Peter Scobic throws some cold water on the idea that the Iran situation demonstrated the weakness of the west.

The specter of Western decline is an old conservative and neoconservative trope that wasn’t true during the cold war and is even less applicable now. Great Britain has two active carrier battle groups and spends more on its defenses than all but four countries, lagging significantly behind only the United States and China. It also deploys 16 megatons of nuclear explosives on its Trident submarines. That’s about 1,000 times the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Put it this way: If British leaders woke up one day and decided that Iran should no longer exist, Iran would no longer exist.

As a matter of history, the United States is more powerful now, relative to the rest of the world, than Rome was at her peak.

However, allow me to quibble. I am not worried that our country is going to be invaded any time soon. I am worried, however, about Iran being able to choke off a third of the world’s oil or send a million men westeward into Iraq. The military ability of the United States is defined primarily by how much power we can project and the deterrence that our power buys. We have a huge military precisely so that we never have to used it.

Bush’s mismangement of Iraq has seriously degraded both our deterrent and projection ability. We currenly have 150,000 troops bogged down in Iraq and an Iranian nation that’s feeling frisky because they’ve seen us stumble. Mr. Scoblic, the point of Iran is not that they can beat us in battle, it’s that they might feel stupid enough to challenge us. And we’d win but at a high cost in lives and treasure.