When World War II broke out in September 1939, the United States adopted a neutral stance despite the efforts made by Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, to drag it in on the side of the Allies. The United States only entered the war in December 1941, following the Japanese attack on its naval base in Pearl Harbour. US industrial and military power provided the Allies with the main strength necessary to stem the tide of initial Axis successes in Europe and the Far East and, finally, to bring the war to a victorious conclusion in the summer of 1945. Although its intervention was the decisive factor in the Allied victory, the United States did not capitalize on this fact in the immediate aftermath of the war, but delayed calling in its debt for just under half a century. In the logic of power politics, the US should have reaped the fruits of the victory it was instrumental in achieving right after the war ended, but fate intervened in the form of the Cold War, which began in 1945 and lasted until 1991. During that period, the United States was locked in a battle for global supremacy with the Soviet Union, which stood as a formidable obstacle between the United States and its dream of unchallenged domination of the post-war world order. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, the moment for which the United States had been waiting since 1945 finally arrived. It was now free to stake its claim to global leadership on the strength not only of its victory in both World War II and the Cold War, but also of its uncontested political, economic, scientific and military superiority.

However, its emergence as the unique superpower on the world stage, which had been delayed by the Cold War, was further delayed by Bill Clinton’s accession to power in January 1993. Under his administration, America held back from asserting its new international status (which reflected the post-Cold War balance of power) too blatantly. However, I believe that if the first president Bush had won a second term in the November 1992 presidential elections, the world would have seen then what it has been seeing since the Republicans regained power in January 2001. For the group of right-wing conservatives at the helm of the Republican Party are more direct when it comes to dealing with the realities of power than anyone else in America.

During the Cold War, the contrast between the value system prevailing inside American society and certain aspects of its foreign policy was disconcerting to outside observers. On the domestic front, America upheld values that had helped make it one of the most advanced societies in the world in all fields. It could rightfully claim an impressive level of democracy, a rate of economic productivity higher than one quarter of the entire global productivity, a vibrant culture, preeminence in the fields of science, technology and research and the strongest military force in the world. But America did not uphold the same values when it came to its dealings with the outside world. Justifying its actions as dictated by the conditions of the Cold War, American foreign policy had no qualms about maintaining friendly relations with corrupt and despotic military juntas in Central and South America, as well as with equally unsavoury regimes in Africa and Asia. It also supported and used radical forces with extremist views, including groups, organizations and countries it now regards as enemies.

One of the most important results of the Cold War culture is that US foreign policy lost sight of the fact that democracy is not only a human right for all the peoples of the world (including those of the Middle East), but that it is also the only safety valve than can protect humanity from the scourges of despotism, totalitarianism and extremism. During the Cold War, the United States was occasionally concerned with upholding democracy and human rights and with combating despotism and corruption outside its own borders, but only when it served its interests to do so. However, it turned a blind eye to blatant human rights violations and glaring manifestations of corruption perpetrated by friendly regimes or those with which it had interests in common. A deep crisis facing many countries today is that the United States has suddenly taken it upon itself to introduce democracy, by force if necessary, into societies it was content for many years to leave at the mercy of corrupt and tyrannical rulers, whose subjects were brainwashed into believing that national pride entailed standing up to the challenge of Western civilization.

America’s newly assertive stance as the unchallenged custodian of world order has not been met with universal favour. Not everyone is willing to accept that the new situation is an inevitable result of the seismic shift in the global balance of power. There are those who dispute the right of the United States to lay down the political and economic rules governing our world today, and others who question whether expressions like ‘sovereignty’ and ‘international legitimacy’ still have any meaning. While these questions and reservations deserve serious tackling, another set of questions the Arab might ought to endeavor to answer far from its historic love to “big words” that are mostly entirely isolated from reality: