Does America Deserve Its Leadership Role?

The debate America needs: "Does the United States deserve to exercise a degree of global leadership after the disaster of Iraq? If so, how should it wield this leadership? These are not surprising questions to anyone who has watched the disaster of Iraq unfold before their eyes. But within the American foreign policy community, this is unsettling stuff. Since the end of the cold war, the assumption of global leadership has been so deeply ingrained in the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that few critics, if any, believed it was possible that one catastrophic error could make things fall apart."


This nonsense reminds me of that famous conversation from Casablanca:


Major Strasser: You give him credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he's just another blundering American.

Captain Renault: We mustn't underestimate American blundering. I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918.