One of the reasons America is declining in the world is that we (and the rest of the effeminized West) are perceived by our foes and rivals, rightly, as having lost our virile resolve. We are generally more concerned with “being better” than our enemies than actually defeating them, and so we court-martial Navy Seals for being mean to brutal terrorists. Upon the massacre of our soldiers by a jihadist within their ranks, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army laments the event as a setback for diversity. Military decorations, once given for valor, honor, and courage under fire, are now to be awarded for “courageous restraint“. So wary are we of giving offense, even to those who would destroy us, that our highest officials shrink even from naming our enemies; meanwhile we cravenly permit the construction of a towering mosque in Lower Manhattan, at a site that is, as John Derbyshire put it: “just a stone’s throw — or to modify the metaphor slightly, an airline passenger’s body-part trajectory — from Ground Zero.” (If you’d like to attend the groundbreaking ceremony, I hear it’s scheduled for September 11th, 2011.)
Not so — never so — the Russians, who look after themselves, and don’t obsess the way we do about whether the rest of the world loves them. Attack them, and they will see to it that you think twice before doing so again (if you are still around to think at all). Here they dispose, with characteristically unsentimental directness, of a captured pirate mother-ship.