few, all reject the Statist’s Utopia as a weakness to be exploited. They are not motivated by world opinion but by their own desires. They seek strategic—economic and military—advantage. For example, while China locks up oil contracts with countries in Africa and Latin America and Russia lays claim to the North Pole to expand its access to crude oil, the Statist asserts that America is only “5 percent of the world’s population, [but] consumes one quarter of the world’s total energy supply,” 14 suggesting that America must become poorer so the rest of the world might become richer. The Statist believes Americans are gluttonous and wasteful, taking from the world that which belongs to others, whereas the Conservative believes Americans are successful and productive, contributing to their own preservation and improvement. The United States also produces and supplies goods and services to the rest of the world, thereby improving their lot. Furthermore, many other countries are incapable of accessing or utilizing natural resources as a result of their own governments, cultures, and societies.
Despite the Statist’s lofty talk of global citizenship, in practice he protects if not augments his domestic position. Therefore, he opposes free trade, because it would alienate his union constituency, which sees protectionism as job security. He opposes the use of DDT to eradicate diseases in the most impoverished areas of the world, to appease his environmental acolytes, for whom DDT is a cause célèbre. The Statist will guard from the international community factions within American society that he considers essential to his authority. The Conservative, on the other hand, will restrict or prevent the provision of certain technologies and military know-how to hostile regimes (through such mechanisms as export controls), thereby limiting free trade with such regimes, not to benefit a favored constituency or enhance his own authority but to preserve America’s security—which, in turn, preserves free trade generally. Once again, the Statist is motivated to accumulate and maintain his authority, whereas the Conservative is motivated to preserve and improve the civil society.
The Statist also uses the idea of global citizenship to denigrate the effectiveness of war efforts that he does not lead and agitate the public against his political opponents. Indeed, the Statist adopts the language and tactics of America’s adversaries in criticizing American foreign and national security policies. For example, in the war on terrorism, the United States has been accused by various countries, self-described human rights groups, international bureaucrats, among others, of using torture in the interrogation and detention of al-Qaeda terrorists. These critics have attacked critically important, albeit rarely used, methodologies for securing intelligence and neutralizing the enemy as violations of terrorists’ human rights—including waterboarding, which simulates drowning. The technique has now been banned, but was used on only three terrorists—Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, Abu Zubaydah, Osama bin Laden’s chief of operations, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who the government says coordinated the attack on the USS Cole . The technique reportedly led to securing important information that prevented dozens of planned al-Qaeda attacks. 15 The Statist has succeeded in characterizing something as torture that is not torture, for the purpose of banning even its judicious use. How is banning waterboarding—which Barack Obama did among his first acts as president—morally defensible when a few minutes of simulated drowning applied against the operational leader of 9/11 reportedly saved an untold number of innocent American lives?
Even the detention of al-Qaeda terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, under the watchful eyes of the media, antiwar groups, defense lawyers, and statist politicians who have toured the detention