Shortly after September 11th, President Bush's father observed that just as Pearl Harbor awakened this country from the notion that we could somehow avoid the call of duty to defend freedom in Europe and Asia in World War Two, so, too, should this most recent surprise attack erase the concept in some quarters that America can somehow go it alone in the fight against terrorism or in anything else for that matter.
But America's allies have begun to wonder whether that is the lesson that has been learned—or whether the Afghanistan campaign's apparent success shows that unilateralism works just fine. The United States, that argument goes, is so dominant that it can largely afford to go it alone.
It is true that no nation since Rome has loomed so large above the others, but even Rome eventually collapsed. Only a decade ago, the conventional wisdom lamented an America in decline. Bestseller lists featured books that described America's fall. Japan would soon become 'Number One'. That view was wrong at the time, and when I wrote 'Bound to Lead' in 1989, I, like others, predicted the continuing rise of American power. But the new conventional wisdom that America is invincible is equally dangerous if it leads to a foreign policy that combines unilateralism, arrogance and parochialism.