America’s ‘Unipolar Moment’ is Over .

 via Real Clear Defense

It was a time of celebration--the 45-year Cold War was over. The West, led by the United States, had won. The Soviet empire collapsed. China, our de facto ally at the end of the Cold War, appeared to be foregoing communist ideology in favor of economic growth produced by a relaxation of state control over the economy. There was an element of hubris involved in proclaiming the end of a multi-polar world or suggesting that history had ended. Victory sometimes breeds hubris. And hubris can be dangerous.

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 As President Reagan's U.N. Ambassador and trusted adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick was one of the intellectual architects of our victory in the Cold War. But Kirkpatrick was not blinded by hubris when the Berlin Wall fell. In the fall of 1990, she wrote an article in The National Interest suggesting that the United States should become a “normal country” in the post-Cold War world. She warned U.S. post-Cold War policymakers against pursuing a “mystical mission” that reached beyond the Constitutional requirement to protect the nation's vital national security interests. Specifically, she wrote that the United States should not devote itself to establishing democracy around the world. She derided the notion that the conduct of U.S. foreign policy should be "the special province" of elites who too often do not pay its costs or bear its consequences. Such elites, Kirkpatrick warned, often develop "disinterested globalist" attitudes couched in high-minded terms such as "internationalism" instead of focusing on concrete U.S. national security interests.

Read the whole thing here.  I could basically highlight the entire article it's so good.