American seems fated to play in the twenty-first century the role Britain played in the nineteenth: Globocop — the country that protects the weak from the strong (the Ottoman Empire from Russia, Kuwait from Iraq), safeguards international trade while stamping out contraband (slaves, nukes), and generally bosses around petty despots in the name of Western ideals (Christianity, human rights). But there’s a price to be paid for taking up what Kipling called “the white man’s burden”: You have to be prepared to fight “the savage wars of peace.”

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