Quote of the Day: The World Needs U.S. Leadership

Our Quote of the Day comes from an extensive commentary by Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor of the Australian, posted on RealClearWorld that needs to be read in full. His point: the world needs U.S. leadership. Here are a few highlights:

There seems to be a whole class of international relations commentators, not least among our bunyip faux wise men in Australia, eagerly predicting, if not outright yearning for, US decline.

Copenhagen is a benign version of what they get if their dreams come true. But at least with climate change the catastrophe is some time off. The multilateral system is failing, too, on more immediate problems.

Further down he writes:

If the Iranians don’t get nuclear weapons, it will be because the Americans stop them. If the Chinese are not tempted to use military force to take back Taiwan, it is because they are frightened of the US and its allies. If the world sees a reduction in nuclear arms numbers, it will be because the Americans work out a treaty with the Russians. If Saddam Hussein is gone and can no longer pursue nuclear weapons, and if there is a chance at last of a democratic Arab state emerging, it is because of US intervention. If the Taliban is to be prevented from retaking Afghanistan and providing a state for the use of its allies al-Qa’ida, it will be because the Americans kept their nerve and set an Afghan government on a sustainable security course.

And so it goes around the world.

This is the most unfashionable thing you can say, and also the most important, because it’s true. The global security system, in so far as it works at all, is US security policy operating in co-operation with its allies.

AND:

When Paul Keating got the idea of trying to elevate APEC to summit level, he had to sell it to Bill Clinton. It was Clinton who formally proposed and covened the first APEC summit, which was held in the US.

Keating’s Asia-first rhetoric had its greatest institutional consequence only through his influence with Washington. The Americans operationalised his idea and this had consequences in Asia.

[Australian Prime Minister Kevin ] Rudd is cleaving close to Obama, as he should. This is the way effective Australian middle-power diplomacy works, which is in great contrast to the multilateral system. It doesn’t work at all.

There’s a lot more — and some of it is written from the context of Australian diplomacy — but it needs to be read in its entirety.