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Nobody has ever had to balance transformational and conservative roles on a global scale before.
From an American point of view, the Arab Spring is just another complication of this global task — a sudden thunderstorm with flashes of lightening, driving rain and unpredictable gusts of wind as we hop one-legged on the tightrope changing our pants. The Islamic world is entering new territory as it struggles to integrate religious and liberal political values; as the United States tries to juggle its geopolitical interests with its values at a volatile moment in world history, we are almost certain to get the balance wrong much of the time.
Here, however, history offers some hope. As I wrote at the beginning of this post, the United States has been doing two things for more than 200 years: getting foreign revolutions wrong, but somehow still pushing its global revolution forward. America’s success as a conservative revolutionary power on a global scale depends less on the clever policies of our presidents and our secretaries of state, and more on the creativity and dynamism of American society as a whole. It is power of a free people more than the brilliance of our intellectual and social establishment that has brought the United States this far; in that truth lies the secret of our revolution and of our success.
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