Walter Russell Mead is the Henry Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He also writes a blog for the American Interest.

How to commemorate those who have laid down their lives for their country?  Memorial Day wasn’t much of an issue in my childhood.  100 years after the Civil War, most white Southerners still considered this a Yankee holiday.  Robert E. Lee’s birthday, a state holiday across much of the South, got more press.  White folks didn’t go much to events like the annual commemoration of the Union prisoners who died in the Confederate POW camp in my father’s hometown of Florence, SC.

For me that changed when I went north to Pundit High School at the age of 13 on a full scholarship.  Memorial Day was a BIG event there; the 200 boys in the student body spent many spring evenings learning to march around the campus in preparation for the town’s Memorial Day parade out to the cemetery where the names of all the town’s war dead going back to the Revolution were read out.  A combination of precocious anti-Vietnam feeling and, I think, culture shock at the vast difference between Pundit High and everything else I had known led me to the conclusion that on conscientious grounds I should not march.

The best way, I argued to my put-upon parents and long suffering Headmaster, to commemorate the war dead was to stop the militaristic displays that made new wars and new deaths more likely.  The school made it clear: it was march or go home.  My parents told me it was my decision to make; I thought hard and eventually marched that spring and every spring thereafter until the time came to move on.  I wasn’t quite finished being adolescent about this national holiday.  The school band provided musical accompaniment as we marched, and I wrote French lyrics to the tune “Over There” which many of us sang to complain about the school food. “Pommes de terre,” it began, “pommes de terre; Içi on ne jamais mange que pommes de terre.“

Je ne regrette rien, but L’Académie Française has yet to call.

I’ve always thought that to march was the right choice, more than ever now that I’ve moved past the pacifism of my teen self.  But the question of how to commemorate those who have given their lives for our country is still a vexing one — and especially now, as the US role in Iraq winds down and we think about the 4,434 Americans who died there to date, the 32,074 who will carry the wounds they suffered there, and the hundreds of thousands who will carry the memories of their service through their lives...

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).

Is the Libyan war legal?  Was Bin Laden’s killing legal?  Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination?  Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? These are all questions raised in recent weeks.  Each seems to call out for debate, for answers.  Or does it?

Now, you couldn’t call me a legal scholar.  I’ve never set foot inside a law school, and in 66 years only made it onto a single jury (dismissed before trial when the civil suit was settled out of court).  Still, I feel at least as capable as any constitutional law professor of answering such questions. 

My answer is this: they are irrelevant.  Think of them as twentieth-century questions that don't begin to come to grips with twenty-first century American realities.  In fact, think of them, and the very idea of a nation based on the rule of law, as a reflection of nostalgia for, or sentimentality about, a long-lost republic.  At least in terms of what used to be called “foreign policy,” and more recently “national security,” the United States is now a post-legal society.  (And you could certainly include in this mix the too-big-to-jail financial and corporate elite.)

It’s easy enough to explain what I mean. If, in a country theoretically organized under the rule of law, wrongdoers are never brought to justice and nobody is held accountable for possibly serious crimes, then you don’t have to be a constitutional law professor to know that its citizens actually exist in a post-legal state.  If so, “Is it legal?” is the wrong question to be asking, even if we have yet to discover the right one.

Pretzeled Definitions of Torture

Of course, when it came to a range of potential Bush-era crimes -- the use of torture, the running of offshore “black sites,” the extraordinary rendition of terrorist suspects to lands where they would be tortured, illegal domestic spying and wiretapping, and the launching of wars of aggression -- it’s hardly news that no one of the slightest significance has ever been brought to justice.  On taking office, President Obama offered a clear formula for dealing with this issue.  He insisted that Americans should “look forward, not backward” and turn the page on the whole period, and then set his Justice Department to work on other matters.  But honestly, did anyone anywhere ever doubt that no Bush-era official would be brought to trial here for such potential crimes?

Everyone knows that in the United States if you’re a robber caught breaking into someone’s house, you’ll be brought to trial, but if you’re caught breaking into someone else’s country, you’ll be free to take to the lecture circuit, write your memoirs, or become a university professor.

Of all the “debates” over legality in the Bush and Obama years, the torture debate has perhaps been the most interesting, and in some ways, the most realistic.  After 9/11, the Bush administration quickly turned to a crew of hand-picked Justice Department lawyers to create the necessary rationale for what its officials most wanted to do -- in their quaint phrase, “take the gloves off.”  And those lawyers responded with a set of pseudo-legalisms that put various methods of “information extraction” beyond the powers of the Geneva Conventions, the U.N.’s Convention Against Torture (signed by President Ronald Reagan and ratified by the Senate), and domestic anti-torture legislation, including the War Crimes Act of 1996 (passed by a Republican Congress).

In the process, they created infamously pretzled new definitions for acts previously accepted as torture.  Among other things, they essentially left the definition of whether an act was torture or not to the torturer (that is, to what he believedhe was doing at the time).  In the process, acts that had historically been considered torture became “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  An example would be waterboarding, which had once been bluntly known as “the water torture” or “the water cure” and whose perpetrators had, in the past, been successfully prosecuted in American military and civil courts.  Such techniques were signed off on after first reportedly being “demonstrated” in the White House to an array of top officials, including the vice-president, the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state.

In the U.S. (and here was the realism of the debate that followed), the very issue of legality fell away almost instantly.  Newspapers rapidly replaced the word “torture” -- when applied to what American interrogators did -- with the term “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which was widely accepted as less controversial and more objective.  At the same time, the issue of the legality of such techniques was superseded by a fierce national debate over their efficacy.  It has lasted to this day and returned with a bang with the bin Laden killing.

Nothing better illustrates the nature of our post-legal society.  Anti-torture laws were on the books in this country.  If legality had truly mattered, it would have been beside the point whether torture was an effective way to produce “actionable intelligence” and so prepare the way for the killing of a bin Laden.

By analogy, it’s perfectly reasonable to argue that robbing banks can be a successful and profitable way to make a living, but who would agree that a successful bank robber hadn’t committed an act as worthy of prosecution as an unsuccessful one caught on the spot?  Efficacy wouldn’t matter in a society whose central value was the rule of law.  In a post-legal society in which the ultimate value espoused is the safety and protection a national security state can offer you, it means the world.

As if to make the point, the Supreme Court recently offered a post-legal ruling for our moment: it declined to review a lower court ruling that blocked a case in which five men, who had experienced extraordinary rendition (a fancy globalized version of kidnapping) and been turned over to torturing regimes elsewhere by the CIA, tried to get their day in court.  No such luck.  The Obama administration claimed (as had the Bush administration before it) that simply bringing such a case to court would imperil national security (that is, state secrets) -- and won.  As Ben Wizner, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued the case, summed matters up, "To date, every victim of the Bush administration's torture regime has been denied his day in court."

To put it another way, every CIA torturer, all those involved in acts of rendition, and all the officials who okayed such acts, as well as the lawyers who put their stamp of approval on them, are free to continue their lives untouched.  Recently, the Obama administration even went to court to “prevent a lawyer for a former CIA officer convicted in Italy in the kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric from privately sharing classified information about the case with a Federal District Court judge.”  (Yes, Virginia, elsewhere in the world a few Americans have been tried in absentia for Bush-era crimes.)  In response, wrote Scott Shane of the New York Times, the judge “pronounced herself ‘literally speechless.’”

The realities of our moment are simple enough: other than abusers too low-level (see England, Lynndie and Graner, Charles) to matter to our national security state, no one in the CIA, and certainly no official of any sort, is going to be prosecuted for the possible crimes Americans committed in the Bush years in pursuit of the Global War on Terror.

On Not Blowing Whistles

It’s beyond symbolic, then, that only one figure from the national security world seems to remain in the “legal” crosshairs: the whistle-blower.  If, as the president of the United States, you sign off on a system of warrantless surveillance of Americans -- the sort that not so long ago was against the law in this country -- or if you happen to run a giant telecom company and go along with that system by opening your facilities to government snoops, or if you run the National Security Agencyor are an official in it overseeing the kind of data mining and intelligence gathering that goes with such a program, then -- as recent years have made clear -- you are above the law.

If, however, you happen to be an NSA employee who feels that the agency has overstepped the bounds of legality in its dealings with Americans, that it is moving in Orwellian directions, and that it should be exposed, and if you offer even unclassified information to a newspaper reporter, as was the case with Thomas Drake, be afraid, be very afraid.  You may be prosecuted by the Bush and then Obama Justice Departments, and threatened with 35 years in prison under the Espionage Act (not for “espionage,” but for having divulged the most minor of low-grade state secrets in a world in which, increasingly, everything having to do with the state is becoming a secret).

If you are a CIA employee who tortured no one but may have given information damaging to the reputation of the national security state -- in this case about a botched effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program -- to a journalist, watch out.  You are likely, as in the case of Jeffrey Sterling, to find yourself in a court of law.  And if you happen to be a journalist like James Risen who may have received that information, you are likely to be hit by a Justice Department subpoena attempting to force you to reveal your source, under threat of imprisonment for contempt of court.

If you are a private in the U.S. military with access to a computer with low-level classified material from the Pentagon’s wars and the State Department’s activities on it, if you’ve seen something of the grim reality of what the national security state looks like when superimposed on Iraq, and if you decide to shine some light on that world, as Bradley Manning did, they’ll toss you into prison and throw away the key.  You’ll be accused of having “blood on your hands” and tried, again under the Espionage Act, by those who actually have blood on their hands and are beyond all accountability.

When it comes to acts of state today, there is only one law: don’t pull up the curtain on the doings of any aspect of our spreading National Security Complex or the imperial executive that goes with it.  As CIA Director Leon Panetta put it in addressing his employees over leaks about the operation to kill bin Laden, “Disclosure of classified information to anyone not cleared for it -- reporters, friends, colleagues in the private sector or other agencies, former Agency officers -- does tremendous damage to our work.  At worst, leaks endanger lives... Unauthorized disclosure of those details not only violates the law, it seriously undermines our capability to do our job."

And when someone in Congress actually moves to preserve some aspect of older notions of American privacy (versus American secrecy), as Senator Rand Paul did recently in reference to the Patriot Act, he is promptly smeared as potentially “giving terrorists the opportunity to plot attacks against our country, undetected."

Enhanced Legal Techniques

Here is the reality of post-legal America: since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the National Security Complex has engorged itself on American fears and grown at a remarkable pace.  According to Top Secret America, a Washington Post series written in mid-2010, 854,000 people have “top secret” security clearances, “33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001... 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks... [and] some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.” 

Just stop a moment to take that in.  And then let this sink in as well: whatever any one of those employees does inside that national security world, no matter how “illegal” the act, it’s a double-your-money bet that he or she will never be prosecuted for it (unless it happens to involve letting Americans know something about just how they are being “protected”).

Consider what it means to have a U.S. Intelligence Community (as it likes to call itself) made up of 17 different agencies and organizations, a total that doesn’t even include all the smaller intelligence offices in the National Security Complex, which for almost 10 years proved incapable of locating its global enemy number one.  Yet, as everyone now agrees, that man was living in something like plain sight, exchanging messages with and seeing colleagues in a military and resort town near Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.  And what does it mean that, when he was finally killed, it was celebrated as a vast intelligence victory?

The Intelligence Community with its $80 billion-plus budget, the National Security Complex, including the Pentagon and that post-9/11 creation, the Department of Homeland Security, with its $1.2 trillion-plus budget, and the imperial executive have thrived in these years.  They have all expanded their powers and prerogatives based largely on the claim that they are protecting the American people from potential harm from terrorists out to destroy our world.

Above all, however, they seem to have honed a single skill: the ability to protect themselves, as well as the lobbyists and corporate entities that feed off them.  They have increased their funds and powers, even as they enveloped their institutions in a penumbra of secrecy.  The power of this complex of institutions is still on the rise, even as the power and wealth of the country it protects is visibly in decline.

Now, consider again the question “Is it legal?” When it comes to any act of the National Security Complex, it’s obviously inapplicable in a land where the rule of law no longer applies to everyone.  If you are a ordinary citizen, of course, it applies to you, but not if you are part of the state apparatus that officially protects you.  The institutional momentum behind this development is simple enough to demonstrate: it hardly mattered that, after George W. Bush took off those gloves, the next president elected was a former constitutional law professor.

Think of the National Security Complex as the King George of the present moment.  In the areas that matter to that complex, Congress has ever less power and, as in the case of the war in Libya or the Patriot Act, is ever more ready to cede what power it has left.

So democracy?  The people’s representatives?  How quaint in a world in which our real rulers are unelected, shielded by secrecy, and supported by a carefully nurtured, almost religious attitude toward security and the U.S. military.

The National Security Complex has access to us, to our lives and communications, though we have next to no access to it.  It has, in reserve, those enhanced interrogation techniques and when trouble looms, a set of what might be called enhanced legal techniques as well.  It has the ability to make war at will (or whim).  It has a growing post-9/11 secret army cocooned inside the military: 20,000 or more troops in special operations outfits like the SEAL team that took down bin Laden, also enveloped in secrecy.  In addition, it has the CIA and a fleet of armed drone aircraft ready to conduct its wars and operations globally in semi-secrecy and without the permission or oversight of the American people or their representatives. 

And war, of course, is the ultimate aphrodisiac for the powerful.

Theoretically, the National Security Complex exists only to protect you.  Its every act is done in the name of making you safer, even if the idea of safety and protection doesn’t extend to your job, your foreclosed home, or aid in disastrous times.

Welcome to post-legal America.  It's time to stop wondering whether its acts are illegal and start asking: Do you really want to be this “safe”?

Niall Ferguson is a Newsweek columnist and Harvard professor.

The world is a better place because Adolf Hitler did not preserve his conquest of the European continent, and because the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of Hideki Tojo and his militarists imploded at Midway, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa. Italy and the Mediterranean were far better off without Benito Mussolini and his mad plans for a renewed but debased Roman Empire, which ended on his own Italian soil at exotic-named places like Anzio and Monte Cassino.

The dream of Soviet rulers from Stalin to Brezhnev was a global gulag overseen from the blood-stained Communist Kremlin. It ended only through the 50-year deterrence of the American military. South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan are somehow still free and independent — and would not be without American carriers, jets, and submarines.

Our generation’s own rogues’ gallery of killers — Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Manuel Noriega, and the Taliban — have lost their tyrannies. If South America chooses to become Communist, it will be by its own volition and not because of an unfettered cross-border invasion from Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela. Even our enemies can export or import oil freely from the Middle East without worries of armed intervention or piracy — as long as an American carrier is nearby in the Gulf.

It seems as if the more Europe disarms and gnashes at the United States, the more we are there when it needs us. If an ascendant China decides to bully Japan or Taiwan in earnest, only one country can thwart it. No one will call the European Union or Russia should North Korea tomorrow cross the 38th parallel or Iran decide to launch a missile. If Turkey rearranges the border in Cyprus or claims airspace over the mid-Aegean, anti-American Greece will turn pro-American. There will be no second Holocaust, in part because of American military support for Israel....

Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and political science at Duke, is the author of “The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East.”

...Democracy requires checks and balances, and it is largely through civil society that citizens protect their rights as individuals, force policy makers to accommodate their interests, and limit abuses of state authority. Civil society also promotes a culture of bargaining and gives future leaders the skills to articulate ideas, form coalitions and govern.

The preconditions for democracy are lacking in the Arab world partly because Hosni Mubarak and other Arab dictators spent the past half-century emasculating the news media, suppressing intellectual inquiry, restricting artistic expression, banning political parties, and co-opting regional, ethnic and religious organizations to silence dissenting voices.

But the handicaps of Arab civil society also have historical causes that transcend the policies of modern rulers. Until the establishment of colonial regimes in the late 19th century, Arab societies were ruled under Shariah law, which essentially precludes autonomous and self-governing private organizations. Thus, while Western Europe was making its tortuous transition from arbitrary rule by monarchs to democratic rule of law, the Middle East retained authoritarian political structures. Such a political environment prevented democratic institutions from taking root and ultimately facilitated the rise of modern Arab dictatorships....

Paul VanDevelder's book "Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire Through Indian Territory," won the 2011 Oregon Book Award.

On a frosty May morning in 1951, a young woman named Louise Holding Eagle jumped into the cab of her pickup truck, waved goodbye to her husband and two toddlers, and drove off to buy groceries in Beulah, N.D., the nearest town, about 35 miles from their farm. Louise decided to make a day of it when she ran into old friends at the store, and finally turned for home at twilight.

"None of us had phones back then, but my husband Matthew was an easygoin' man, and I knew he wouldn't mind if I was late."

When she reached her driveway in full darkness, she thought she had been daydreaming and made a wrong turn. "I don't know how long I sat there before I realized I was home," Louise recalled for me more than half a century later. "This was our farm, all right! But everything was gone! The house, the chicken coop, the barn, my husband and children!"

Without a word of warning, written or verbal, an Army Corps of Engineers crew had arrived at Louise's farm that afternoon and lifted all the buildings off their foundations, loaded them onto flatbed trucks and relocated them 20 miles away. Her house had to be moved to make way for the first of five massive dams that Congress approved with the passage of the Flood Control Act of 1944. Construction had already begun on the dam near Garrison, N.D., but lawmakers in Washington were still locked in legislative limbo over just what to do with the thousands of people these dams would displace. Finally tiring of bureaucratic delays, the Army Corps of Engineers, an agency with a reputation for being a government unto itself, took matters into its own hands and commenced evacuating the bottomlands....

Daniel Martin Varisco is professor of anthropology at Hofstra University.

As someone who has a long standing interest in the peoples and cultures of the region geographically maligned as the “Middle East,” I am beyond being overwhelmed by the daily turn of events. To see the streets of Yemen turned into bloody confrontation after three months of amazingly peaceful protests is so sad. I had always wondered if Ali Abdullah Salih was really trying to be a father-of-his-country figure (despite the widespread corruption and nepotism) or if it was mainly his inability to be a brutal dictator in the Ben Ali mode that ruled the day. His recent flirtation with leaving office, only to back down each time, suggests that he has no intention of leaving and is looking for any way to prolong his rule. The Al Qaeda on the doorsteps alibi has not fooled anyone, including the U.S. terrorism money machine. So it seems his latest insane step, right out of a really bad thriller movie, is to foment civil strife. Today’s news about his attempt to alienate the leader of the Hashid confederacy has indeed plunged the capital into street fighting. One thing is clear: Ali Abdullah Salih loves Ali Abdullah Salih and the country he has ruled over for over three decades be damned.

Then there is Syria, where Bashar al-Asad, once thought to be a rather weak version of his towering (at least in all the statues strewn about the former Umayyad enclave) father, has decided to be the old-fashioned Stalinesque strongman. Not content to believe that the mere 96.7% of the votes in his last presidential referendum meant anything other than the normal one-man-rule politics, he is apparently trying to get rid of anyone who opposes him by whatever mean means work. To protest in Syria, as in Libya, means to risk life and limb. And, speaking of Libya, here we have the media-made mismatch of the U.S. and NATO taking out the certified nutcase Qaddafi, but not doing a very effective job. Under the shadow guise of protecting Libyan citizens (no such Euromadness mantra seems to be forthcoming for what is happening in Syria or Bahrain), all the weapons and infrastructure that the oil wealth allowed Qaddafi to buy from Europe is now being torched from the sky. Yes there is a rebellion and Qaddafi is a ruthless killer, but then why not just take him out and be done with it. Having a U.N. sanction is not fooling anyone from thinking that the sole purpose is regime change since there is no other way the Libyan people can ever be safe.

Tunisia and Egypt, where it all started and garnered massive media coverage, have mostly receded into the back sections of the news. Yet how these two countries reform after long-term dictatorships is crucial both to the youth who helped topple the old-men regimes and to foreign policy. Word that Mubarak may be tried for the deaths of protestors is newsworthy, but little else is able to muscle its way ahead of Libya and Syria. I suspect that Iran’s Ahmadinejad is quite happy about all the protests outside his country, so that people’s memory about the Green Revolution that he put down will subside all the more. The Saudis are still sitting pretty in all of this, basking in the divine kingship comradeship they share with little brothers (not really “Muslim Brothers” in the strict sense) in Bahrain. And the news that does come out is same-old, like arresting a woman for calling on other Saudi women to start driving cars.

Lest we forget, there are still two wars aflame in the region. American troops are scheduled to mostly pull out of Iraq almost a decade after the liberation from Saddam Hussein, a figure whose named is so rarely mentioned these days that he might as well be Genghis Khan. It seems some of the neocons and musicians of Bremer in the Bush administration actually did believe this as they threw out the baby with the Ba’ath water. Billions of dollars and thousands of lives later, Iraq is a (a) much better place to live or (b) not so nice a place to try and live which is why so many Iraqis fled. If you vote for a, you are either a fool or one of the typical Middle East experts trotted out on Fox News (feel free to replace the “or” with “and” in the last sentence). And here I am several paragraphs into this lament without yet mentioning Afghanistan. This is where it all started. To get Bin Laden we had to get rid of the Taliban (who at the time were too busy worrying about the length of Afghan men’s beards to care about us) and once we finally got rid of Bin Laden we discover that the Taliban and their sympathizers really do hate us now and have reason to do so. In the near future the U.S. can no doubt follow the Vietnam alternative by declaring victory and pulling out.

But wait, there is also a place called “Palestine.” In a recent visit by Israel’s piece-loving Prime Minister, known to many as Bebe, we learned that Israel has made many sacrifices to seek piece (No, I am not mispelling this…) with (meaning “of”) Palestinians. They built a wall, for instance, and that clearly cost a lot of money. And then think of the expenses for expanding all those illegal (not sure what this word means to Bebe) settlements in conquered land. Perhaps the Nobel committee should consider Bebe for a piece prize since he clearly has not adopted the old Joshua policy of wiping out all the Canaanites with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. For a little historical perspective, the people who used to live in Mandate Palestine should have all just fled to their Arab brothers because there really was no Palestine after the time of Christ and God gave this land originally to Abraham and his seed forever and beyond. This is manifest divine destiny, sort of like when the European settlers colonized America and drove out all the Indians (after all it wasn’t really India so who gave them a right to live there in the way of more civilized people?).

If you detect a note of cynicism, you are also missing the point. The issues are complex and there are few heroes, certainly no one with a Gandhi stature, that seem to be rising to the occasion. The so-called “Arab Spring” is being doused with antifreeze from within and without. The worst elements that go by the name of “religion” are roaming the paths of public opinion. Frustration is off the charts and at the moment exacerbated by an economic collapse outside the oil-wealth states. The protests have resulted in a momentum for real change, although it is not clear how much of this will be twittered away. My thoughts here will be buried in the blogosphere and deserve the ephemeral fate all pundits face. But the crises persist and all we can do is keep hopping and hoping for something better.

Luther Carpenter is a historian and Dissent editorial board member.

AS OF May 2011, governmental (and intergovernmental) institutions have prevented a 1930s-style depression. They’ve saved the financial system. Nonetheless, the Western industrial world is crumbling.

I call our situation a silent depression, analogous to the silent depression of 1974–84, which French economists called la crise. During la crise, there was massive deindustrialization in the heavy industries that had formed the postwar mode of production, and satiation where there had been rapid growth in the consumer durables that were its mode of consumption. La crise became normal, a second stage of postwar capitalism. New leading industries developed—information technology, speculative finance—and with them a new mode of consumption based on debt and income inequality. That stage of capitalism worked for a while, then turned desperate after 2000. High technology became less revolutionary, and high finance lurched from bubble to bubble; the rich couldn’t eat up all that the economy could produce. That stage came to an end in 2007–8.

Like its predecessor, the current silent depression means that not enough jobs are created to provide full employment. Since over two-thirds of workers in OECD countries are employed in the service sector (a figure even higher in countries like the United States and France), that’s where jobs have been destroyed. That sector isn’t going to pull us back to full employment. Most of the new jobs created in it and other sectors are part-time and precarious. To get us out of this mess and into a new stage of capitalist accumulation, new modes of production and consumption must be constructed out of new and recycled materials.

Most of my friends in France and the United States don’t say this, thought not because they aren’t hurting. Those who are self-employed (journalists, translators) have lost clients. Salaried workers have lost their jobs, or are at risk of losing their jobs. Many have children who are having difficulty finding a place in society, or they experience the effects of cutbacks in medical care and the annoyance of trying to talk to insurers or providers of what once were growing service industries. But they stop short of saying that the survival of their societies is seriously threatened....

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Is America’s preeminent world role over?

That’s what a recent New Yorker essay, based on interviews with presidential advisers, claimed. It characterized the new Obama foreign-relations style as “leading from behind” — given America’s supposedly inevitable decline and growing unpopularity. The president is said to agree with pundits such as Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman, who have often outlined the parameters of what the post-American world would look like.

But if America abrogates the preeminent leadership position it has held for the last 65 years, wouldn’t the world look a lot like it did in the pre-American days of the 1930s? Then, a Depression-era United States was just one of many powers, and was reluctant to assert leadership abroad.

Eighty years ago, a newly Westernized and anti-democratic Japanese powerhouse, in the fashion of today’s rising China, was carving out uncontested Asian spheres of influence. An oil-, rubber-, and iron-hungry imperial Japan claimed it needed more natural resources to fuel its industrial revolution, and so spread an authoritarian Asian co-prosperity sphere of influence as an alternative to alliance with an economically depressed and psychologically withdrawn America.

Most Americans then were tired anyway of overseas commitments. Our ancestors felt that their considerable sacrifices in World War I either had gone unappreciated or had solved little — not unlike the way we are becoming exhausted by Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya.

A newly confident, united, and ascendant Germany was growing angry at other European countries. It nursed a long list of financial grievances over feeling used and abused. Sound familiar?..