The Sleepy Superpower Awakes
The U.S. is on the move again around the globe, and it's about time
by CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
time.com
The Great Wall of China, roughly defining the northern contours of the Chinese empire, has stood in the same place for 2,200 years. The Great Wall of America — the barrier of bases set up around the world to define the contours of the free world and hold back the Soviet empire — is about to disappear after just 50 years.
We are living a revolution, and hardly anyone has noticed. In just the three months since the end of the Iraq war, the Pentagon has announced the essential evacuation of the U.S. military from its air bases in Saudi Arabia, from the Demilitarized Zone in Korea and from the vast Incirlik air base in Turkey — in addition to a radical drawdown of U.S. military personnel in Germany, the mainstay of the Great American Wall since 1945.
For a country that is seen by so much of the world as a rogue nation, recklessly throwing its weight around, this is a lot of withdrawing. The fact is that since 9/11, when America awoke from its post — cold war end-of-history illusions, the U.S. has not, as most believe, been expanding. It has been moving — lightening its footprint, rationalizing its deployments, rearranging its forces, waking from a decade of slumber during which it sat on its Great Wall, oblivious to its immobility and utter obsolescence.
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