Does this describe you? From Tunku Varadarajan, in today’s WSJ Opinion Journal:

[A] new America has emerged from all this sentiment; perhaps for the first time in its existence, America is prepared to be coldly, ruthlessly unsentimental. I refer here not to the Bush administration–there have, after all, been some memorably unsentimental presidencies in American history–but to the entire civitas. With the exception of a small band of leftists, who maintain, in the face of all evidence, that this country is the font of all evil, America is united in the pursuit of its national interest abroad. There is an unapologetic assertion of a national right to self-protection–to self-preservation, if the truth be spoken plainly–that brooks no opposition from any nation that might seek to challenge this new, sharp mood.

The boundary, the frontier, that separates home from abroad–that demarcates the ‘Here’ from the ‘There’–has simply melted away. Americans are now aware, as never before, that what happens ‘There’ has implications that can be bloody, too bloody, for ‘Here.’ So the aversion to intervention abroad that had accumulated in the smug years after the Soviet Union’s collapse–accumulated like tartar on bad teeth–has become almost extinct.

For my part, I hope Varadarajan’s right — and that the politics of “realism,” in my opinion our country’s most unfortunate and persistent post-Vietnam-era legacy in the foreign policy arena — is replaced once again with the political determination of a government confident in its convictions, and in the convictions inherent in its founding and guiding principles. Some cultures, it turns out, are better than others, no matter how vigorously some malcontents or apologists deconstruct the term “better.” And we shouldn’t need Prime Minister Berlusconi to remind us of that (though, grazia, signore, for doing just that…and a lump of coal in the stockings of the various EU appease-ocrats who feigned outrage when the fiesty paison had the balls big enough to tell the truth…)

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