And to show the Russians that such Cold War thinking is antiquated, Obama canceled his September summit with Vladimir Putin.

The reason: Putin’s grant of asylum to Edward Snowden, who showed up at the Moscow airport, his computers full of secrets that our National Security Agency has been thieving from every country on earth, including Russia.

Yet there are many KGB defectors in the United States, and Russia has never used this as an excuse to cancel a summit.

The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal are delighted, hopeful that cancellation presages a more confrontational policy toward Putin.

But is a second Cold War really a good idea? And if it is coming, who is more responsible for it?

From 1989 to 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to let Eastern Europe go free and withdraw his troops and tank armies back to the Urals. The Soviet Union was allowed to dissolve into 15 nations. In three years, the USSR gave up an empire, a third of its territory, and half its people.

And it extended to us a hand of friendship.

How did we respond? We pushed NATO right up to Russia’s borders, bringing in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, even former Soviet republics Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

European objections alone prevented us from handing out NATO war guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia. Was this a friendly act?

Would we have regarded post-Cold War Russian alliances with Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Mexico as friendly acts?

To cut Moscow out of the Caspian Sea oil, we helped build a pipeline through two former Soviet republics, Azerbaijan and Georgia, and, thence, under the Black Sea to our NATO ally Turkey.

In the Boris Yeltsin decade, the 1990s, U.S. hustlers colluded with local oligarchs in looting Russia of her natural resources.

In the past decade, the National Endowment for Democracy and its Republican and Democratic subsidiaries helped dump over governments in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia, and replace them with regimes friendlier to us and more distant from Moscow.

George W. Bush sought to put an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Neither country had requested it. We said it was aimed at Iran.

When my late friend, columnist Tony Blankley, visited Russia in the Bush II era, he was astounded at the hostility he encountered from Russians who felt we had responded to their offer of friendship at the end of the Cold War by taking advantage of them.

Putin is a former intelligence officer, a patriot, a nationalist.

How did we think he would react to U.S. encirclement of his country by NATO and U.S. meddling in his internal affairs?

How did American patriots in the Truman-McCarthy era react to the discovery that Hollywood, the U.S. government and our atom bomb project were riddled with communists loyal to Josef Stalin?

Why cannot we Americans see ourselves as others see us?

Why is Russia still supporting the brutal regime of Bashar Assad in Syria, the Post and Journal demand to know.

Well, Russia has a long relationship with the Assad family, selling it arms and maintaining a naval base on Syria’s coast. Did we expect Russia to behave as we did when our autocratic ally of 30 years, Hosni Mubarak, was challenged by crowds in Tahrir Square?

We ditched Mubarak and washed our hands of him in weeks.

Russia stood by its man. And does not Putin have a point when he asks why we are backing Syrian rebels among whom are elements of that same al-Qaida that killed thousands of us in the twin towers?

Is the Syrian war so clear-cut a case of good and evil that the Russians should dump their friends and support ours?

If the Assad family is irredeemably wicked, why did George H.W. Bush enlist Hafez Assad in his war to liberate Kuwait in 1991, a war to which Damascus contributed 4,000 troops?

There is another reason Russia is recoiling from America.

With the death of its Marxist-Leninist ideology, Russia is moving back toward its religious and Orthodox roots. Secretly baptized at birth by his mother, Putin has embraced this.

Increasingly, religious Russians look on America, with our Hollywood values and celebrations of homosexuality, as a sick society, a focus of cultural and moral evil in the world.

Much of the Islamic world that once admired America has reached the same conclusion. Yet the Post is demanding that our government stand with “the persecuted rock band” of young women who desecrated with obscene acts the high altar of Moscow’s most sacred cathedral.

Upon what ground do we Americans, 53 million abortions behind us since Roe v. Wade, stand to lecture other nations on morality?

Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, trade, arms reduction — we have fish to fry with Putin. As for our lectures on democracy and morality, how ’bout we put a sock in it?

The House voted 400-20 to impose new sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, two days before Iran’s new president, elected on a pledge to re-engage the West on the nuclear issue, takes his oath.

Do these triumphs of AIPAC and the War Party, of neocons and liberal internationalists, tell us where we are going? Or are they the last hurrahs of the interventionists, as America’s long retreat proceeds apace.

If we take what Richard Nixon called “the long view,” the trend line seems unmistakable. Under President Obama, America has pulled all U.S. forces out of Iraq and has scheduled a full withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014.

Despite his “red line” in Syria having allegedly been crossed, and the cawing of Hill hawks like Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain, Obama seems the very portrait of a reluctant warrior in Syria.

A large majority of Americans, too, want no part of that civil war.

On Iran, the Pentagon seems to concur with Obama, in opposition to a new Mideast war. And as Congress votes new sanctions on Iran and new billions for an Egyptian army that just arrested its elected government, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is laying out scenarios for reducing the size, reach and power of the U.S. military.

“Without the controlling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means, and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources, and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.” So wrote Walter Lippmann in 1943.

That is our situation today.

During World War II, we were united in defeating Germany and Japan. After the war, we became united on a new foreign policy — containment of communism and a Soviet Empire that had spread from the Elbe River to the Bering Sea. Through great sacrifices we ensured that our resources were adequate to our commitments.

Vietnam shattered the Cold War consensus.

Yet enough of it survived for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush to lead the nation and the West to victory.

Bush I then set out to build his “New World Order.” He invaded Panama, drove Iraq out of Kuwait and put U.S. troops into Somalia. The country sent him packing.

After 9/11, Bush II invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and undertook to nation-build in both. The country removed his party from power in both houses of Congress in 2006 and from the presidency in 2008.

George W. was going to “end tyranny in our world.” Enough said.

Obama began the long retreat of American power that proceeds today despite a bellicosity on Capitol Hill redolent of the Cold War.

Today, as government at all levels consumes nearly 40 percent of gross domestic product, as the deficit is growing three times as fast as the GDP, as China continues to grow at four times the U.S. rate, we need to ask ourselves:

What should we fight for? Whom shall we defend? What can we afford in the way of national defense? What must we afford?

Consider America’s alliances, almost all of which date to a Cold War no American under 25 can even remember.

NATO was formed in 1949 to protect Western Europe from a Soviet Bloc and a Soviet Union that disappeared a generation ago.

U.S. treaties with Japan and the Philippines date to the 1950s, when Chairman Mao was exporting communist revolution. Should these treaties now require us to go to war with China to defend disputed islets and rocks in the East and South China Sea?

Our treaty with South Korea dates to a war against the North that ended in a truce 60 years ago. South Korea today has twice the population of the North and 40 times the GDP.

Must we still deploy a U.S. army on the Korean DMZ?

In 1977 we undertook to give $5 billion in annual foreign aid to Israel and Egypt. After 35 years, how long should the United States, whose middle class has not seen a rise in real income since 1977, borrow from China to pay Egyptians and Israelis $5 billion a year not to fight each other?

Through a mindless adherence to policies that date to a long-dead past, America is forfeiting her future.

Through our abandonment of economic patriotism and embrace of globalism, we have run up $10 trillion in trade deficits since Reagan. We have fought two trillion-dollar wars in 12 years.

Every year we go into world financial markets to borrow tens of billions for the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and foreign aid to send to regimes that routinely vote against the us in the United Nations.

Is Rand Paul really the one living in yesterday?

In his second term, Ronald Reagan had Iran-Contra, but also a treaty eliminating U.S. and Soviet missiles in Europe, his “tear-down-this-wall” moment in Berlin and his lead role in ending the Cold War.

In his second term, Bill Clinton had Monica, but also came close to a peace treaty between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat.

Obama’s second-term scandals — IRS, Benghazi, wiretapping The Associated Press and Fox — are in the low-kiloton range compared to the resignation of Nixon or the impeachment of Clinton.

And as Obama is going to get nada from a Republican House on guns, amnesty, cap-and-trade or a second stimulus, he should look for his legacy — as Nixon, Reagan and Clinton did — to foreign policy.

Two opportunities beckon. First, the mirage — a Middle East peace. Essential to any treaty, however, is a withdrawal of Israeli “settlers” from the West Bank, a sharing of Jerusalem, Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a “Jewish state” and Arab repudiation of the “right of return.”

Good luck. Bibi Netanyahu, who calls Jerusalem our “eternal capital” and Judea and Samaria our ancient lands, is not going to divide Jerusalem or uproot Jewish settlers from the West Bank — not when he opposed their removal from Gaza by Ariel Sharon.

Bibi will not do it, cannot, if he wants his Likudnik coalition to survive. And Obama lacks the clout in Congress or this capital city to force Bibi to do anything he does not wish to do.

Hence Obama’s legacy hopes lie not in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Washington this week, but in what is happening in Iran — the inauguration of the president who replaces Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Hasan Rouhani was elected with 51 percent of the vote by the constituency that voted against Ahmadinejad in 2009. His triumph was due to his endorsement by former presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. Both had been kept off the ballot by Ayatollah Khamenei.

Rouhani is a founding father of the Islamic Republic and was a close ally of Ayatollah Khomeini. But he was elected on a pledge to revive the economy, get sanctions lifted, and re-engage with the West.

He won on a promise of better times for the Iranian people and an end to Iran’s isolation.

Yet the only way he can achieve these goals is to come to terms with Obama on Iran’s nuclear program.

Despite the decades of acrimony between us, the basic elements of a Washington-Tehran deal are there.And as he was once Iran’s lead negotiator on that program, Rouhani knows exactly what is required.

Iran wants its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — to peaceful nuclear research and nuclear power — recognized by the United States. And it wants U.S.-UN sanctions lifted.

The United States wants more than verbal assurances that Iran is not building a bomb. We need intrusive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities to assure us that she is not building an atom bomb.

As Reagan said, trust but verify.

Yet this seems not beyond the realm of possibility.

Despite the hysteria about Iran’s “mad dash” to an atom bomb, Tehran has never tested a bomb and never produced the 90-percent-enriched uranium needed for a bomb, and does not have sufficient 20-percent uranium to further enrich for a bomb test.

Netanyahu’s initial prediction that Iran was “three to five” years away from a bomb came — in 1992. Since then we have been getting monthly updates on the imminence of the Iranian bomb, but no bomb.

Moreover, Khamenei has declared nuclear weapons anti-Islamic, and U.S intelligence agencies have never retracted their declarations of 2007 and 2011 that Iran has made no decision to build a bomb.

Rouhani’s political future, the continued allegiance of his Iranian followers who want to re-engage with the West and the world, hangs on whether he can get a deal on Iran’s nuclear program and a lifting of sanctions. He knows this.

What Rouhani cannot do is surrender Iran’s rights to nuclear power and research. On this his nation is united. But he may be able to give the West what it requires, intrusive inspections, to prove that what Iran claims to be true is true — that it has no nuclear weapons program.

If we can get that, we should be able to get a deal, and America can lift her sanctions, their objective having been achieved.

That would be the crown jewel of Obama’s second term.

Who would be against such a deal? Bibi and the War Party that wants Iran smashed, as we smashed Iraq, even if that means another trillion-dollar unnecessary war.

Obama can, however, defeat the War Party coalition. He should congratulate Rouhani on his inauguration, declare his readiness for direct talks with Tehran, and appoint as negotiators national security hawks who want no war with Iran, but no Iranian atom bomb either.

History beckons. Obama should seize the moment.

But why, when the fires of anger over the Zimmerman verdict were dying down, did he go into that pressroom and stir them up?

“A week of protests outside the White House, pressure building on him inside the White House, pushed him to that podium,” said Tavis Smiley on “Meet the Press.” Black leaders demanded Obama come out of hiding and stand in solidarity with the aggrieved and outraged.

Belatedly and meekly, Obama complied.

“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” said Obama.

But which Trayvon?

The one walking home with Skittles and tea? Or the one who sucker-punched Zimmerman, decked him, piled on, pummeled him martial arts style, hammered his head on the sidewalk, ignored his screams for help and got shot by the guy he was assaulting?

For that is the story Zimmerman told, Sanford police believed, the lone eyewitness confirmed, the defense argued, the prosecution could not shake and the jury believed. Not guilty, on all counts.

If Obama thinks the verdict was justified, why did he not urge that the demonstrations, marches, vandalism and violence cease?

If he agrees Zimmerman got away with murder — “an atrocity,” Al Sharpton said of the verdict — why did Obama hide behind this mush: “Once the jury’s spoken, that’s how the system works.”

The president sent his “thoughts and prayers” to Trayvon’s family.

To George Zimmerman, painted as a racist monster for 16 months, hiding in fear of his life, his Peruvian mother and family under threat — not a word of compassion from the president.

Obama moved swiftly off the trial and into a rambling discourse on the black experience and racial profiling.

But why? The jury said Trayvon was not profiled.

What is Obama up to? Answer. A law professor, he knows this case, based on evidence and testimony, was open and shut. And he knows Eric Holder is not going to file any hate-crime civil rights charges.

Because Holder and Obama know they would be seen as caving to Sharpton & Co., they would get stuffed in court, and the nation would react with outrage to a double-jeopardy, murder-charge, racial prosecution of this persecuted man whose innocence was established in a court of law.

So Obama swiftly changed the subject.

“There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.”

“There are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me … before I was a senator.”

“That happens often,” said Obama. Undeniably. But why do black males awaken such apprehensions and fears? Is it their color?

Well, 13 percent of our population is black. Half of that — say, 6 plus percent — is male. Of that 6 percent, one in six — just 1 percent of the U.S. population — consists of black males age 18 to 29.

Of all black males 18 to 29, writes Ron Unz in “Race and Crime in America,” 28 percent are in jail or prison, or on probation.

The “liberal Sentencing Project organization,” says Unz, estimates that “one-third of all black men are already convicted criminals by their 20s, and the fraction would surely be far higher for those living in urban areas.”

Twenty years ago in Chicago, where black kids are gunned down daily, Jesse Jackson was quoted, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

That’s the same apprehension, Mr. President, those women feel on that elevator.

Obama traced the “violence … in poor black neighborhoods” to “poverty and … a very difficult history.

But slavery and segregation were far closer in time to the black America of the 1950s, and poverty was far greater. Yet we never saw crime and incarceration rates like we see today in Black America.

As Unz writes, El Paso, Texas, and Atlanta are cities of equal size and poverty rates. Yet Atlanta has 10 times the crime. Oakland and Santa Ana, Calif., are equal in size and poverty numbers. Yet Oakland “has several times the rate of crime.” Why?

Why are white folks nervous about strange young black men in the neighborhood? Perhaps because they commit interracial muggings, robberies and rapes at 35 times the rate of whites.

As newspapers avoid the issue of black racism and rarely give the stats on interracial crime, Obama dwelt lovingly on the indignities of racial profiling — without really addressing the root cause.

It was an uncourageous commentary. Weak as Kool-Aid, said Tavis.

But Obama was where he likes to be, leading from behind — this time behind Al Sharpton.

Yet they know — and Barack Obama, whose silence speaks volumes, knows — nothing is going to happen.

“Stand-Your-Ground” laws in Florida and other states are not going to be repealed. George Zimmerman is not going to be prosecuted for a federal “hate crime” in the death of Trayvon Martin.

The result of all this ginned-up rage that has produced vandalism and violence is simply going to be an ever-deepening racial divide.

Consider the matter of crime and fear of crime.

From listening to cable channels and hearing Holder, Sharpton, Jealous and others, one would think the great threat to black children today emanates from white vigilantes and white cops.

Hence, every black father must have a “conversation” with his son, warning him not to resist or run if pulled over or hassled by a cop.

Make the wrong move, son, and you may be dead is the implication.

But is this the reality in Black America?

When Holder delivered his 2009 “nation-of-cowards” speech blaming racism for racial separation, Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald suggested that our attorney general study his crime statistics.

In New York from January to June 2008, 83 percent of all gun assailants were black, according to witnesses and victims, though blacks were only 24 percent of the population. Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98 percent of all gun assailants. Forty-nine of every 50 muggings and murders in the Big Apple were the work of black or Hispanic criminals.

New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly confirms Mac Donald’s facts. Blacks and Hispanics commit 96 percent of all crimes in the city, he says, but only 85 percent of the stop-and-frisks are of blacks and Hispanics.

And these may involve the kind of pat-downs all of us have had at the airport.

Is stop-and-frisk the work of racist cops in New York, where the crime rate has been driven down to levels unseen in decades?

According to Kelly, a majority of his police force, which he has been able to cut from 41,000 officers to 35,000, is now made up of minorities.

But blacks are also, per capita, the principal victims of crime. Would black fathers prefer their sons to grow up in Chicago, rather than low-crime New York City, with its stop-and-frisk policy?

Fernando Mateo, head of the New York taxicab union, urges his drivers to profile blacks and Hispanics for their own safety: “The God’s honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing these drivers are blacks and Hispanics.”

Mateo is what The New York Times would describe as “a black Hispanic” Yet he may be closer to the ‘hood than Holder, who says he was stopped by police when running to a movie — in Georgetown.

Is Holder saying we’ve got racist cops in the district where Obama carried 86 percent of the white vote and 97 percent of the black vote? And his son should fear the white cops in Washington, D.C.?Which raises a relevant question. Georgetown is an elitist enclave of a national capital that has been ruled by black mayors for half a century. It’s never had a white mayor.

What about interracial crime, white-on-black attacks and the reverse?

After researching the FBI numbers for “Suicide of a Superpower,” this writer concluded: “An analysis of ‘single offender victimization figures’ from the FBI for 2007 finds blacks committed 433,934 crimes against whites, eight times the 55,685 whites committed against blacks. Interracial rape is almost exclusively black on white — with 14,000 assaults on white women by African Americans in 2007. Not one case of a white sexual assault on a black female was found in the FBI study.”

Though blacks are outnumbered 5-to-1 in the population by whites, they commit eight times as many crimes against whites as the reverse. By those 2007 numbers, a black male was 40 times as likely to assault a white person as the reverse.

If interracial crime is the ugliest manifestation of racism, what does this tell us about where racism really resides — in America?

And if the FBI stats for 2007 represent an average year since the Tawana Brawley rape-hoax of 1987, over one-third of a million white women have been sexually assaulted by black males since 1987 — with no visible protest from the civil rights leadership.

Today, 73 percent of all black kids are born out of wedlock. Growing up, these kids drop out, use drugs, are unemployed, commit crimes and are incarcerated at many times the rate of Asians and whites — or Hispanics, who are taking the jobs that used to go to young black Americans.

Are white vigilantes or white cops really Black America’s problem?

Obama seems not to think so. The Rev. Sharpton notwithstanding, he is touting Ray Kelly as a possible chief of homeland security.

In the Big Media, which has relentlessly sought out the voices of those most incensed by the verdict in Sanford, Fla., that is how the Saga of Trayvon Martin is being told. And from listening to TV reports of the rage across black America, that is what is widely believed there.

But is that what happened? Well, not exactly.

Trayvon Martin was not shot while walking home.

He was shot after sucker-punching George Zimmerman, breaking his nose, knocking him down, jumping on top of him, beating him martial arts style and banging his head on a concrete walk, while Zimmerman screamed again and again, “Help me, help me.”

This is what George Zimmerman said happened.

It is what the sole eyewitness to the fight, John Good, says happened. It is what Sanford police believed.

It is what the defense proved beyond a reasonable doubt. It is what that jury of six women came to believe.

Why, then, do so many in the black community believe Trayvon was profiled and murdered, when even most of the analysts on the cable news shows were saying in the last days of the trial that the prosecution had failed completely to make its case?

Answer: Many had convicted George Zimmerman in their hearts before the trial began. Here, as this writer noted a year ago, are some of the voices that had declared Zimmerman guilty of murder before a witness had been called.

“Blacks are under attack,” railed Jesse Jackson. “Killing us is big business.” Trayvon was “shot down in cold blood by a vigilante … murdered and martyred.”

“A hate crime,” said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said Trayvon had been “executed.”

The Grio compared his killing to the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. The New Black Panther Party put Zimmerman’s face on a “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster, called for 5,000 black men to run him down and said Trayvon had been “murdered in cold blood.”

Spike Lee twittered Zimmerman’s home address.

And President Obama? Did he calm the waters? Hardly. He signaled whose side he was on. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” he said.

Not only did they all inflame the black community into believing a racist atrocity had occurred, others still do so, even after the weeks of testimony that raised far more than a reasonable doubt.

Moments after the verdict, Al Sharpton ranted, “This is an atrocity.” He went on to explain the moral outrage that the ladies of the jury had just committed.

“What this jury has done is establish a precedent that when you are young and fit a certain profile, you can be committing no crime, just bringing some Skittles and iced tea home to your brother, and be killed.”

Did the ladies of the jury really establish such a “precedent”?

The four-term mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Barry, has now brought his healing touch to the proceedings.

The Zimmerman verdict was “awful,” he said, another example of “institutionalized racism.” But look to Marion to find a bright side.

“The good news is that Zimmerman will never be in peace. He won’t be able to get a job. He’ll have to go underground, travel incognito and never live in peace. That’s the good news for me.” Now a comment like that might befit a James Earl Ray. But George Zimmerman? Who turned this neighborhood watch fellow, well-liked by all in his community, into some racist monster?

The night of the verdict, Mark O’Mara gave America the answer.

George “didn’t know why he was turned into a monster,” O’Mara told the assembled journalists. “But quite honestly, you guys had a lot to do with it. You took a story that was fed to you, and you ran with it, and you ran right over him, and that was horrid to him.”

Like his partner Don West, O’Mara exhibited moral courage in that post-verdict press conference, as did that jury of six women, who rejected the prosection’s pleas to at least give them manslaughter or child abuse.

President Obama might now exhibit a little moral courage of his own, by directing his Justice Department to halt this scavenger hunt for a “hate crime.” If Sanford police and the FBI could not find a hate crime, and the prosecution could not prove racial profiling or malice, what reason is there to believe any such motive ever existed?

If Barack Obama and Eric Holder capitulate to Al Sharpton’s demand for “Plan B” and the NAACP’s demand for a second trial of George Zimmerman for a crime of which he has been acquitted, most Americans will come to believe this is no search for justice, but a drive for racial retribution and revenge. And they will be right.

End this persecution of George Zimmerman, Mr. President.

Shut it down.

For George Zimmerman’s defense has proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he shot Trayvon Martin not out of malice, rage or hate — but in a desperate act of self-defense.

Zimmerman was being beaten “ground-and-pound,” mixed martial arts style. His head was being banged on the cement. Screaming again and again for help, he pulled out his gun and fired.

Even the prosecution is now conceding Trayvon might have been on top, and is now scrambling for a compromise verdict on a lesser charge than second-degree murder, a charge that never should have been brought. Indeed, this trial should never have been held.

What we have witnessed in Sanford, Fla., is the prosecution of an innocent man for murder because the politically and socially powerful demanded it.

That Trayvon is dead is a tragedy, and an avoidable tragedy. But it was not murder. And it does not justify railroading a man who, whatever his mistakes that night — and George Zimmerman made them — committed no crime.

The case comes down to four questions. And the answers, supported by the evidence, testimony and common sense, point straight to an acquittal.

First, who was the aggressor?

All agree it would have been better if Zimmerman had never left his car or followed Trayvon that night.

Yet, ask yourself:

Would a pudgy, out-of-shape 28-year-old with a gun, facing a 17-year-old athletic kid, 4 inches taller, with a longer reach, throw a punch and start a fistfight with him?

If Zimmerman threw the first punch, what would be his motive? If you have a gun and your adversary does not, is not the sensible stance to keep your distance so you can be free to pull the gun? Who armed with a pistol starts a fistfight with a suspicious stranger?

Moreover, Trayvon’s body showed no signs of having ever been punched, while George’s nose looks like he was sucker-punched.

Second, who was on top in those final moments of the fight?

If Zimmerman was on top and Trayvon was on his back, Trayvon would have been found on his back. He was found dead on his stomach.

If Zimmerman was on top and Trayvon was on his stomach, he would have been shot in the back. He was shot in the chest.

How could Trayvon have been found lying on his face, with a bullet hole in his chest, if Zimmerman was sitting on top of him? Only if George Zimmerman, after shooting Trayvon, would have turned him over as he lay dying. No one has even suggested that.

Why was the back of Zimmerman’s jacket soaking wet, and the back of Trayvon’s dry, if Trayvon was on the bottom? Why were the knees of Trayvon’s pants wet, if he was on the bottom?

Third, who was screaming for help?

His mother, brother and father say it was Trayvon. George’s mother, father and half a dozen friends say it is George’s voice on the tape, screaming for help.

Trayvon’s father and brother apparently told investigators initially that the voice was not Trayvon’s, or they did not know. And the eyewitness John Good says the guy on the bottom in the red jacket, George Zimmerman, was the one screaming.

But, again, let us assume it was Trayvon screaming.

Why would he be screaming? If he was being beaten up martial arts style on the ground, would Trayvon not have had cuts and bruises?

What, exactly, was George Zimmerman doing to this 17-year-old football player that he should be screaming for help?

Where is the physical evidence that Trayvon had been hurt in any way before he was shot? Is screaming how a tough 17-year-old male reacts in a fistfight, even one he is losing?

Trayvon was a stranger in that neighborhood, and George was the neighborhood watch guy. Which of the two is more likely to be yelling for help from the neighbors?

Fourth, was the use of a firearm justified, even if Zimmerman was losing the fight and being beaten up?

Were his injuries that serious? Was he really is danger of grave bodily harm?

Experts disagree. But the real question is: What did Zimmerman think at the time? And judging by those piercing screams, was not that screaming man frightened, even terrified?

Trayvon’s parents think these were the desperate cries for help of a son about to be killed. But if they were Zimmerman’s cries, could George not have had those same thoughts?

George Zimmerman should have informed Trayvon he was the neighborhood watch. Trayvon should not have pummeled him. Both made mistakes. One is dead. To send the other to prison for what happened that night would be an act of vengeance, not justice, an invocation of the old lex talionis — an eye for an eye.

That’s not what America is supposed to be about.

Having won the presidency of Egypt in free and fair elections after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, President Mohammed Morsi has been ousted in a military coup and placed under house arrest. Brotherhood leaders, convicted of no crimes, are being rounded up.

They played by America’s rules. Now, with America’s blessing, they are being locked up by America’s friends in Egypt’s armed forces.

Nor is this the first perceived betrayal. When Hamas won the free elections demanded by George W. Bush, America refused to recognize their legitimacy and plotted the violent overthrow of Hamas in Gaza.

When Islamists swept the first round of Algerian elections in 1991, the regime, with the blessing of Bush 1, canceled the second round, leading to a guerrilla war that cost 100,000 to 200,000 dead.

If Muslims have come to believe that Americans preaching democracy are charlatans and hypocrites, do they not have a point?

U.S. foreign policy once seemed to make sense. We put vital interests ahead of democratist ideology. We stood by those who stood by us. We did not spend time inspecting the moral credentials of those who took America’s side. We played the cards we were dealt in this world.

Gen. Washington danced a jig when he heard Louis XVI, a descendant of the Sun King, would support America’s cause against our mother country.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson took us to war “to make the world safe for democracy” as an associate power of five empires — the British, French, Italian, Russian and Japanese. At war’s end, Wilson signed treaties that plundered the lands and colonies of the three defeated empires, for the benefit of the victorious empires.

In the Good War from 1941 to 1945 against the Nazis, our greatest ally was the mass murderer of Christians and democrats Josef Stalin.

In the Cold War, Dwight Eisenhower sanctioned the overthrow of democratic governments in Guatemala and Iran and their replacement by autocrats who would take our side in the struggle for the world.

We welcomed the Shah, Saudi kings and Gulf emirs. JFK welcomed the “Butcher of the Balkans,” Marshal Tito, to the White House. President Nixon sided with autocratic Pakistan over democratic India — for Pakistan had sided with us.

Nixon went to Beijing to toast Chairman Mao, a monster as great as Stalin. Liberals sickened by our alliance with the “corrupt and dictatorial regime” of President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon were ecstatic.

The Nixon White House celebrated the overthrow of elected president Salvador Allende of Chile by Gen. Augusto Pincohet.

Among other U.S. allies in the Cold War were Asian dictators and generals Chiang Kai-shek of China, Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-hee of South Korea, and Suharto of Indonesia.

Portugal’s dictator Antonio Salazar and Spain’s Gen. Francisco Franco were loyal allies against Bolshevism. Mobutu Sese Seko was for 32 years our man in the Congo, as Emperor Haile Selassie was in Ethiopia.

Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak were American allies and dictators of Egypt from 1970 to 2011, until, in the name of our democratic ideals, we threw our flawed friend Mubarak to the wolves.

What is the cause of our present angst over what is happening in Cairo? Our democratist ideals appear to have been run over by U.S. armored personnel carriers driven by Egyptian soldiers trained by the U.S. Army. Whether or not our interests have been advanced, our ideals seem to have been wounded.

Behind our ambivalence and paralysis may be found several truths. First, the Cold War, the life-or-death civilizational struggle that defined our times, is over. No vital U.S. interest is at risk in Egypt to justify military intervention or the shedding of American blood.

This is thus their problem, not ours, most Americans believe, and our influence is receding there, even as that of the British, French and Russians did before us. Let them work it out.

Testifying to this truth is the tape of Secretary of State John Kerry inspecting his yacht off Nantucket as the Egyptian regime fell, and Obama, after a brief National Security Council conclave, heading off for the golf course on the July 4 weekend, then on to Camp David.

Today, from Egypt to Lebanon to Syria and Iraq, it is Islamist against secularist, Sunni vs. Shia, tribe against tribe, those in power against those who want power. The Arab Spring has ushered in the Arab war of all against all.

That year 1848, when all the thrones of Europe were shaken by revolution, was a similar time. And those wise old war hawks of 1812, Henry Clay and John Calhoun, found themselves again on the same side.

America, they said, should stay out.

“Masterly inactivity” is our role, said Calhoun. Added Clay, “Avoiding the distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on this Western shore as a light to all the nations than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen or falling republics.”

“They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Ben Franklin is much quoted in today’s debate on the trade-off between freedom and security, as we learn about the National Security Agency’s easy access to our phone records and emails.

Yet we Americans have often sacrificed liberty for safety.

In World War II, Korea and Vietnam, we conscripted millions of men and sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths fighting against Italians, Germans, Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese.

The greater antagonist of liberty is not the quest for security, but our insatiable demand and inexorable drive for equality – not equality of rights but equality of results.

To equalize incomes the government confiscates 40 percent of the earnings of the most successful Americans and uses that wealth to subsidize the food, health care, housing and income of that half of the nation that pays no income taxes.

A steeply progressive income tax was originally advanced by that great egalitarian Karl Marx.

The federal estate tax is 40 percent for the wealthy. Some states tack on 16 percent. Individuals may spend entire lives acquiring wealth for their progeny. And governments, in the name of equality, will seize half of it on their deaths. Socialism, said Winston Churchill, is the philosophy of envy and gospel of greed.

To guarantee equal pay for equal work, the government has created agencies to monitor the payrolls of every business, agencies empowered to identify, expose and punish employers who might dare to use their economic freedom to reward some workers more than others.

To ensure racial, ethnic and gender equality in the labor force and the front office, the government fields thousands of agents to police the hiring, promotion and dismissal decisions of executives.

Affirmative action and quotas have been imposed on colleges and universities, stripping those institutions of freedom of choice, to advance a greater racial, ethnic and gender equality in student bodies and on faculties than a free and fair competition might produce.

Contract set-asides have been established on which no white male may bid. To make minorities and women more equal, we make others less free.

Freedom of assembly, which produced men’s and women’s clubs and colleges, has been under assault for decades. Only a handful of men’s colleges survive. Even Augusta National Golf Club was forced to conform to the dictates of diversity and equality.

To achieve greater equality in the test scores of Asian, white, Hispanic and black children, enormous sums have been extracted from taxpayers and shoveled into an educational establishment with little to show for it in 50 years. Yet the clamor rises for more billions to achieve this modern form of alchemy.

In a decades-long intrusion on freedom that ignited a social rebellion, children were forcibly bused out of their home neighborhoods across cities to troubled schools to achieve a “racial balance.”

Why? Because it was said that through a process of osmosis, underachievers could attain greater equality with overachievers by having them sit beside one another in classrooms. Parental freedom yielded to social dictation.

“A man’s home is his castle,” was a concept we inherited from English law and proudly adopted as our own. No more. A man’s right to sell or rent his home is restricted by open housing laws.

Owners of hotels, motels, taverns and restaurants can lose their licenses if they conduct their businesses according to personal biases and beliefs.

In the land of the free, such freedom is now illegal.

“If we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal, as well,” said Obama in his second inaugural. Thus, homosexual unions will soon have to be treated equally with traditional marriage, though “marriage equality” contradicts Christian teaching.

Our Union was “founded on the principles of liberty and equality,” said Obama. But how could that be when the word “equality” does not appear in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Federalist Papers?

Egalite is rather a founding principle of Robespierre’s revolution, not ours. It is ideological contraband smuggled into America and the enemy of that freedom for which our fathers fought.

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal in their God-given rights to life and liberty. Does anyone think that Jefferson, who kept slaves all his life, excoriated Indians in that same Declaration of Independence and spoke of a “natural aristocracy” that Providence had wisely provided to govern us, believed all men and all women were equal in any other way?

In The Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant wrote: “Leave men free and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917.

“Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.”

As the Party of Equality triumphs, the Party of Freedom expires.

Happy Independence Day!

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

Is the Second Reconstruction over?

The first ended with the withdrawal of Union troops from the Southern states as part of a deal that gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency after the disputed election of 1876.

The second began with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a century after Appomattox. Under the VRA, Southern states seeking to make even minor changes in voting laws had to come to Washington to plead their case before the Justice Department and such lions of the law as Eric Holder.

Southern states were required to get this pre-clearance for any alterations in voting laws because of systematic violations of the 14th and 15th amendment constitutional rights of black Americans to equal access to polling places and voting booths.

The South had discriminated by using poll taxes, gerrymandering and literacy tests, among other tactics. Dixie was in the penalty box because it had earned a place there.

What the Supreme Court did Tuesday, in letting the South out of the box, is to declare that, as this is not 1965, you cannot use abuses that date to 1965, but have long since disappeared, to justify indefinite federal discrimination against the American South.

You cannot impose burdens on Southern states, five of which recorded higher voting percentages among their black populations in 2012 than among their white populations, based on practices of 50 years ago that were repudiated and abandoned in another era.

You cannot punish Southern leaders in 2013 for the sins of their grandfathers. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted, black turnout in 2012 was higher in Mississippi than in Massachusetts.

Does this mean the South is now free to discriminate again?

By no means. State action that discriminates against minority voters can still be brought before the Department of Justice.

Even the “pre-clearance” provision of the VRA remains. All the court has said is that if Congress wishes to impose a pre-clearance provision on a state or group of states, Congress must have more evidence to justify unequal treatment than what “Bull” Connor did in Birmingham back in 1965.

Congress could pass a bill today authorizing Justice Department intervention in any state where the registration of blacks, Hispanics or Asians fell below 60 percent of that electorate.

What Congress can no longer do is impose conditions on Southern states from which Northern states are exempt. Washington can no longer treat the states unequally – for that, too, is a violation of the Constitution.

The Roberts court just took a giant stride to restoring the Union.

Yet the hysterical reaction to the decision reveals a great deal.

What do critics say they are afraid of?

While conceding that immense progress has been made with the huge turnout of black voters in the South and the re-election of a black president, they say they fear that without the pre-clearance provision this would never have happened. And now that the provision no longer applies to the South, the evil old ways will return.

On several counts this is disheartening.

For what the critics of the court decision are saying is that, no matter the progress made over half a century, they do not trust the South to deal fairly and decently with its black citizens, without a club over its head. They do not believe the South has changed in its heart from the days of segregation.

They think the South is lying in wait for a new opportunity to disfranchise its black voters. And they think black Southerners are unable to defend their own interests – without Northern liberal help.

In this belief there are elements of paranoia, condescension and bigotry.

Many liberals not only do not trust the South, some detest it. And many seem to think it deserves to be treated differently than the more progressive precincts of the nation.

Consider Wednesday’s offering by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson. The South, he writes, is the home of “so-called right-to-work laws” and hostility to the union shop, undergirded by “the virulent racism of the white Southern establishment,” a place where a “right-wing antipathy toward workers’ rights” is pandemic.

The South is the “the heartland of cheap-labor America. … When it wants to slum, business still goes to the South.” Then there are those “reactionary white Republican state governments.”

Were a conservative to use the term “black” as a slur the way Meyerson spits out the word “white,” he would be finished at the Post. Meyerson’s summation:

“If the federal government wants to build a fence that keeps the United States safe from the danger of lower wages and poverty and their attendant ills – and the all-round fruitcakery of the right-wing white South – it should build that fence from Norfolk to Dallas. There is nothing wrong with a fence as long as you put it in the right place.”

Harold looks forward to the day that a surging Latino population forces “epochal political change” on a detestable white South.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

“The Pentagon unveiled plans Tuesday for fully integrating women into front-line and special combat roles, including elite forces such as Army Rangers and Navy SEALs.”

So ran the lead on the CNN story. And why are we doing this?

Did the young officers leading troops in battle in Afghanistan and Iraq, returning with casualties, say they needed women to enhance the fighting efficiency of their combat units and the survival rate of their soldiers?

Did men from the 101st and 82nd airborne, the Marines, the SEALs and Delta Force petition the Joint Chiefs to put women alongside them in future engagements to make them an even superior force?

No. This decision to put women in combat represents a capitulation of the military brass, a surrender to the spirit of our age, the Pentagon’s salute to feminist ideology.

This is not a decision at which soldiers arrived when they studied after-action reports, but the product of an ideology that contradicts human nature, human experience and human history, and declares as dogma that women are just as good at soldiering as men.

But if this were true, rather than merely asserted, would it have taken mankind the thousands of years from Thermopylae to discover it?

In the history of civilization, men have fought the wars. In civilized societies, attacks on women have always been regarded as contemptible and cowardly. Even the Third Reich in its dying hours did not send women into battle, but old men and boys.

“You don’t hit a girl!” was something every American boy had drilled into him from childhood. It was part of our culture, the way we were raised. A Marine friend told me he would have resigned from the Corps rather than fight women with the pugil sticks used for bayonet practice at Parris Island.

Sending women into combat on equal terms seems also to violate common sense. When they reach maturity, men are bigger, stronger, more aggressive. Thus they commit many times the number of violent crimes and outnumber women in prisons 10 to 1.

For every Bonnie Parker, there are 10 Clyde Barrows.

Is it a coincidence that every massacre discussed in our gun debate – from the Texas Tower to the Long Island Railroad, from Columbine to Ft. Hood, from Virginia Tech to Tucson, from Aurora to Newtown – was the work of a crazed male?

Nothing matches mortal combat where soldiers fight and kill, and are wounded, maimed and die for cause or country. Domestically, the closest approximations are combat training, ultimate fighting, boxing and that most physical of team sports, the NFL.

Yet no women compete against men in individual or team sports. They are absent from boys’ and men’s teams in high school and college, be it football, basketball, baseball, hockey or lacrosse.

Even in the non-contact sports of golf, tennis and volleyball, men compete with men, women against women. In the Olympics, to which nations send their best athletes, women and men compete separately in track and field, swimming and gymnastics.

Consider our own history. Would any U.S. admiral say that in any of America’s great naval battles – Mobile Bay, Manila Bay, Midway, the Coral Sea – we would done better with some women manning the guns?

In the revolutionary and civil wars, World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam, women were not in combat. Was it invidious discrimination of which we should all be ashamed that women were not fighting alongside the men at Gettysburg, in the Argonne, at Normandy or with “Chesty” Puller’s Marines in the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir?

Undeniably, some women might handle combat as well as some men. But that is true of some 13-, 14- and 15-year-old boys, and some 50- and 60-year old men. Yet we do not draft boys or men that age or send them into combat. Is this invidious discrimination based on age, or ageism?

Carry this feminist-egalitarian ideology to its logical conclusion, and half of those storming the Omaha and Utah beaches should have been girls and women. Is this not an absurdity?

We have had Navy ships become “love boats,” with female sailors returning pregnant. At the Naval Academy, three midshipmen, football players, allegedly raped an intoxicated classmate. For months, she was too ashamed and frightened to report it.

An estimated 26,000 personnel of the armed forces were sexually assaulted in 2011, up from 19,000 in 2010. Obama and the Congress are understandably outraged. Such assaults are appalling. But is not the practice of forcing young men and women together in close quarters a contributory factor here?

Among the primary reasons the Equal Rights Amendment, the ERA, went down to defeat three decades ago was the realization it could mean, in a future war, women could be drafted equally with men, and sent in equal numbers into combat.

But what appalled the Reaganites is social progress in the age of Obama. This is another country from the one we grew up in.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

On U.S. military intervention in Syria’s civil war, where “both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line ‘Allahu akbar’ … I say let Allah sort it out.”

So said Sarah Palin to the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. And, as is not infrequently the case, she nailed it.

Hours later, Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times, at length, echoed Palin: “Those who are urging the US to get more deeply involved in the Syrian conflict now are living in the past.”

Four fundamental changes make it “no longer realistic, or even desirable, for the US to dominate” the Middle East as we did from the Suez crisis of 1956 through the Iraq invasion of 2003.

The four changes: the failures of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the Great Recession, the Arab Spring and emerging U.S. energy independence.

Indeed, with $2 trillion sunk, 7,000 U.S. troops dead, 40,000 wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead, and millions of refugees, what do we have to show for this vast human and material waste?

Can a country with an economy limping along, one that has run four consecutive deficits in excess of $1 trillion, afford another imperial adventure?

On the Shiite side of the Syrian civil war are Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hezbollah and Syrian President Bashar Assad. On the Sunni side are the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, Sunni jihadists from across the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Is victory for either side worth yet another U.S. war?

Ought we not stand back and ask: What vital interest is imperiled here?

And even if Americans favor one side or the other, how lasting an impact could any U.S. intervention have? The region is in turmoil.

Since the Tunisian uprising that dethroned an autocratic ally, dictators have fallen in Egypt and Libya. There have been a Shiite revolt in Bahrain, a civil war in Yemen and a civil-sectarian war in Syria that has cost 90,000 lives. Iraq is disintegrating. Al-Qaida is in Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb region and Mali.

Now the muezzin’s call to religious war is heard.

“How could 100 million Shiites defeat 1.7 billion (Sunnis)?” roared powerful Saudi cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, calling for a Sunni-Shiite war. Al-Qaradawi denounces Assad’s Alawite sect as “more infidel than Christians and Jews” and calls Hezbollah “the party of the devil.”

“Everyone who has the ability and has training to kill … is required to go” to Syria, said al-Qaradawi.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have made a comeback, and the United States is negotiating with the same crowd we sent an army to oust in 2001. And the press reports we will be leaving behind $7 billion in U.S. military vehicles and equipment when we depart.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the most successful Turkish leader since Kemal Ataturk, appears to have lost his mandate, with hundreds of thousands pouring into streets and squares both to denounce and to defend him.

The United States, says Rachman, “has recognised that, ultimately, the people of the Middle East are going to have to shape their own destinies. Many of the forces at work in the region – such as Islamism and Sunni-Shia sectarianism – are alarming to the West but they cannot be forever channelled or suppressed.”

Did those clamoring today for intervention in Syria learn nothing from Ronald Reagan’s intervention in an earlier Arab civil war, the one in Lebanon? Result: 241 dead Marines, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut bombed and hostages taken.

Reagan left office believing his decision to put Marines in Lebanon was his greatest mistake. And to retrieve those hostages, he acceded to a transfer of weapons to Iran, an action that almost broke his presidency.

Yet it is not only in the Middle East that we are “living in the past,” in a world long gone. As Ted Galen Carpenter writes in Chronicles, under NATO we are committed to go to war with Russia on behalf of 27 nations.

If Russia collides with Estonia or Latvia over the treatment of their Russian minorities, we fight Russia. For whose benefit is this commitment?

Today Japan spends 1 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. Yet the USA is committed to go to war to defend not only the home islands but the Senkaku islets and rocks in the East China Sea that China also claims.

Are the Senkakus really worth a war with China?

NATO was established to defend Europe. Yet Europe spends less on its own defense than we do. Sixty years after the Korean War, we remain committed to defend South Korea against North Korea. Yet South Korea has an economy 40 times as large as North Korea’s.

Former Rep. Ron Paul asks: Why, when U.S. debt is larger than our GDP and we are running mammoth annual deficits, are we borrowing money abroad to give away in foreign aid?

Good question. As for those ethnic, sectarian and civil wars raging across the Middle East, let Allah sort it out.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

Barack Obama has just taken his first baby steps into a war in Syria that may define and destroy his presidency.

Thursday, while he was ringing in Gay Pride Month with LGBT revelers, a staffer, Ben Rhodes, informed the White House press that U.S. weapons will be going to the Syrian rebels.

For two years Obama has stayed out of this sectarian-civil war that has consumed 90,000 lives. Why is he going in now?

The White House claims it now has proof Bashar Assad used sarin gas to kill 100-150 people, thus crossing a “red line” Obama had set down as a “game changer.” Defied, his credibility challenged, he had to do something.

Yet Assad’s alleged use of sarin to justify U.S. intervention seems less like our reason for getting into this war than our excuse.

For the White House decided to intervene weeks ago, before the use of sarin was confirmed. And why would Assad have used only tiny traces? Where is the photographic evidence of the disfigured dead?

What proof have we the rebels did not fabricate the use of sarin or use it themselves to get the gullible Americans to fight their war?

Yet, why would President Obama, whose proud boast is that he will have extricated us from the Afghan and Iraq wars, as Dwight Eisenhower did from the Korean War, plunge us into a new war?

He has been under severe political and foreign pressure to do something after Assad and Hezbollah recaptured the strategic town of Qusair and began preparing to recapture Aleppo, the largest city.

Should Assad succeed, it would mean a decisive defeat for the rebels and their backers: the Turks, Saudis and Qataris. And it would mean a geostrategic victory for Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, who have proven themselves reliable allies.

To prevent this defeat and humiliation, we are now going to ship arms and ammunition to keep the rebels going and in control of enough territory to negotiate a peace that will remove Assad.

We are going to make this a fair fight.

What is wrong with this strategy? It is the policy of an amateur. It treats war like a game. It ignores the lessons of history. And, as it continues a bloodbath with no prospect of an end to it, it is immoral.

In every great civil war of modernity – the Russian civil war of 1919-1921, the Spanish civil war of 1936-1939, the Chinese civil war of 1945-49, one side triumphs and takes power. The other loses and lives with the consequences – defeat, death, exile.

What is the likely reaction to our escalation from humanitarian aid to military aid? Counter-escalation. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are likely to rush in more weapons and troops to accelerate the progress of Assad’s army before the American weapons arrive.

And if they raise and call, what does Obama do?

Already, a clamor is being heard from our clients in the Middle East and Congress to crater Syria’s runways with cruise missiles, to send heavy weapons to the rebels, to destroy Assad’s air force on the ground, to bomb his antiaircraft sites.

All of these are acts of war. Yet under the Constitution, Congress alone authorizes war.

When did Congress authorize Obama to take us to war in Syria? Where does our imperial president get his authority to draw red lines and attack countries that cross them?

Have we ceased to be a republic? Has Congress become a mere spectator to presidential decisions on war and peace?

As Vladimir Putin seems less the reluctant warrior, what do we do if Moscow answers the U.S. escalation by delivering on its contract to provide S-300 antiaircraft missiles to Damascus, which can cover half of Israel?

Obama has put us on the escalator to a war already spilling over Syria’s borders into Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, a war that is now sundering the entire Middle East along Sunni and Shia lines.

He is making us de facto allies of the Al-Qaida-like al-Nusra Front, of Hamas and jihadists from all across the region, and of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi just severed ties to Syria and is demanding a “no-fly zone,” which one imagines the United States, not the Egyptian air force, would have to enforce.

Our elites shed tears over the 90,000 dead in Syria. But what we are about to do will not stop the killing, but simply lengthen the duration of the war and increase the numbers of dead and wounded.

At the top of this escalator our country has begun to ascend is not just a proxy war with Iran in Syria, but a real war that would entail a disaster for the world economy.

If the ouster of Assad is what the Sunni powers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt demand, why not let them do it?

Anti-interventionists should demand a roll-call vote in Congress on whether Obama has the authority to take us into this Syrian war.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

Next year should be a banner year for the GOP, and may yet be.

Obamacare, a “train wreck” about to happen, says Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, goes into full effect Jan. 1, with the popular IRS as enforcer.

The Obama media feel betrayed by the secret intrusions on First Amendment rights. Libertarians see the National Security Agency’s data mining as a massive violation of Fourth Amendment rights.

The White House is bedeviled by scandals, the second-term curse has caught up with the Obama presidency, and prospects for the U.S. economy seem dicier than a few months ago.

History is also on the GOP’s side. In the second midterm elections, Presidents Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK-LBJ, Nixon-Ford, Reagan and Bush II all suffered big losses. It has become a tradition.

But if the GOP is favored to hold the House and make gains in the Senate, the long-term prognosis for the party remains grim.

First, libertarianism is breaking up that old gang of mine.

Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham call for air strikes on Syria. But no echo is heard, as the Republican Party becomes anti-interventionist.

Yet the acid test comes after Friday’s Iranian election, as the neocon war drums begin to beat.

Libertarian Republicans believe the National Security Agency is Big Brother and the Brave New World at hand. National security Republicans back the agency’s right to access private data banks to protect us from terrorism.

On how to deal with 12 million illegal aliens – send them home or grant them amnesty and a “path to citizenship” – the party’s rancorous division will be starkly visible when the bill reaches the House.

But the existential crisis of the GOP, from which it has turned its eyes away since George H.W. Bush, is demography.

Yet the matter cannot be avoided now, for it is on page one.

“White Numbers Shrink,” was the headline on the lead story in USA Today. “More Whites Dying Than Being Born,” blaredThe Wall Street Journal. What does this mean?

In demographic terms, more white Americans died in 2012 than were born. Never before – not during the Civil War bloodletting, not during the influenza epidemic after World War I, not during the Great Depression and birth dearth of the 1930s – has this happened.

In ethnic terms, it means that Americans whose forebears came from Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, Southern and Eastern Europe – the European tribes of North America – have begun to die.

The demographic winter of white America is at hand, even as it began years ago for the native-born of old Europe.

In political terms, this is depressing news for the Republican Party. For nearly 90 percent of all Republican votes in presidential elections are provided by Americans of European descent.

In 1960 white folks were close to 90 percent of the entire U.S. population and 95 percent of the electorate. Nixon’s New Majority was created by pulling Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern conservative Protestants, white folks all, out of the Roosevelt coalition and bringing them into a new alliance that would give Nixon a 49-state landslide in 1972, which Reagan would replicate in 1984.

But since that New Majority gave the Republicans five victories in six presidential elections, four of them 40-state landslides, the political world has turned upside down, and demography is the cause.

Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the white vote, a 3-to-2 victory over Obama among America’s majority. In any year before 1980, that would have meant victory. But in 2012 whites were only 74 percent of those who went to the polls.

Thus, Obama’s sweep of 80 percent of the African-American, Asian and Hispanic vote, one-fourth of the electorate and rising, enabled him to coast to a second term.

Between 2008 and 2012, the Hispanic vote rose 1.4 million, the black vote by 1.7 million, and the white vote fell by 2 million.

Where is America going? What does the GOP future look like?

America’s white majority, 64 percent of the population and 74 percent of the electorate, still declining in relative terms, has begun to decline in real terms. Deaths outnumber births. Among all U.S. births in 2012, white babies were outnumbered by babies of color.

If Republicans are opposed to what mass immigration is doing to the country demographically, ethnically, socially and politically, there are, as Reagan used to say, “simple answers, just no easy answers.”

Those answers: No amnesty, secure the border, enforce laws against businesses that hire illegals, and impose a moratorium on new immigration so wages can rise and immigrants enter the middle class and start voting as did the children and grandchildren of the immigrants of 1890-1920 by 1972.

So what are the Republicans doing?

Going back on their word, dishonoring their platform, and enraging their loyal supporters, who gave Mitt 90 percent of his votes, to pander to a segment of the electorate that gave Mitt less than 5 percent of his total votes.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

A Cairo court has convicted 43 men and women of using foreign funds to foment unrest inside Egypt in connection with the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.

Sixteen of those convicted were Americans. All but one, Robert Becker of the National Democratic Institute, had already departed. Becker fled this week rather than serve two years in an Egyptian prison.

And U.S. interventionists are in an uproar.

“Appalling and offensive,” said Sen. Pat Leahy of the verdicts.

“The 2011 revolution was supposed to end the repressive climate under Mubarak,” said The Wall Street Journal of our ally of 30 years whom Hillary Clinton called a family friend.

This “crackdown,” decries The Washington Post, was defended with “cheap nationalism and conspiracy theories.” As for Egypt’s proposed new law for regulating foreign-funded groups promoting democracy, it is “based on … repressive and xenophobic logic.”

Yet the questions raised by both the Cairo and Moscow crackdowns on U.S.-funded “democracy” groups cannot be so airily dismissed.

For these countries have more than a small point.

While U.S.-funded democracy promotion is portrayed as benign, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, DNI and Freedom House have been linked to revolutions that brought down regimes in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and nearly succeeded in Belarus.

People who pride themselves on bringing about revolutions should not whine when targeted regimes treat them like troublemakers.

And who directs these “pro-democracy” groups?

Before 2011, Freedom House was headed by ex-CIA Director Jim Woolsey, who says we are in “World War IV.” The IRI is chaired by John McCain, who pushed for U.S. intervention in the Russia-Georgia war and is clamoring for air strikes on Syria.

The DNI chairman is ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who says: “We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.”

Is it not understandable to patriots of the original “Don’t Tread on Me” republic that foreigners might resent paid U.S. agents operating inside their countries to alter the direction of their politics?

We have a right to advance our democratic values, we say.

But for the United States to push, for example, for freedom of speech, press and assembly in the People’s Republic of China is to promote political action that must lead to the fall of Beijing’s single-party state. Do we not understand why that might be seen by the Chinese Communist Party of Xi Jinping as subversive?

In the Cold War Americans learned that not only was the Communist Party U.S.A. a wholly owned subsidiary of Joseph Stalin’s Comintern, that party had deeply infiltrated the U.S. government and Hollywood. In the late ’40s and early ’50s, America was convulsed over communist penetration of our institutions.

Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped by J. Edgar Hoover at the direction of JFK and Attorney General Robert Kennedy because he refused to dump an adviser, Stanley Levison, who was a communist and thought to be a Soviet spy.

Were the Kennedys being “repressive and xenophobic”?

If we were apoplectic that Soviet-funded communists were seeking to influence our culture and politics, why ought not other countries, with cultures and institutions far different from our own, react even as we did?

In the stricter societies of the Islamic world, governments have enacted laws regarding alcohol, premarital sex, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, gay marriage and religious conversions different from any such laws in the U.S.A.

In some of those countries, such activities can produce floggings, amputations, stonings and beheadings. In many of these countries, children are indoctrinated in the Islamic faith in government-supported schools. Not here.

We may deplore this, but where do we get the right to intervene in the internal affairs of these countries if they do not threaten us?

And are we really consistent in our democracy promotion?

How many U.S.-funded agents of Freedom House, NED, IRI and NDI are in Bahrain demanding elections that would permit the Shia majority to dump the king and oust our 5th Fleet from its Persian Gulf base?

How would we react if Riyadh funneled billions of petrodollars into organizations and agents to finance Wahhabi madrassas and assist local Muslim communities in the U.S.A. with their efforts to enact sharia law?

What lies behind U.S. interventions in the internal affairs of countries all over the world?

There is, first, the residual Cold War mindset. What we did for Solidarity in Poland was right and successful, and we cannot give up this tool of democracy just because the Cold War is over.

Second, there is the arrogance of power, the End-of-History babble about democracy being the last, best hope of earth to which all nations should aspire – and if they don’t, give them a kick in that direction.

Once the most admired of nations, America is no longer so.

Why not? Because of our compulsive interventions, military and political, in the internal affairs of nations that are none of our business.

Defund the American Comintern, and bring the outside agitators home.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

Before his committee sat, unapologetic and uncontrite, Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose company had paid no U.S. corporate income taxes on the $74 billion it had earned abroad in recent years.

“Apple has sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance,” said Levin. “Apple has exploited an absurdity.”

Actually, Apple had done nothing wrong, except hire some crack accountants who chose Ireland’s County Cork as the headquarters of their international division. Thus Apple paid on profits earned outside the U.S.A. nothing but a 2 percent tax imposed by the Irish government.

Far from being condemned, Apple’s CPAs ought to be inducted into the Accountants Hall of Fame.

It is no more immoral for Apple to move its headquarters for foreign sales to Ireland than for Big Apple residents to move to Florida to escape the 12 percent combined state and city income tax.

Among the reasons the Sun Belt is booming at the expense of the Rust Belt is not just the weather. Southern states strive to keep income and estate taxes low or nonexistent. They want companies and families to relocate and live there, and to spend their money there.

The problem here is not with Apple, it is with Sen. Levin & Co.

In a press release, “Avoiding Their Fair Share of Taxes,” the AFL-CIO hails Levin and bewails the fact that though the U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent, highest in the world, corporate income tax revenue has fallen to well below 10 percent of federal tax revenue.

“Cash tax payments by non-financial companies in the S&P 500 Index fell … to $222 billion in 2010,” moaned the AFL-CIO.

“Another corporate tax avoidance strategy is to move overseas to a corporate tax haven like Bermuda. By reincorporating offshore, companies avoid paying federal income taxes on profits earned outside the United States.”

Yes, they do. But instead of bewailing this, perhaps we should start thinking and acting as our forebears did. In the same Wall Street Journal that reported on Cook’s defense of Apple, former Sen. Phil Gramm described that earlier America:

“Over the late 19th century, real GDP and employment doubled, annual average real earnings rose by over 60 percent and wholesale prices fell by 75 percent, thanks to marked improvement in productivity.”

Astonishing. And what is the difference between that age and ours? A 35 percent income tax rate on individuals and corporations that did not exist then, and would have been regarded by Americans of the Gilded Age as the satanic work of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.

From the Civil War to World War I, our economy grew from one-half the size of Great Britain’s to twice Britain’s. American companies were capturing markets abroad. Today’s U.S. companies are looking for ways to relocate abroad.

Herewith, a modest proposal to turn this around.

Since the U.S. corporate income tax now produces less than 10 percent of federal revenue and less than 2 percent of gross domestic product, abolish it. Get rid of it.

Think of it. A continent-wide nation that doesn’t tax business.

Assume this would cost the Treasury $250 billion in lost revenue.

How to make it up? Put a 10 percent tariff on imports entering the United States, which last year added up to $2.7 trillion.

This tax reform would thus be revenue neutral.

And what would a corporate income tax rate of zero, with a 10 percent tariff on goods entering the U.S.A. from abroad, accomplish?

First, every U.S. corporation that had moved abroad in search of lower taxes in recent years would start thinking about coming home and bringing its production and its jobs back to America.

Second, that $2 trillion in income U.S. companies have stashed abroad would come roaring back into U.S. institutions.

Third, foreign companies would begin to relocate and produce here in America, both to get around the tariff and pay no taxes.

Fourth, U.S. producers would see sales soar inside the $17 trillion U.S. market, at the expense of foreigners who would pay a 10-percent admission fee to get into this market, a fraction of what they used to pay in the 19th century.

While this would cause a surge in unemployment among IRS agents and accountants, hundreds of millions of man hours could be redirected away from filling out tax forms and into productive work.

“Since 1980, the U.S. has run trade deficits in every year totaling about $9 trillion,” writes columnist Robert Samuelson.

That is 9 thousand billion dollars in trade deficits!

It is what unmade America as a self-reliant republic and made China a manufacturing marvel. And those trade deficits are how America became a dependent nation in hock to the world.

From 1865 to 1914, America had 10 Republican presidents. All believed in financing government by taxing imports, not the incomes of U.S. citizens or the U.S. companies that employed them.

And this was how the miracle Sen. Gramm details came about.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

The thrice-promised land it has been called.

It is that land north of Mecca and Medina and south of Anatolia, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf.

In 1915 – that year of Gallipoli, which forced the resignation of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill – Britain, to win Arab support for its war against the Ottoman Turks, committed, in the McMahon Agreement, to the independence of these lands under Arab rule.

It was for this that Lawrence of Arabia and the Arabs fought.

In November 1917, however, one month before Gen. Allenby led his army into Jerusalem, Lord Balfour, in a letter to Baron Rothschild, declared that His Majesty’s government now looked with favor upon the creation on these same lands of a national homeland for the Jewish people.

Between these clashing commitments there had been struck in 1916 a secret deal between Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s Francois Georges-Picot. With the silent approval of czarist Russia, which had been promised Istanbul, these lands were subdivided and placed under British and French rule.

France got Syria and Lebanon. Britain took Transjordan, Palestine and Iraq, and carved out Kuwait.

Vladimir Lenin discovered the Sykes-Picot treaty in the czar’s archives and published it, so the world might see what the Great War was truly all about. Sykes-Picot proved impossible to reconcile with Woodrow Wilson’s declaration that he and the allies – the British, French, Italian, Russian and Japanese empires – were all fighting “to make the world safe for democracy.”

Imperial hypocrisy stood naked and exposed.

Wilson’s idealistic Fourteen Points, announced early in 1918, were crafted to recapture the moral high ground. Yet it was out of the implementation of Sykes-Picot that so much Arab hostility and hatred would come – and from which today’s Middle East emerged.

Nine decades on, the Sykes-Picot map of the Middle East seems about to undergo revision, and a new map, its borders drawn in blood, emerge, along the lines of what H.G. Wells called the “natural borders” of mankind.

“There is a natural and necessary political map of the world,” Wells wrote, “which transcends” these artificial states, and this natural map of mankind would see nations established on the basis of language, culture, creed, race and tribe. The natural map of the Middle East has begun to assert itself.

Syria is disintegrating, with Alawite Shia fighting Sunni, Christians siding with Damascus, Druze divided, and Kurds looking to break free and unite with their kinfolk in Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Their dream: a Kurdistani nation rooted in a common ethnic identity.

Shia Hezbollah controls the south of Lebanon, and with Shia Iran is supporting the Shia-led army and regime of Bashar Assad.

Together, they are carving out a sub-nation from Damascus to Homs to the Mediterranean. The east and north of Syria could be lost to the Sunni rebels and the Al-Nusra Front, an ally of al-Qaida.

Sectarian war is now spilling over into Lebanon.

Iraq, too, seems to be disintegrating. The Kurdish enclave in the north is acting like an independent nation, cutting oil deals with Ankara.

Sunni Anbar in the west is supporting Sunni rebels across the border in Syria. And the Shia regime in Baghdad is being scourged by Sunni terror that could reignite the civil-sectarian war of 2006-2007, this time without Gen. Petraeus’ U.S. troops to negotiate a truce or tamp it down.

Sunni Turkey is home to 15 million Kurds and 15 million Shia. And its prime minister’s role as middle man between Qatari and Saudi arms shipments and Syria’s Sunni rebels is unappreciated by his own people.

Seeing the Shia crescent – Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad’s Syria, Nuri al-Maliki’s Iraq, the Ayatollah’s Iran – imperiled by the potential loss of its Syrian linchpin, Tehran and Hezbollah seem willing to risk far more in this Syrian war than does the Sunni coalition of Saudis, Qataris and Turks.

Who dares, wins.

Though the Turks have a 400,000-man, NATO-equipped army, a population three times that of Syria and an economy 12 times as large, and they are, with the Israelis, the strongest nations in the region, they appear to want the Americans to deal with their problem.

President Obama is to be commended for resisting neocon and liberal interventionist clamors to get us into yet another open-ended war. For we have no vital interest in Assad’s overthrow.

We have lived with him and his father for 40 years. And what did our intervention in Libya to oust Moammar Gadhafi produce but a failed state, the Benghazi atrocity, and the spread of al-Qaida into Mali and Niger?

Why should Americans die for a Sunni triumph in Syria? At best, we might bring about a new Muslim Brotherhood regime in Damascus, as in Cairo. At worst, we could get a privileged sanctuary for that al-Qaida affiliate, the Al-Nusra Front.

As the Sykes-Picot borders disappear and the nations created by the mapmakers of Paris in 1919-1920 disintegrate, a Muslim Thirty Years’ War may be breaking out in the thrice-promised land

It is not, and it should not become, America’s war.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

No, this is not Watergate or Iran-Contra. Nor is it like the sex scandal that got Bill Clinton impeached.

The AP, IRS and Benghazi matters represent a scandal not of presidential wrongdoing, but of presidential indolence, indifference and incompetence in discharging the duties of chief executive.

The Barack Obama revealed to us in recent days is something rare in our history: a spectator president, clueless about what is going on in his own household, who reacts to revelations like some stunned bystander.

Consider. Because of a grave national security leak, President Obama’s Department of Justice seized two months of records from 20 telephones used by The Associated Press. An unprecedented seizure.

Yet the president was left completely in the dark. And though he rushed to defend the seizure, he claims he was uninvolved.

While the AP issue does not appear to have legs – we know what was done and why – it has badly damaged this president. For his own Justice Department treated the press, which has an exalted opinion of itself and its role, with the same contempt as the IRS treated the Tea Party.

The episode has damaged a crucial presidential asset. For this Washington press corps had provided this president with a protective coverage of his follies and failings unseen since the White House press of half a century ago covered up the prowlings of JFK.

The Benghazi issue is of far greater gravity. Still, Obama’s sins here as well seem to be those of omission, not commission.

The president was apparently completely in the dark about the urgent requests from Benghazi for more security. Obama was also apparently completely out of the loop during the seven-hour crisis of Sept. 11-12, when Ambassador Stevens was assassinated, calls for help from Benghazi were denied and two heroic ex-Navy SEALs died fighting to defend U.S. personnel from the roof of that CIA installation.

No one seems to know where Obama was that night.

The following week, as the State Department, CIA and National Security Council all worked the “talking points” to make it appear that this preplanned terrorist atrocity was a spontaneous event triggered by an anti-Islamic video, Obama knew nothing of the discussions.

Thus, almost a week after the massacre, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was put on six networks to move the line that we could not have better prepared for what would happen in Benghazi because it was all a spontaneous event triggered by a YouTube video.

Rice’s version was untrue, but consistent with Obama’s campaign message: “Bin Laden is dead, and al-Qaida is on the run.”

Yet if Rice’s credibility was crippled by what she was sent out to parrot, a week after she got the egg all over her face, Obama was himself peddling the same line at the United Nations. Obama, it seems, may have been the last man to know the cover story had collapsed.

As for the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party applications for tax-exempt status, this bureaucratic misconduct began as far back as 2010, when the Tea Party was a national sensation.

Yet, despite Tea Party protests to members of Congress, who made inquiries of the IRS, the discrimination against groups with “Tea Party” and “Patriot” in their names continued, and was extended to groups whose proclaimed mission was to defend the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

Literally for years this went on. Investigations were begun by the IRS, and the results reported to the Treasury Department.

But nothing was made public before the election of 2012.

This weekend we learned that the White House counsel was told this April about the IRS misconduct and the investigations, but she did not inform President Obama. He learned about it from news reports.

What we have here, it appears, is a government out of control and a president clueless about what is going on in that government.

And that is the best case. For it is difficult to believe the IRS could conduct a full-court press on Obama’s opponents, that IRS higher-ups knew about it, years ago, and that Treasury knew about it before the election – but the White House was kept in the dark about a scandal that could have derailed the Obama campaign.

But whatever Obama knew, he and his allies in Congress bear moral responsibility for denying these Tea Party folks for years their right to participate fully in the politics of their country.

For years, Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other Democrats have slandered and slurred Tea Party people as enemies of progress – smears echoed by their mainstream press allies.

Should we then be surprised that IRS bureaucrats, hearing this, thought they were doing what was right for America by slow-walking applications for tax exemptions from these same Tea Party folks?

Who demonized the Tea Party people? Who created the climate of contempt? Whoever did gave moral sanction to those IRS agents.

And the Spectator President is right in the vanguard.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

“The American people are weary. They don’t want boots on the ground. I don’t want boots on the ground. The worst thing the United States could do right now is put boots on the ground in Syria.”

That was the leading Senate hawk favoring U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war. But by ruling out U.S. ground troops, John McCain was sending, perhaps unintentionally, another message: There is no vital U.S. interest in Syria’s civil war worth shedding the blood of American soldiers and Marines.

Thus does America’s premier hawk support the case made by think-tank scholars Owen Harries and Tom Switzer in their American Interest essay, “Leading from Behind: Third Time a Charm?”

There is in the U.S.A. today, they write, “a reluctance to commit American blood.”

A legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan “is an unwillingness of the American public to take casualties on behalf of less than truly vital challenges. … While such concerns may be admirable … they are incompatible with a superpower posture and pretensions to global leadership.”

You cannot be the “indispensable nation” if you reflexively recoil at putting “boots on the ground.”

“If a nation is not prepared to take casualties, it should not engage in the kind of policies likely to cause them. If it is not prepared to take casualties, it should resign itself to not having the kind of respect from others that a more resolute nation could expect.”

About the author’s premise, that Americans are reluctant to take casualties, is there any doubt?

To demonstrate this, we need only address a few questions.

Would we be willing to send another army of 170,000 to stop a Sunni-Shia war that might tear Iraq apart? Would the American people support sending 100,000 troops, again, to fight to keep Afghanistan from the clutches of the Taliban?

To ask these questions is to answer them.

Should Kim Jong Un attack across the DMZ with his million-man army and seize Seoul, would Barack Obama’s America, like Harry Truman’s America, send a third of a million U.S. soldiers and Marines to drive the North out? Or would we confine our support to the South, under our security treaty, to air, sea and missile strikes – from above and afar?

Under NATO, the United States is required to assist militarily any member nation that is a victim of aggression.

If Moscow occupied Estonia or Latvia in a dispute over mistreatment of its Russian minorities, would we declare war or send U.S. troops to fight Russians in the Baltic?

Would we fight the Chinese to defend the Senkakus?

“America no longer has the will, wallet or influence to impose an active and ambitious global leadership across the world,” Harries and Switzer contend. They cite Walter Lippmann, who wrote that a credible foreign policy “consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, a nation’s commitments and the nation’s power.

“Without the compelling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, it purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.”

Though U.S. commitments are as great or greater than in 1991, the authors write, America is not so domineering as she was at the end of the Cold War, or when Bush 43 set out to “end tyranny in our world.”

“The dollar is weak. The debt mountain is of Himalayan proportions. Budget and trade deficits are alarming. Infrastructure is aging. The AAA bond credit rating is lost. Economic growth is exceptionally sluggish for a nation that is four years out of a recession. And where 20 years ago U.S. military power was universally considered awesome in its scope, today, after more than a decade of its active deployment, the world is much more aware of its limitations and costs. It is decidedly less impressed.”

Consider Syria, where the neocons and liberal interventionists are clamoring for U.S. military action, but “no boots on the ground.”

Is there really any vital U.S. interest at risk in whether the 40-year-old Assad dictatorship stands or falls?

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been calling for Assad’s ouster for two years and transships weapons to the rebels, has now seen his country stung by a terrorist attack.

But though he has a 400,000-man NATO-equipped army, three times Syria’s population, and a 550-mile border to attack across, Erdogan wants us, the “international community,” to bring Assad down.

But why is Assad our problem – and not Erdogan’s problem?

Harries and Switzer urge Obama to enunciate a new foreign policy that defines our true vital interests and brings U.S. war guarantees into balance with U.S. power – a policy where the first question U.S. leaders ask about a conflict or crisis abroad is not “how” but “why”?

Why, exactly, is this America’s problem?

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

Has the bell begun to toll for the GOP?

The question arises while reading an analysis of Census Bureau statistics on the 2012 election by Dan Balz and Ted Mellnik.

One sentence in their Washington Post story fairly leaps out:

“The total number of white voters actually decreased between 2008 and 2012, the first such drop by any group within the population since the bureau started to issue such statistics.”

America’s white majority, which accounts for nine in 10 of all Republican votes in presidential elections, is not only shrinking as a share of the electorate, but it is declining in numbers, as well.

The Balz-Mellnik piece was primarily about the black vote.

Sixty-six percent of the black electorate turned out, to 64 percent of the white electorate. Black turnout in 2012 was higher by 1.7 million than in 2008. Hispanic turnout rose by 1.4 million votes.

But from 2008 to 2012, the white vote fell by 2 million.

This is the crisis of the Grand Old Party:

Minorities, peoples of color – Hispanic, black, Asian – gave 80 percent of their votes to Obama. And while the minorities’ share of the electorate was 26 percent in 2012, minorities constitute 36.3 percent of the population. And their share of both the electorate and the population is inexorably rising.

Obama won only 39 percent of White America, lowest ever of any victorious presidential candidate. But he did not need any more white votes, when he was carrying people of color 4 to 1.

Any good news in the Census Bureau report for the GOP?

Only this: The tremendous turnout of black Americans in 2012 was surely due to Obama’s being under ferocious attack and in peril of being repudiated. Black folks turned out in record numbers to rescue the first black president. That situation will not recur in 2016.

Yet the bad news for the Republican Party does not cease.

While the total Hispanic vote rose by 1.4 million between 2008 and 2012, some 12 million eligible Hispanics did not bother to vote. And when one considers that Romney lost Hispanics 71-27, any Democratic effort to get out the Hispanic vote is going to be problematic for the GOP.

Only 48 percent of eligible Asians voted. But when they did, they went 70 percent Democratic. Asians’ numbers, too, are growing, and as more go to the polls, the GOP crisis deepens.

The Republican response to this gathering disaster?

Led by Sens. Marco Rubio, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Republicans are pushing for amnesty and “a path to citizenship” for the 11 to 12 million illegal aliens in the country today.

Who are these folks? Perhaps half are Hispanic, but 90 percent are people of color who, once registered, vote 4-to-1 Democratic. One would not be surprised to hear that the Senate Democratic Caucus had broken out into chants of “Go, Marco, Go!”

Setting aside the illegals invasion Bush 41 and Bush 43 refused to halt, each year a million new immigrants enter and move onto a fast track to citizenship. Between 80 and 90 percent now come from the Third World, and once naturalized, they vote 80 percent Democratic.

This brings us back around to the Electoral College.

After Richard Nixon cobbled together his New Majority, the GOP carried 49 states in 1972 and in 1984, 44 states in 1980 and 40 in 1988. In four elections – 1972, 1984, 1988 and 2004 – the Republican Party swept all 11 states of FDR’s “Solid South.”

Such were the fruits of that evil Southern Strategy.

But when conservatives urged Bush 1 to declare a moratorium on legal immigration in 1992 and build a security fence, the politically correct Republican establishment fought tooth and nail to keep the idea out of the platform.

So, where are we?

Eighteen states, including four of the seven mega-states – California, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania – have gone Democratic in six straight elections. Two others, Florida and Ohio, have gone Democratic twice in a row. And white folks are now a minority in the last mega-state, Texas.

In Ohio, which produced seven Republican presidents, more than any other state, Republicans are dropping out, and may be dying out.

“Eight years ago, blacks and whites voted at about the same rate (in Ohio),” write Balz and Mellnik. In 2008, “the participation rate for whites dropped to 65 percent, while the rate for blacks rose to 70 percent. Last November, the turnout rate among whites fell to 62 percent, while the rate for blacks ticked up to 72 percent.”

From these Census figures, white folks are losing interest in politics and voting. Yet, whites still constitute three-fourths of the electorate and nine in 10 Republican votes.

Query: Is the way to increase the enthusiasm and turnout among this three-fourths of the electorate for the GOP to embrace amnesty and a path to citizenship for 12 million illegal foreign aliens?

Or is it to demand the sealing of America’s borders against any and all intruders?

Just asking.

Last week, several polls came out assessing U.S. public opinion on intervention in Syria.

According to the Huffington Post poll, Americans oppose U.S. air strikes on Syria by 3-to-1. They oppose sending arms to the rebels by 4-to-1. They oppose putting U.S. ground troops into Syria by 14-to-1. Democrats, Republicans and independents are all against getting involved in that civil war that has produced 1.2 million refugees and 70,000 dead.

A CBS/New York Times poll found that by 62-to-24 Americans want to stay out of the Syrian war. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that by 61-to-10 Americans oppose any U.S. intervention.

But the numbers shift when the public is asked if it would make a difference if the Syrian regime used poison gas. In that case, opposition to U.S. intervention drops to 44-to-27 in Reuters/Ipsos.

Yet on the Sunday talk shows and cable news, the hawks are over-represented. To have a senator call for arming the rebels and U.S. air strikes is a better ratings “get” than to have on a senator who wants to stay out of the war.

In that same CBS poll, however, the 10 percent of all Americans who say they follow the Syrian situation closely were evenly divided, 47-to-48, on whether to intervene.

The portrait of America that emerges is of a nation not overly interested in what is going on in Syria, but which overwhelmingly wants to stay out of the war.

But it is also a nation whose foreign policy elites are far more interventionist and far more supportive of sending weapons to the rebels and using U.S. air power. From these polls, it is hard not to escape the conclusion that the Beltway elites who shape U.S. foreign policy no longer represent the manifest will of Middle America.

America has not gone isolationist, but has become anti-interventionist. This country does not want its soldiers sent into any more misbegotten adventures like Iraq and Afghanistan, and does not see any vital national interest in who comes out on top in Syria.

But who is speaking up for that great silent majority? Who in the U.S. Senate is on national TV standing up to the interventionists?

Who in the Republican Party is calling out the McCainiacs?

Another story that came out this weekend, smothered by news of Israeli air strikes on Syrian military installations and missile depots, might cool elite enthusiasm – and kill any public desire to intervene.

“Syrian Rebels May Have Used Sarin Gas,” ran the headline in Monday’s New York Times. Datelined Geneva, the story began:

“United Nations human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria’s civil war and medical workers indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said Sunday.”

The U.N. commission has found no evidence that the Syrian army used chemical weapons. But Carla Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney general and a commission member, stated:

“Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals, and according to their report of last week, which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated.

“This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels.”

In short, the war criminals may be the people on whose behalf we are supposed to intervene. And if it was the rebels who used sarin gas, and not the forces of President Bashar Assad, more than a few questions arise that need answering.

For just two weeks ago, the White House informed Congress:

“Our intelligence community does assess, with varying degrees of confidence, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically, the chemical agent sarin.”

A clamor then arose demanding Obama make good on his threat that the Syrian regime’s use of poison gas would cross a “red line” and be a “game changer,” calling forth “enormous consequences.”

If the Syrian military did not use sarin, but the rebels did, who in the U.S. intelligence community blew this one? From whom did U.S. agencies get their evidence that sarin had been used by Damascus? Were we almost suckered by someone’s latest lies about weapons of mass destruction into fighting yet another unnecessary war?

When allegations of the Syrian government’s use of sarin arose, many in Congress, especially in the Republican Party, denounced Obama for fecklessness in backing off of his “red line” threat.

It now appears that Obama may have saved us from a strategic disaster by not plunging ahead with military action. And the question should be put to the war hawks:

If Assad’s use of sarin should call forth U.S. air strikes, ought not the use of sarin by the rebels, if confirmed, cause this country to wash its hands of those war criminals?

“The worst mistake of my presidency,” said Ronald Reagan of his decision to put Marines into the middle of Lebanon’s civil war, where 241 died in a suicide bombing of their barracks.

And if Barack Obama plunges into Syria’s civil war, it could consume his presidency, even as Iraq consumed the presidency of George W. Bush.

Why would Obama even consider this?

Because he blundered badly. Foolishly, he put his credibility on the line by warning that any Syrian use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” and be a “game changer” with “enormous consequences.”

Not only was this ultimatum unwise, Obama had no authority to issue it. If Syria does not threaten or attack us, Obama would need congressional authorization before he could constitutionally engage in acts of war against Syria. When did he ever receive such authorization?

Moreover, there is no proof Syrian President Bashar Assad ever ordered the use of chemical weapons.

U.S. intelligence agencies maintain that small amounts of the deadly toxin sarin gas were likely used. But if it did happen, we do not know who ordered it.

Syrians officials deny that they ever used chemicals. And before we dismiss Damascus’ denials, recall that an innocent man in Tupelo, Miss., was lately charged with mailing deadly ricin to Sen. Roger Wicker and President Obama. This weekend, we learned he may have been framed.

It is well within the capacity of Assad’s enemies to use or fake the use of poison gas to suck us into fighting their war.

Even if elements of Assad’s army did use sarin, we ought not plunge in. And, fortunately, that seems to be Obama’s thinking.

Why stay out? Because it is not our war. There is no vital U.S. interest in who rules Syria. Hafez Assad and Bashar have ruled Syria for 40 years. How has that ever threatened us?

Moreover, U.S. intervention would signal to Assad that the end is near, making his use of every weapon in his arsenal, including chemical weapons, more – not less – likely.

U.S. intervention would also make us de facto allies of Assad’s principal enemies, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nusra Front, Syria’s al-Qaida. As The New York Times reported Sunday, “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.”

Do we really wish to expend American blood and treasure to bring about a victory of Islamists and jihadists in Syria?

If Assad’s chemical weapons threaten any nation, it is Israel. But Israel knows where they are stored and has an air force superior to our own in the Med. Israeli troops on the Golan are as close to Damascus as Dulles Airport is to Washington, D.C. Yet Israel has not attacked Syria’s chemical weapons.

Why not? Israel is well aware that Syria’s air defense system is, as The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, “one of the most advanced and concentrated barriers on the planet.”

And if Israel does not feel sufficiently threatened by Syria’s chemical weapons to go after them, why should we, 4,000 miles away?

Then there is Turkey, with three times Syria’s population, NATO’s second-largest army and a 600-mile border. Why is ridding the Middle East of Assad our assignment and not Ankara’s?

Surely the heirs of the Ottomans have a larger stake here.

And if we get into this war, how do we get out?

For the war is metastasizing. Hezbollah is sending in fighters to help the Alawite Shia. Other Lebanese are assisting the Sunni rebels. The war could spread into Iraq, where the latest clashes between Sunni and Shia are pulling the country apart. Young Muslims are coming in from Europe.

Iran and Russia are aiding Damascus. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are aiding the Islamists. The United States, Jordan and Turkey are aiding the secularists. Syria could come apart, and a sectarian and ethnic war of all against all erupt across the region.

Do we really want the U.S. military in the middle of this?

Because his “red line” appears to have been crossed, Obama is being told he must attack Syria to maintain his credibility with Iran and North Korea.

Nonsense. To attack Syria would compound Obama’s folly in drawing the red line. Better to have egg on Obama’s face than for America to be dragged into another unnecessary war.

Obama would not be alone in having his bluff called. George Bush proclaimed that no “axis of evil” nation would be allowed to acquire the “world’s worst weapons.” North Korea now has those weapons.

Congressional war hawks, led by Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are cawing for air strikes and no-fly zones, which would mean dead and captured Americans and many more dead Syrians.

Time for Congress to either authorize Obama to lead us into a new Middle East war, or direct him, in the absence of an attack upon us, to keep America out of what is Syria’s civil war.

Before we slide into another war, let the country be consulted first.

Attacks from abroad – Pearl Harbor, 9/11 – have united us.

Yet domestic atrocities lately seem only to deepen our divisions.

The bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City was seized upon to savage government critics like Rush Limbaugh.

After the murder of six innocents, including a 9-year-old girl, and the wounding of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and a dozen others in Tucson, Ariz., by a certifiable lunatic, Sarah Palin was charged with moral complicity.

The slaughter of 20 first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., put the National Rifle Association in the media cross hairs. With the massacres at Columbine, Virginia Tech and Ft. Hood, Tucson and Newtown are now the primary exhibits in the prosecution case for the disarming of America.

Are the gun controllers winning? They have surely made gains.

Maryland, New York, Connecticut and Colorado have outlawed high-capacity magazines used in semiautomatic rifles and pistols. All four have outlawed all versions of the AR-15 rifle used in Newtown. All have imposed background checks on all gun purchasers.

Maryland has gone further. According to The Washington Post, Maryland’s law “would force gun buyers to provide fingerprints and undergo classroom training, target practice and background checks to obtain a license to buy a firearm. No state had sought to impose a licensing requirement in nearly 20 years.”

To make licensing and fingerprinting a condition of buying a gun seems a prima facie violation of the Second Amendment.

At the federal level, the going has been tougher for the gun controllers. Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania have introduced a bill to require background checks on all gun purchases on the Internet and at gun shows.

Yet Harry Reid has warned that any attempt to outlaw the AR-15, the most popular rifle now selling in America, or limit magazines to 10 rounds might not carry 40 votes, let alone the 60 senators needed to stop a filibuster.

So who is winning this ideological and cultural war?

Measured by media coverage, the gun controllers. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is treated with a deference Wayne LaPierre of the NRA and Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America will never know.

But measured by wins and losses, LaPierre and Pratt seem to be holding their own.

Polls show support for new gun laws dropping steadily. And there has been an explosion in sales of AR-15s and high-capacity magazines. Makers of the rifles cannot fill back orders. A number of Americans seem so fearful of new restrictions on their gun rights they are stocking up on weapons and ammunition as though the revolution were at hand.

Going back further, gun sales have soared in recent years. According to CNS News, there have been 70 million FBI background checks for gun purchases since February 2009.

In the last two decades, many states have passed laws allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons and reduced the number of sites where weapons may not be carried.

Gun manufacturers like Beretta in Maryland and Colt in Connecticut are talking about moving to more friendly states.

Another problem the gun controllers seem unable to overcome is the suspicion they are not being honest about their ultimate goal – and that goal is a place far beyond having criminal background checks.

What is behind the suspicion?

How many gun controllers who today profess their love of and loyalty to the Second Amendment spoke out against the new Maryland law that requires fingerprints and licensing?

How many said Gov. Martin O’Malley had gone too far?

How many spoke out against the infamous Washington, D.C., gun law that was overturned by the Supreme Court in the 2007 Heller decision? How many would object to fastening something like that gun law on the entire nation?

Under that law, city residents were forbidden to own handguns, semiautomatics or any unregistered weapon. Only guns registered before 1976 were permitted to private citizens, and guns kept in the home had to be “unloaded, disassembled or bound by a trigger lock or similar device.”

Law-abiding citizens were left naked to a criminal class in a city then known as the murder capital of America.

Joe Biden might call gun rights militants the “black helicopter crowd.” But if Second Amendment folks fear that outlawing the AR-15s is only the beginning for the Biden crowd, they may be not far off the mark.

One need not be paranoid to get the sense that what gun controllers saw in Newtown was not only an atrocity but an opportunity – to advance toward their ultimate goal of overturning Heller and disarming America.

After all, only one more Obama justice is needed.

How often, for example, have Biden and Obama condemned their Hollywood bundlers for glamorizing automatic weapons in a thousand films that have reaped Hollywood untold billions of dollars?

Has Obama ever called on the Hollywood moguls and actors who have contributed mightily to his campaign, or ex-Sen. Chris Dodd, head of the motion picture association, for restraint in the use of guns in films?

That America created only 88,000 jobs in March, less than half the number anticipated, was jolting news, indicating the recovery that the White House has boasted about may not be at hand.

But in that March jobs report, there was more disturbing news. While unemployment fell to 7.6 percent, the reason it fell is alarming.

Half a million U.S. workers (495,000) disappeared from the labor force. They dropped out. They are no longer even looking for a job.

Worse, this appears to be an inexorable trend. The participation rate of eligible workers in the United States has fallen to 63.3 percent, a level unseen since Jimmy Carter gave his malaise speech in 1979.

These folks, who have quit working and quit looking, who are they? How do they support themselves? What does this surging dropout rate from the workforce portend for America’s future?

Disproportionately, the dropouts are young, black, Hispanic, female, working class. Some have gone home to live with their parents and may have re-enrolled in school to re-enter the job market better prepared. But other indices are troubling.

Though we have been creating jobs for two years, even if at a torpid pace, the food stamps rolls have soared to 47 million at a cost of $80 billion. When George W. Bush departed, 31 million Americans were on food stamps. Fifty years ago, there was no food stamp program. Yet, now more than one in seven Americans is fed by government.

In another shocking number, almost 9 million Americans ages 20 to 64 years old – nearly 5 percent of the working-age population – is receiving disability pay. Among workers 55 to 64, 10 percent are on disability. Few of those folks will ever enter the job market again.

In 1971, only 1.5 percent of U.S. workers were on disability. Yet, today’s workplace is a less hazardous and safer place than it was back when manufacturing was a far larger factor in the economy.

Other questions are raised by the Friday numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Why is Asian unemployment 5 percent, while the Hispanic rate is more than 9 percent and the African-American rate more than 13 percent?

Do Asian-Americans and Asian immigrants have a superior work ethic or superior capacities for work and success in a post-industrial economy?

And with 14 percent of the U.S. labor force unemployed, underemployed or having quit looking for work, why is Congress about to grant amnesty to 12 million illegal aliens who are taking and doing jobs that might otherwise go to unemployed Americans?

Patriotism argues that we enforce the laws against businesses that hire illegals and declare a time-out on handing out a million green cards every year to foreign folks to come here and work, until our own fellow countrymen are fully employed.

As to why so many are dropping out of the U.S. labor force, politically incorrect thoughts come to mind. Have we made idleness so appealing we are killing the work incentives of millions, and perhaps tens of millions, who would prefer not to work, if they don’t have to work?

In the 19th century, the phrase was “root, hog or die.” Raise crops, farm animals or starve. From the Jamestown colony to the 20th century, America was a self-sufficient society in which all understand St. Paul’s epistle to the Thessalonians, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”

During Depression days and World War II up through the 1950s, the necessities of life were provided by the individual himself or herself or by the family.

Today, however, government provides for almost all of the needs of those who claim they cannot provide for themselves.

There is the welfare program Temporary Aid for Needy Families. Medicaid pays the health care costs. Head Start, free public schools K-12, Pell grants and student loans take care of education from cradle through college.

School breakfasts, lunches and food stamps take care of feeding folks who say they cannot feed themselves. So successful are these programs that obesity is most prevalent among food stamp recipients. Then there are the unemployment checks, rent and energy subsidies and endless tax credits for taxes never paid.

The impolitic questions that arise are these:

Has the welfare state killed the work ethic for a rising share of the American people? If you can live a comfortable life with your food, shelter, health care, education and income paid for or subsidized, why work when you don’t have to?

Today, the top 1 percent of Americans in income pays 37 percent of all income taxes. The top half of wage earners pays 98 percent of all income taxes. How long can one-half of America carry the other?

With the Baby Boomers going on Social Security and Medicare at a rate of 300,000 a month, and scores or hundreds of thousands going on disability rolls and quitting the labor force every month, what kind of future are we looking at?

“Government is theft.”

The old libertarian battle cry came to mind when the news hit, two weeks ago, that Cyprus was about to confiscate 7 percent of all the insured deposits in the island’s two biggest banks. Nicosia also planned to siphon off 10 percent of uninsured deposits, those above 100,000 euros ($130,000), and use that cash as well to finance Cyprus’ share of a eurozone bailout.

The reaction was so scalding that the regime had to back off raiding insured deposits. The little people of Cyprus were spared. Not so the big depositors, among whom are Cypriot entrepreneurs and thousands of Russians. Their 10 percent “haircut” has now become an amputation.

Large depositors in the Bank of Cyprus, the island’s largest, face confiscation of 60 percent of their capital. In Laika, the No. 2 bank, which is to be euthanized, the large depositors face losses of up to 80 percent. All of Laika’s bondholders will be wiped out, and all employees let go.

When the Cypriot banks opened again on March 28, capital controls had been imposed. Only 300 euros may be withdrawn daily from a bank. Folks leaving Cyprus may take only 1,000 euros.

What has this crisis to do with us? More than we might imagine.

Last week, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch chairman of the eurozone’s finance ministers, let the cat out of the bag. The bail-in of big depositors and bondholders, who are being forced to eat a huge slice of the Cypriot bailout, may serve as a model for future bailouts.

The hot money that came into Cyprus, said Dijsselbloem, either to be laundered or hidden from taxes, or to seek a higher rate of return, was wagered money. And when bets go bad, government is not obligated to made the gamblers whole again.

The former eurozone policy of protecting senior bondholders and uninsured depositors, said the Dutch conservative, is history. If money comes from Northern Europe to bail out the Club Med, Club Med bank bondholders and big depositors will be “bailed in.”

Translation: Uninsured savings in Spain, Italy and Slovenia may be raided and bondholders liquidated to bail out their troubled banks. To Malta, Luxembourg, Latvia and other banking centers, the handwriting is on the wall: What happened in Cyprus could happen here.

So great was the shock from Dijsselbloem’s remarks, by day’s end he was backtracking, declaring Cyprus was not a template but a “specific case” with unique circumstances.

None too soon. For as Barclay’s bank noted, “The decision to bail in senior bank debt and large depositors will likely have a price impact on equity and direct instruments of those euro area banks that are perceived as the weakest.”

Barclay’s was saying that bondholders and big depositors in banks of other troubled eurozone countries may take a second look at where they have stashed their cash and whether their assets may be subject to sudden confiscation. And the monied class may decide, in the wake of the Cyprus slaughter, that security of principal is preferable to a higher rate of return in a risky institution.

When capital controls are lifted in Cyprus, why would any depositor, who had been scorched in the inferno, risk leaving any major deposit in a Cypriot bank? Nicosia’s days as a banking center, where total bank deposits exceeded seven times its gross domestic product, are over.

And facing a dramatic contraction in their economy, what do Cypriots do now?

The effect across Europe is likely to be a gradual selloff of bonds in Italian and Spanish banks and transfers of cash out of these banks into U.S. and European banks where the interest rate offered may be lower but the principal is more secure.

Nor is this an unhealthy development.

If taxpayers in Northern Europe have to rescue mismanaged Club Med banks, why should not bank bondholders be wiped out, just as they were at Lehman Brothers? And ought not uninsured depositors who stuffed cash into these banks to get higher rates of return or evade taxes or launder dirty money get burned as well?

From Asia to Europe, people concerned about the safety of their money are looking at Cyprus, with many surely saying, “There, but for the grace of God, go I!” And they likely hear in the anguished cries of Russian, British and Cypriot depositors, who got no warning and failed to get out in time, a fire bell in the night for themselves.

If this persuades depositors to seek security first for their income, pensions and savings, and to transfer funds out of risky banks into more solid institutions, is that such a bad thing?

If Kipling’s Gods of the Copybook Headings, who arrived on Cyprus in March with their terrible swift sword, are back in charge, is this not better than having Western taxpayers forever securing the deposits and investments of the rich and feckless?

Those Russian depositors wiped out in the Cyprus slaughter may not have died in vain.

As President Obama departed for Israel, there came a startling report. Bashar Assad’s regime had used poison gas on Syrian rebels.

Two Israeli Cabinet members claimed credible evidence. Justice Minister Tzipi Livni said, “It’s clear for us that (gas is) being used. … This … should be on the table in the discussions.”

Yet, 72 hours later, the United States still cannot confirm that gas was used, and Syria and Russia have called on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to investigate whether it was used, and if so, by whom.

What’s going on here?

It does not require Inspector Clouseau to surmise this may be a fabrication to stampede the ever-gullible Americans into plunging into Syria to win the war for the al-Qaida-saturated Syrian rebels.

But sucking America into Syria’s civil war is only a near-term goal for the War Party, which is after larger game – greasing the skids for a U.S. war on Iran.

And lest we underestimate the War Party, the likelihood is they will get their war. For they have already gotten Obama to make concessions that are steering us inexorably toward such a war.

First, Obama was persuaded to declare it U.S. policy that, where Iran’s uranium-enrichment program is concerned, “All options are on the table!” Translation: Absent major concessions by Iran, proving she is not seeking a nuclear weapon, war against Iran is in the cards.

Yet, even as Obama parrots the mantra, “All options are on the table,” he has been persuaded to take off the table the option that won the Cold War, the George Kennan option of containment and deterrence.

Obama has been goaded into proclaiming that though America contained an evil empire that spanned 13 time zones and possessed thousands of nukes, containment cannot work with Iran.

Why not? Because the ayatollah, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs, we are solemnly instructed, are religious fanatics who could easily opt for committing collective suicide should they get a bomb – by using that bomb on us.

This, of course, is to attribute to Iran’s leaders an insanity they have never exhibited. Not in memory has Iran started a war. Saddam attacked Iran, not the other way around. When the Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner, Ayatollah Khomeini himself ordered the Iraq war ended for fear America was about to intervene on Baghdad’s side.

Now we come to the sinister role of the U.S. Senate in setting the table for war. Consider what Senate Joint Resolution 65, crafted at AIPAC, the Israeli Lobby, and now being shopped around for signing by Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Robert Menendez, does.

SR 65 radically alters U.S. policy by declaring it to be “the policy of the United States … to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and to take such action as may be necessary to implement this policy.”

Obama’s policy – no nuclear weapons in Iran – is tossed out. Substituted for it in SR 65 is Bibi Netanyahu’s policy – “no nuclear weapons capability” in Iran.

Now, as Iran already has that “capability” – as does Germany, Japan, South Korea and other nations who have forsworn nuclear weapons – what SR 65 does is authorize the United States to attack Iran – to stop her from what she is doing now. Yet, according to all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, Iran does not have a nuclear bomb program.

Critically, SR 65 goes further and “urges that if the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in self-defense, the United States Government should … provide diplomatic, military and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people and existence.”

Translation: Should Bibi attack Iran, the Senate urges the U.S. military to join in that attack. SR 65 is a blank check to Bibi to go to war with Iran, with a U.S. Senate commitment to join him.

Coupled with House Resolution 850, which calls for crushing new sanctions, SR 65 is designed to so enrage and humiliate Iran that her delegates walk out of negotiations – and war inevitably ensues.

Here then is War Party calendar and countdown.

First, rule out containment and deterrence of Iran, though that policy won the Cold War. Second, rule in a U.S. war on Iran if Tehran does not yield to all our demands in nuclear negotiations.

Third, ensure the negotiations fail by repeated insults, threats, sanctions, and intolerable demands that so humiliate the Iranians that, enraged, they say “to hell with it” and walk out of the talks.

Then, by default, the last “option” left for dealing with Iran – even if she still has not tested a bomb or enriched uranium to bomb grade – will be U.S. air strikes on Fordow and Natanz, cheered on by a War Party that dreams of this day and that war.

Preventing another generation of war dead delivered to Dover should be the first priority of American patriots.

North Korea has just pulled off an impressive dual feat – the successful test both of an intercontinental ballistic missile and an atom bomb in the 6-kiloton range.

Pyongyang’s ruler, 30-year-old Kim Jong Un, said the tests are aimed at the United States. So it would seem. One does not build an ICBM to hit Seoul, 30 miles away.

Experts believe North Korea is still far from having the capability to marry a nuclear warhead to a missile that could hit the West Coast. But this seems to be Kim’s goal.

Why is he obsessed with a nation half a world away?

America has never recognized his, his father’s or his grandfather’s regime. We have led the U.N. Security Council in imposing sanctions. We have 28,000 troops in the South and a defense treaty that will bring us into any war with the North from day one, and a U.S. general would assume overall command of U.S. and Republic of Korea troops.

We are South Korea’s defense shield and deterrent against the North.

And while America cannot abdicate her responsibility and role in this crisis, we should be asking ourselves: Why is this our crisis in 2013?

President Eisenhower ended the Korean War 60 years ago. The Chinese armies in Korea went home. Twenty years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia abandoned communism and ceased to arm the North, and Mao’s China gave up world revolution for state capitalism.

Epochal events. Yet U.S. troops still sit on the DMZ, just as their grandfathers did when this writer was still in high school.

Why? North Korea represents no threat to us, and South Korea is not the ruined ravaged land of 1953. It has twice the population of the North, an economy 40 times the size of the North’s, and access to the most modern weapons in America’s arsenal.

Why were U.S. troops not withdrawn from Korea at the end of the Cold War? Why should we have to fight Seoul’s war if Pyongyang attacks, when the South is capable of fighting and winning its own war?

Why is South Korea’s defense still America’s obligation?

Had the United States moved its soldiers out of South Korea, and its planes and ships offshore, and turned over to Seoul responsibility for its own security, would the North be building missiles that can hit the United States?

Undeniably, Kim Jong Un runs a tyrannical, wretched regime. But its closest neighbors are South Korea, Japan, Russia and China.

Why is Kim Jong Un not primarily their problem, rather than ours?

Had we departed 20 years ago, the South would have built up its own forces to contain the North. Instead, we have allowed it to remain a strategic dependency. And the same holds true for Japan.

Japanese and Chinese warplanes and warships are now circling each other near what Tokyo calls the Senkaku Islands and Beijing calls the Diaoyou. These rocks were occupied by Japan in 1895, when the Empire of the Sun was at war with China and colonizing Taiwan.

After Imperial Japan fell in 1945 and disgorged its colonies, the Senkakus, along with the Ryukyus – of which the largest is Okinawa – were returned by President Nixon. And as the Senkakus are but a few rocks sticking out of the East China Sea, no one seemed to mind, before reports surfaced of oil and gas deposits in adjacent waters.

Beijing restated China’s claim. Last week, Chinese warships reportedly locked firing radar on Japanese ships and helicopters near the islands. China denies it.

What has this to do with us?

The United States has reportedly signaled Japan that the Senkakus are covered by our mutual defense treaty and if China attacks in those waters, and Japan goes to war, we stand with Japan.

Sixty years ago, U.S. commitments to go to war to keep South Korea and Japan from falling into the Stalin-Mao sphere were supported by Americans, who willingly sent their sons to the Far East to defend the “frontiers of freedom.”

But South Korea and Japan long ago became economic powers, fully capable of undertaking their own defense. And the Cold War enemies we confronted no longer exist.

Why have we failed to adapt to the new world we are in? As Lord Salisbury said, “The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.”

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is not Stalin’s. If Putin is in a quarrel with Japan over the Kuriles, why should that be our quarrel? If Japan is in a quarrel with Xi Jinping’s China over the Senkakus, why is that our quarrel?

Are our war guarantees to Japan and South Korea eternal?

Undeniably, should the U.S. seek to renegotiate its defense pacts with Seoul and Tokyo, each would consider, given the rogue regime in the North, a nuclear deterrent of its own. This would stun and shock China.

But what help have the Chinese been to us lately?

Recently by Patrick J. Buchanan: Will Obama Paint Mitt as Warmonger?

“It would be unconscionable to go to war if we haven’t had such discussions,” said Nicholas Burns, under secretary of state in the Bush administration, of reports the Obama White House has agreed to one-on-one talks with Tehran over its nuclear program.

Sen. Lindsey Graham dissented Sunday: “I think the time for talking is over. … We talk, they enrich. It needs to stop. We need to have red lines coordinated with Israel and end this before it gets out of hand.”

Clearly, Graham believes an ultimatum, followed by an attack if Iran denies us “access to their nuclear program,” is the way to “end this.”

What kind of attack?

According to David Rothkopf, writing in Foreign Policy magazine, U.S. and Israeli military authorities are discussing a joint attack, and the idea getting the most traction is “a U.S.-Israeli surgical strike targeting Iranian enrichment facilities.”

“The strike might take only ‘a couple of hours’ in the best case and only would involve ‘a day or two’ overall, the source said, and would be conducted by air, using primarily bombers and drone support.”

Smashing the enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow, writes Rothkopf, would mean “setting the Iranian nuclear program back many years, and doing so without civilian casualties.”

This would have “region-wide benefits,” writes Rothkopf.

“One advocate asserts it would be a ‘transformative outcome: saving Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, reanimating the peace process, securing the (Persian) Gulf, sending an unequivocal message to Russia and China, and assuring American ascendancy in the region for a decade to come.’”

Thus, according to Rothkopf and his source, a U.S. attack on Iran’s enrichment facilities would produce the same glorious benefits we were promised if only we would invade and occupy Iraq in 2003.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has another view. “The results of an American or Israeli military strike on Iran could … prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations in that part of the world.” What consequences might Gates have in mind?

Iran might mine the Persian Gulf, sending ships to the bottom, halting traffic, doubling the price of oil and plunging Europe into the economic abyss on the edge of which the continent stands today.

U.S. ships might face swarm attacks from Iranian speedboats, forcing us to sink the Iranian Navy’s surface ships and destroy the hundreds of fast missile boats in the gulf and Iranian ports.

Iran could send its submarines out and fire its anti-ship missiles to sink a U.S. warship. Iranian missile attacks on U.S. bases in Bahrain and the gulf region could ignite an all-out air and sea war, with the U.S. having to destroy Iranian air fields, antiaircraft and missile sites, and Iran’s remaining nuclear facilities.

The U.S. could face the kind of attacks across the region that Ronald Reagan confronted when he put Marines in Beirut, with the U.S. embassy blown up and 241 Marines massacred by a suicide truck bomber.

And if after months we had smashed Iran as we did Iraq in Desert Storm, would the regime give way to a pro-Western democracy? Or would the result in Iran look like what exists today in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan?

Syria is breaking apart into Sunni and Alawite, Arab, Kurd and Druze, Christian and Muslim, Islamist and secular. Afghanistan is dissolving into Tajik and Uzbek in the north, Hazara in the center, and Pashtun in the south and east. Iraq is losing Kurdistan and reverting to civil-sectarian war.

A U.S. defeat of Iran could bring to power revanchists bent on payback through terrorism and propel that half of the population that is Arab, Baluch, Kurd and Azeri to try to break away.

Who would benefit from a breakup of Iran, other than jihadists?

Iran would surely stir up Hezbollah to rain down rockets on Israel and incite the Shia in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to rise against the regimes there.

Would Shia in Iraq attack the U.S. embassy in Baghdad? We cannot know, but Gates is surely right that the consequences could be catastrophic.

Which raises the question. Why are we even talking about war?

Sen. Graham notwithstanding, the sanctions are working. The Iranian economy is sinking into recession, oil revenues have fallen, and hard currency reserves are being depleted. And what is the grave threat that justifies a war?

While Iran is enriching uranium to 20 percent, it has not enriched to weapons grade. Should they do so, we would know it. Ayatollah Khamenei has called nuclear weapons anti-Islamic, and the U.S. intelligence community says Iran has no nuclear bomb program.

America’s position as of today is: We do not want war with Iran, but will tolerate no Iranian bomb. Iran’s official position is: We want no bomb, and we are willing to negotiate, but we have a right to have a peaceful nuclear program.

Can we find no common ground here?

Gates and Burns are right. Before we go to war, let us find out, in face-to-face talks if need be, if we really have to go to war.

Patrick J. Buchanan [send him mail] is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his website.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

Usually, not always, the peace party wins.

Gen. Sherman’s burning of Atlanta and March to the Sea ensured Abraham Lincoln’s re-election in 1864.

William McKinley, with his triumph over Spain and determination to pacify and hold the Philippines, easily held off William Jennings Bryan in 1900.

Yet Woodrow Wilson won in 1916 on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War!” And Dwight Eisenhower won a landslide with his declaration about the stalemate in Harry Truman’s war: “I shall go to Korea.”

Richard Nixon pledged in 1968 that “new leadership will end the war and win the peace.” Vice President Hubert Humphrey, behind by double digits on Oct. 1, promised to halt the bombing of North Vietnam. He united his party and closed the gap to less than a point by Election Day.

George McGovern ran as an antiwar candidate in 1972. By November, almost all U.S. troops were home from Vietnam, however, and in late October Henry Kissinger had announced, “Peace is at hand.” Nixon had expropriated the peace issue. Result: 49 states.

Today, after the longest wars in our history in Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans are sick over the 6,500 dead and 40,000 wounded, fed up with the $2 trillion in costs, and disillusioned with the results that a decade of sacrifice has produced in Baghdad and Kabul.

Aware of this war weariness, especially among women, President Obama and Vice President Biden seem intent on appearing before the nation on Election Day as the sole peace party. This fact leaps out of a close read of Biden’s debate transcript.

Lost in his manic grinning and mocking laughter at Paul Ryan’s points and rude interruptions was a recurring theme: President Obama ended the war in Iraq and is dialing back the war in Afghanistan, but Ryan and Romney seem to be looking to new military interventions in Syria and Iran.

Consider but a few Biden comments nestled in the transcript of his half of that 90-minute debate.

“The last thing we need now is another war.”

“Are you (Ryan) … going to go to war?”

“We will not let them (the Iranians) acquire a nuclear weapon, period, unless he’s (Ryan) talking about going to war.”

“War should always be the absolute last resort.”

“He (Ryan) voted to put two wars on a credit card.”

“We’ve been in this war (Afghanistan) for over a decade. … We are leaving in 2014, period.”

About intervention in Syria, Biden said: “The last thing America needs is to get into another ground war in the Middle East, requiring tens of thousands if not well over a hundred thousand American forces.”

This drumbeat, implying Romney and Ryan are champing at the bit to get into the war in Syria or into a new war with Iran, was deliberate.

Biden’s words almost surely reflect what Democratic focus groups, pollsters, political analysts and pundits are advising the party to say and do: Play the peace card Monday night in Boca Raton, Fla., and tag Romney-Ryan as a trigger-happy ticket of the war party.

The charges Romney is likely to hear from the president and the questions he is likely to face from the moderator, pushing him toward bellicosity, are not that difficult to discern.

“Governor, President Obama has said Iran will not be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. You have said Iran will not be allowed to have a ‘nuclear weapons capability.’ What is the difference? Doesn’t Iran already have the capability to produce a nuclear weapon? What will you do about it?”

“Governor, Paul Ryan said in his debate Iran ‘is racing toward a nuclear weapon.” But 16 U.S. intelligence agencies said in 2007 and reaffirmed in 2011 that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. What is your evidence that Iran is ‘racing toward a nuclear weapon?’”

“Governor, you have said of America and Israel, ‘The world must never see daylight between our two nations.’ Does that mean if Israel attacks Iran, you would take us to war on Israel’s side?”

“Governor, at VMI you said, ‘In Syria, I will work … to identify and organize those members of the opposition who share our values and ensure they obtain the arms they need to defeat Assad’s tanks, helicopters and fighter jets.’ Would you give surface-to-air missiles to the Syrian rebels?”

“Governor, Japan and China are at sword’s point over the Senkaku Islands. If war breaks out, are we obligated by our alliance with Japan to come to her defense?”

The Republican peril in Boca Raton is that headlines the next day will have Romney, consciously or inadvertently, laying down some marker for a new war.

“Peace through strength,” the Eisenhower-Reagan slogan, is the GOP slogan that still resonates with American voters.

Even in 1940, FDR, though plotting war, ran as a peace candidate:

“I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

Hopefully, Gov. Romney will say something like this, and mean it.

Patrick J. Buchanan [send him mail] is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his website.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

“In Syria, I will work … to identify and organize those members of the opposition who share our values and ensure they obtain the arms they need to defeat Assad’s tanks, helicopters and fighter jets.”

This commitment by Mitt Romney in his VMI address has thrilled the neocons as much as it has unsettled the realists in his camp.

And the reasons for the latter’s alarm are apparent.

Last year, U.S. planes scrambled to defend Benghazi against the “tanks, helicopters and fighter jets” of Col. Gadhafi. Now we are investigating the murders of our ambassador and three Americans in the city we saved.

To bring down helicopters and fighter jets would require U.S. F-16s over Syria or putting surface-to-air missiles in rebel hands. Do we really want to be passing Stingers around a no man’s land where al-Qaida agents could buy up a few to bring down U.S. airliners?

What Romney proposes is an act of war. Before we get into our fourth war in 12 years, let us consider the antagonists.

This is first a religious war with the Shia regimes — Hezbollah, Iran and the Iraqis we brought to power — lined up behind Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Aligned against are Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who have been sending arms to the rebels, and Turkey, which has allowed the transfer of arms.

Egypt has not gotten involved, but President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood has demanded that Assad stand down.

Among the rebels fighting Assad, however, are Islamic jihadists from across the Middle East and al-Qaida. And should Assad fall, his successor would likely be a Sunni favorite of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Does the Brotherhood “share our values”?

If Damascus falls to the Brotherhood, the Christians Assad sheltered would face the fate of the Copts in Egypt and Christians in Iraq: terror, persecution, expulsion. The Alawites, the Shia minority whence Assad comes, would go to the wall.

There is also an ethnic component to this war. If the regime and state collapse, Syria’s Kurds could emulate their cousins in Iraq and Turkey and unite to fight for a separate Kurdistan in the heart of the Middle East.

Then there are the strategic stakes. If Assad falls, the Shia crescent — Iran, Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon — is severed. Vladimir Putin’s navy, whose last base in the Mediterranean is Tartus on Syria’s coast, would suffer a strategic defeat.

Thursday, the Turks forced down a Syrian airliner flying from Moscow to Damascus and removed what the Turks described as military equipment. An angry Moscow has protested.

And Israel? While nothing would please Israelis more than a strategic defeat for Tehran, Assad and his father kept the peace on the Golan for 40 years. And as the Sinai is turning into a no man’s land with Hosni Mubarak gone and the Muslim Brotherhood in power, might not the same happen on the Golan when Assad falls?

And how have the Turks benefited from their involvement? By siding against Assad, they made a mortal enemy of a friend. Assad in retaliation loosened the reins on Syria’s Kurds, whose kinsmen are 20 percent of Turkey’s population. The Alawites in Turkey, ethnic Arabs, number another 15 million. The hard line taken by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is becoming increasingly unpopular with his people.

How long would Americans support an administration that embroiled us in this maelstrom?

In the last week, shells from Syria have landed on Turkish soil. Is the Syrian army doing this deliberately? That makes no sense.

Are these mortar shells landing in Turkey a result of artillery duels between the Syrian army and rebels? Or are the rebels doing it deliberately to provoke Turkey into entering the war?

The Turkish line toward Syria is growing more belligerent. Are the Turks seeking a clash with the Syrian army so Ankara can invoke Article 5 of the NATO treaty and force the United States to join Turkey in ousting Assad, if not on a march to Damascus?

In an Arab world that does not fondly recall an Ottoman Empire whose heartland Turkey was, that would not sit well.

The Syrian civil war could end suddenly with the fall of Assad. But it could also widen with Turkey and Hezbollah becoming directly involved, and Russia, Iran and Iraq sending military aid to prop up their ally. The whole region could go up in flames.

Yet what vital American interest is there in who rules in Damascus to justify yet another U.S. war in the Middle East?

While the Assads are despotic, George H.W. Bush made the father an ally in Desert Storm and Ehud Barak offered to return to Hafez Assad the Golan Heights in exchange for a peace deal.

If America has a vital interest in this multisided war, that interest is served by staying out, as we have done for its duration.

And how exactly have we suffered by not plunging in?

Patrick J. Buchanan [send him mail] is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his website.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan