READER JOE HRUTKA EMAILS TO ASK “How come nobody’s trying to appease the United States?”

It’s because they know that we won’t do anything awful to them. If the United States were more like the old Soviet Union, we’d have plenty of supporters in Europe, hoping to buy us off. Just like the Soviets did.

Holly Watson, meanwhile, sends this V.S. Naipaul quote, which seems to go nicely with this topic:

…the people who substitute doctrine for knowledge and irritation for concern, the revolutionaries who visit centers of revolution with return air tickets, the hippies, the people who wish themselves on societies more fragile than their own, all those people who in the end do no more than celebrate their own security.

Indeed. It should have been printed on every nametag in Johannesburg.