by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
FrontPage Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n In 1868, a British army led by Sir Robert Napier sailed from India to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to rescue several English and European hostages from the mentally unstable, sadistic King Theodore. Theodore had become enraged a few years earlier because his letter to Queen Victoria asking for military assistance had been ignored, and so he retaliated by taking the hostages. Napier\u2019s expedition required the building of a port, railroad, and road in order for his army of 13,000 soldiers to march to Theodore\u2019s stronghold Magdala, 400 brutal miles from the coast. After the three-month march, the British met Theodore\u2019s army at Magadala and routed it. The hostages were released, and Theodore committed suicide. Then Napier led his army back to the coast and sailed away, surprising many who believed that rescuing the hostages was a pretext for colonial expansion.<\/p>\n The Abyssinian expedition illustrates the British awareness that an empire must defend not just its material interests, but also its prestige. Insults and injuries to its citizens cannot be tolerated, for rivals and enemies will interpret such forbearance as a weakness to be exploited. The expedition was an expensive, massive undertaking, but one necessary in order to warn the Empire\u2019s potential enemies that England would pay any price to defend its honor and interests. Power is not just about material resources, but also the perceptions of others that power will be used, a perception that works as a force multiplier. As Vergil says in the\u00a0Aeneid<\/em>, \u201cThey have power because they seem to have power.\u201d<\/p>\n History is filled with examples of how costly it is for a nation to allow its prestige to be damaged, thus weakening its power and inviting aggression. By 1938, Hitler had no respect for the English or the French despite their combined military might, given their failure to respond to Germany\u2019s serial violations of the Versailles settlement over the previous two decades. Thus Hitler\u2019s brilliant manipulation of diplomacy in the Czechoslovakia crisis, when England and France, as Churchill would write later, \u201cpresented a front of two over-ripe melons crushed together.\u201d Hitler agreed: a year later, he would respond to England and France\u2019s guarantee of Poland\u2019s security by sneering, \u201cI saw them at Munich. They are little worms.\u201d<\/p>\n Likewise the US paid the price for its loss of prestige following the abandonment of South Vietnam in 1975. As Jimmy Carter publicly announced a \u201ccrisis of confidence,\u201d fretted over America\u2019s \u201crecent mistakes\u201d and \u201crecognized limits,\u201d and cut spending on the military, an emboldened Soviet Union went on a geopolitical rampage throughout the Third World. Equally ominous was the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the seizure of the embassy hostages, a grievous affront to our prestige met with toothless sanctions, UN resolutions, secret negotiations, and the whole repertoire of excuses to substitute talk for action. A byproduct of this blow to US prestige was the creation of an oil-rich jihadist regime in the heart of the Middle East, one that immediately started creating and supporting terrorist groups that for 30 years have murdered Americans. A series of jihadist attacks followed Iran\u2019s victory over the superpower America, from the 1983 Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks, to the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, none of which were met with a punitive response that would have made clear the overwhelming price to be paid for assaulting America\u2019s interests and citizens. So it was no surprise that Osama bin Laden, convinced that America was a \u201cweak horse\u201d with \u201cfoundations of straw,\u201d on September 11, 2001 sent his jihadists to attack the very centers of American power and prestige in Washington DC and New York.<\/p>\n The short-lived restoration of American prestige wrought by George Bush\u2019s routing of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the destruction of the Hussein regime in Iraq soon dissipated in the administration of Barack Obama and his promise to \u201cembrace a new era of engagement\u201d and a \u201cnew way forward\u201d with America\u2019s enemies. In practice this has meant his solicitous \u201coutreach\u201d to thug regimes like Iran and Syria, the appeasing and unreciprocated \u201creset\u201d of relations with Russia, the Carter-like pledges that America would be a \u201cpartner mindful of his own imperfections,\u201d the undercutting and hounding of stalwart allies like Israel, the craven apologies to the Muslim world for a \u201ccolonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims,\u201d and the abandonment of unsavory allies like Hosni Mubarak, who nonetheless better served America\u2019s interests than the Muslim Brothers soon to run Egypt are likely to.<\/p>\n All we have gained from Obama\u2019s \u201cnew way forward\u201d is further damage to our prestige, and the perception that America is an unreliable friend and a contemptible enemy. Iran blusters, threatens, and continues to work furiously on obtaining nuclear weapons, with the patent support of Russia and China. Russia ignores our sermons on international morality and provides diplomatic and material support to Syria\u2019s Bashar al Assad\u2019s brutal slaughter of his citizens. Our precipitous withdrawal from Iraq promises to squander all that has been gained for the last 9 years and to further strengthen Iran. The Taliban have marked our announced 2014 withdrawal date from Afghanistan on their calendars, in the meantime tempting us into \u201cpeace negotiations,\u201d and demanding as the price just for starting talks the release of their murderous colleagues from Guantanamo, 5 of whom Obama is thinking of releasing as a \u201cgood will gesture.\u201d The allegedly \u201cmoderate\u201d Palestinian Authority is moving closer to forming a unity government with the genocidal Hamas, without any worries that the near $1 billion in US financial support will stop. And most recently, the interim Islamist government in Egypt has indicted 16 American NGO workers and kept the 6 still in Egypt from leaving the country, virtually kidnapping them. Like the Palestinians, the Egyptians don\u2019t respect us enough to fear that we will cut off the more than $1.5 billion in annual aid.<\/p>\n In short, thanks to Obama\u2019s foreign policy, our enemies and rivals do not believe that we will vigorously defend our interests and citizens. We have the most lethal military power in the history of the world, but we lack the prestige based on the certainty of friend and foe alike that we will use that power to protect our friends and punish our enemies. Great powers decline for many reasons, but losing respect for their power is surely one of them.<\/p>\n \u00a92012 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine In 1868, a British army led by Sir Robert Napier sailed from India to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to rescue several English and European hostages from the mentally unstable, sadistic King Theodore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,99,196],"tags":[1051,445,72,12,249,71,1028,141,228,1039,1061,1043,296,1074,1041,197,162,364,400],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-fF","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6594,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/prestige-and-power-in-statecraft\/","url_meta":{"origin":971,"position":0},"title":"Prestige and Power in Statecraft","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 4, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"History teaches us that nations must always respond vigorously to an enemy's challenge, a lesson the U.S. should remember in Syria. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0Defining Ideas President Obama, responding to widespread criticisms that his handling of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis was clumsy and ad hoc, said, \u201cI\u2019m less\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1090,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/iran-on-the-brink\/","url_meta":{"origin":971,"position":1},"title":"Iran on the Brink","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 11, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Defining Ideas Just in the last few months, events have hastened to a crisis in Iran\u2019s long confrontation with the West. The ongoing civil war in Syria looks more and more likely to end with the ouster of strongman Bashar al-Assad, one of Tehran\u2019s most stalwart\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Iran"","block_context":{"text":"Iran","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/iran\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":868,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/appeasement-bode-war-not-peace\/","url_meta":{"origin":971,"position":2},"title":"Appeasement Bode War Not Peace","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 3, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Terry Scambray New Oxford Review A review of\u00a0The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama's America\u00a0by Bruce S. Thornton. (Encounter Books, 2011 pp. 283) Winston Churchill famously said, \"An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last.\" In\u00a0The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1085,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-case-for-military-action-against-iran\/","url_meta":{"origin":971,"position":3},"title":"The Case for Military Action Against Iran","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Iran\u2019s 30-year war against the United States may be reaching its decisive moment. Signs of the worsening crisis abound. Iran just announced it has begun enriching uranium at the Fordo underground nuclear site, a key step to producing more quickly fissile material for a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Iran"","block_context":{"text":"Iran","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/iran\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":127,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-new-year-in-america-will-we-continue-down-the-road-to-decline\/","url_meta":{"origin":971,"position":4},"title":"A New Year in America: Will We Continue Down the Road to Decline?","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 8, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thronton Frontpage Magazine \u00a0 Looking back over 2012, one could be forgiven for thinking that if America goes on at this rate, the nation must be ruined. But as Adam Smith replied to a young man who said those same words about British losses during the American Revolution,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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