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...make a moral claim to leadership. You did not need to argue that because America was an idea, a city on a hill, the last, best hope of mankind, it had a right and responsibility to remake the world. It was much simpler than that. American leadership in the post-1945 world was not a moral aspiration, or a policy goal, at all. It was, as the Marxists would say, an objective reality, a fact that needed neither justification nor proof...
...that does not even come close to describing the world today. The American domination - economic, social, cultural, political - that was such a feature of the post-1945 world is missing now. Plainly, there are material aspects of modern American life that still inspire admiration from overseas, and features of American innovation that nobody else can match. But I spend about half my time outside the U.S., and I have to say that in many ways, like Bernard Kouchner, I think that the magic is gone. You want modern transportation systems? Try France or Japan. New airports? Half the cities...
...Africans were seeing, of course, was not just a collection of extraordinary buildings - the world's highest hotel or a funky reworking of the Eiffel Tower - they were seeing a way of being modern. And that goes directly to the problem with claims of American leadership today. In the post-1945 world, the U.S. had a monopoly on modernity. Now it does not. There are, we have learned, many ways of being modern, and they do not all follow the path blazed by the U.S. This isn't just because in China - or in Russia, for that matter - the social...
...much as one of followership. To be sure, the fiasco of Iraq has meant that there is no new generation of people and nations keen to follow America's lead. But the fundamental point transcends Iraq. It is that the conditions which created leadership and followership in the post-1945 world are gone, and they're not coming back...
...HESBAH, a terrorism website quoted by the Washington Post, saying John McCain would continue the "failing march of his predecessor," George W. Bush...