Is it true that, however just America’s cause, the world’s last superpower cannot effectively fight global threats to our security and values, if the rest of the world is reluctant to follow the U.S. lead? This is today’s conventional wisdom, but a look at the historical record—at how in the 1800s the British, almost single-handedly, used their global power to end the international slave trade—suggests a different conclusion.1
The current context is this. Back in September, the U.S. and Israel had to walk out of the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), held in Durban, South Africa, because the United Nations and the European Union allowed the Conference to be highjacked by the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim world’s anti-American, anti-Jewish propaganda machine. President George W. Bush was roundly criticized—from Paris, to Teheran, to Beijing, as well as in the editorial pages of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post—as a “wild cowboy” conducting a “rogue foreign policy” that would isolate the U.S. from its traditional allies as well as alienate world opinion.2
Then, on September 11, world opinion miraculously changed—or, for a time, seemed to. The Europeans, the U.N. Security Council, and even much of the Third World closed ranks behind the U.S., at least long enough to give lip service to the international war on terrorism and President Bush’s challenge that “you’re either for us or against us.”
But even before this year’s blowup in the Middle East that is being blamed one-sidedly by everybody but the U.S. on Israeli self-defense against Palestinian “homicide bombers,” the American-led united front against terrorism had begun to unravel, as our European allies and Arab friends went AWOL rather than join with the U.S. in possible military action against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Now, it looks as if the dogma of the multilateralists, including many in our own State Department, that the U.S. cannot successfully act to defend our national interests or advance human rights without widespread international support, appears to have straitjacketed even the Bush administration. Reportedly, plans have been put on hold, at least until next year, to take out Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capacity that, already used to gas tens of thousands of Kurds in 1988, may next target Tel Aviv or even Western Europe. It remains to be seen whether Washington will have the courage that Tel Aviv displayed in 1981 to defy international criticism and act unilaterally, invoking the doctrine of self-defense, to take our Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear reactor.3
 

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