>Listening to Gore and Bush talk about foreign affairs sent me right to
>the remote to tune in the baseball game. What disgustingly blatant
>imperialism.
Christopher Hitchens wrote, in a rather odd love letter to the USA:
>Currently, a version of the old argument between "isolationists" and
>"internationalists" is under way again, providing much facile fodder
>for editorialists and columnists. Actually, the United States has
>never been, and never will be, isolationist. Even as it was trying
>to put tariff and other barriers between itself and Europe in the
>1920s and 1930s, it was making strenuous efforts to expand in the
>Pacific and in Latin America. The term that people need to employ
>instead is "unilateralist": the combination of a provincial
>mentality with an imperial one. Those who voted down the test ban
>treaty in the Senate did so not in order to create a "Fortress
>America", but in order to preserve a global nuclear superiority, and
>to insist that America may conduct inspection of other countries
>while refusing it for itself. Alas, these tough-minded conservatives
>were confronted only by a pseudo-internationalist; a president with
>the soul of a governor or a mayor; perhaps the most parochial and
>timorous president of modern times.