Iran Strike Underscores The Reality Of American Military Power

By: Chris Bray | The Federalist

Less than a month ago, Politico put this remarkable statement in a headline: “Top NATO allies don’t think US helps deter enemies anymore.” The body of the story went on to explain that “American military power is increasingly seen as an uncertain asset,” while fewer Europeans “still see the U.S. as an effective deterrent against enemy attacks.”

Doubting the value of American hard power, Europeans have called for a transition to a new era of security independence in which they can confront enemies like Russia without the handicap of being yoked to a dumb and declining United States. “Europe needs not only to strengthen its defence capabilities but to increase the resilience of its societies,” a policy brief published by the European Union warned in December. Get strong, get armed, and get ready for a world without American intervention. If democracy ever needs to be saved in Europe, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that same month, “we would manage that alone.” American military power, dead just short of its 250th birthday.

That fantasy has been spreading. In Davos this year, in a speech I’ve already spent half my waking hours mocking, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney laid out a plan for a new security coalition of “middle powers” that would arm up and challenge American dominance. At the New York Times, a reliably stupid columnist declared that Carney had “marked out a path of allied integration and cooperation that could create, in essence, a new great power rival to the United States.”

This has been the emerging consensus among professional opinion-havers, who mostly manipulate symbols as symbols, not noticeably connecting to things in what we used to call meatspace. American power has faded into the past, because Mark Carney and Friedrich Merz said that American power has faded into the past. Speeches say what reality is. In this sense, Trump really is our last Boomer president: He engages symbols in real life. He perceives the thingness of things, and blows them up.

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