One of Charles Austin's readers has written an eloquent response to the most recent Matthew Parris column on the unfortunate reality of American power:
The tenor of his complaint lays bare the fundamental philosophical divide between his beliefs about the proper principles of government, versus those that actually do govern the US. He advocates the centralization of authority and the incremental increase of its coercive powers over time, while the US is a republic, dedicated to decentralized government according to the will of the people. There is no way to paper over this divide, which irks Mr. Parris greatly. It would probably irk him less if the US were less powerful, but it does not seem to occur to him that the power of the US has grown to its current stature because of its governing principles, while the decline of other nations stems from those he advocates.Aside from the US, virtually every dominant nation in history that cared about the world outside its boundaries exercised its might to take as much of the world as it could hold. Yet the US, which now has more power than any nation in history, does nothing of the sort. While it refuses to be ruled, it shows no desire to be ruler. This fact is the moose in the newsroom that Mr. Parris and his colleagues refuse to see. He ought to spend more of his attention on understanding why the US limits its own exercise of power, and less on Lilliputian fulminations over his own powerlessness.