America must lead again...but it's time for a balanced debate

This Economist cover cartoon which accompanies the week's leading article, "The New Game" (i.e. great power competition), depicts the current state of world affairs: American dominance being challenged by the new Sino-Russian quasi-alliance.

Americans of all political and social persuasions who can't agree on many things can probably agree on at least one undeniable fact: the world doesn't feel like a warm and fuzzy place these days.

Henry Kissinger has also just written his prescription in the Wall Street Journal as to how America can recover the initiative it has now largely squandered in the Middle East.

Both articles quite aptly conclude, if even just by implying: the core problem is that America is basically reeling from the sense of loss that our botched 2003 invasion of Iraq and 2008 financial crisis produced, which in turn created much of the foreign policy timidity that has characterized Obama's second term. We've not only learned the hard way that our good intentions and firm convictions, backed up by the world's mightiest military and dominant economy, aren't quite enough to shape a global environment we can be secure and confident about; in a deeper sense, we've even begun to lose the foundations of trust in ourselves.

This is true for both Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, left and right: we seem caught now between those who say we should simply surrender to our enemies without even resisting on the one hand, and those who basically say we should simply bomb everyone who doesn't like us back to the stone age on the other. Of course, there's also very little love lost between these opposite ends of the spectrum themselves: to take either camp at its word, America would truly get back on track but only for the other camp's shenanigans.

And so, instead of rising resolutely to the challenge of mastering this new world by learning the parameters and contours of a whole new ballgame, we as a nation, from our leaders (including the 2016 presidential candidates) on down, seem more preoccupied with assigning blame and pointing fingers at who we should get even with.

Now is the time for Americans to hear all sides of the story, not just the skewed partisan cacophony that masquerades as unbiased commentary, which filters, skews, and mis-contextualizes all manner of solid argument and analysis to advance goals that are, in the end, downright childish.

It's time for some real debate...

And it had better lead us, still the world's sole superpower, to an appreciation of the absolute necessity of cooperating with Russia and China, even if it means swapping concessions with them that make us feel a little less exclusively blessed by God.