Existential Threat…
Before dashing Jonah Goldberg’s latest editorial to the scrap-heap, I pause and reflect on this very simple question which Golberg wants everyone to answer:
Existential Threat?
It’s a simple question without a simple answer. Use the Cold War as an example. For most of the Cold War, Russia and the Soviet Union was not an Existential threat to the United States, and for the part that it was an existential threat, it was only a potential existential threat. The proof of the non-existential threat is shown when at that famous point where a Russian watched as his computer screen showed that nuclear missiles had been launched from America. Protocol said that he launched countering-missiles, he did not. He did not because the idea that the United States would launch nuclear missiles at Russia was absurd, as was the case with the Soviet Union at the United States.
But, we spent half a century in intermittent terrifying fear.
al Qaeda? Existential Threat? It’s something that we focus our foreign policy around, sure. I run around in circles at this:
no terrorist attacks on our soil since 9/11.
… Europe is a lot closer to their general bases of concentration, and the nations in Europe generally a bit easier and better monitored by the state (London, anyone?) with which they were hit than the United States, you know…
… and …
Never mind. Answer the question for yourself, and delve into it a bit deeply.