Yes I do. If they cannot even enforce their own resolutions then they are very similar to the League of Nations. But I never thought that our moral legitimacy arises from getting authority from the United Nations to begin with. There are a lot of democracies in the United Nations but it is also home to China Libya Iraq Syria and many other not so admirable countries that do not give liberty to their own people. Yet they’re going to be instructing us when we freely elect our Congress and our president? They’re going to be advising us on the morality of our conduct? It’s absurd.
Moreover even if they were all perfectly functioning democracies like France they would all also be pursuing their own interests. The notion that the UN is some sort of dispassionate body that ‘does right’ and just pursues everybody’s best interests is a fantasy. Each individual nation will be pursuing its best interests. That’s the normal behavior of nation-states. It shouldn’t surprise us but neither should we go to them for permission to do what’s in our national interests.
Columnist Ann Coulter wrote (prior to the war) ‘Not exactly smashing stereotypes of liberals as mincing pantywaists the Left’s entire contribution to the war effort thus far has been to whine.’ For the most part would you agree or disagree with that statement?
I would agree. I think that the Left’s reflexive position is to find fault with the United States. Therefore they’re not actually being very helpful. Here we were the victims of an attack. Yet the immediate reaction of many on the Left was ‘We deserved it. We brought it on ourselves.’ Basically that does arise from hatred of this country.
Katha Pollitt of the Nation magazine refused to fly a flag from her apartment window although her young daughter wanted too. She said the flag stands for jingoism and war etc etc — if that isn’t hatred of America I don’t know what is. So I do think that they have been remarkably unhelpful but I think the same was true throughout the Cold War and I write about that. The answer is you have to take them on and defeat their arguments in order to be successful in the world. By the way their arguments have influence beyond our shores…
If you listen to the statements from a lot of these anti-American Muslim groups overseas they sound just like the Left…
That’s exactly right. Those poisonous and curdled views of the United States travel very well.
Tell us about your book Useful Idiots.
I was moved to write it because I think the Left has never been held to account for how wrong it was about American foreign policy in the Cold War. So I decided to go back and look at their actual quotes and reprint what they were actually saying while the war was going on to counter this revisionist history since then where they’ve claimed that everybody was a Cold Warrior — which was obviously not true.
Furthermore I wanted to show that these habits of thought that were formed during the Cold War remain a key part of the liberal mindset even today. Although the Cold War is over the anti-American posture of the Left has not changed at all. To show this I give many examples post-9/11.
I think the United States was faced with two huge challenges in the twentieth century. The first was Nazism and the second was Communism. Both were moral strategic and military threats to us. We rose to the first challenge beautifully and everybody agreed that Nazism was a terrible evil that needed to be eradicated and we did it. The Left had no trouble identifying Nazism as an evil. But they had a great deal of trouble identifying Communism as such and they have never come to grips with the fact that they had a tendency to excuse the Soviets to justify their actions to understand them to try to appease them and to find fault with us for opposing the Communists. They called themselves anti-anti-Communists but that was a fundamentally immoral position for them to take and I wanted to call them to task for that because I think they have not yet grappled with it.
