While addressing the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., she touted her country's achievements in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan - three war-stricken disaster areas - without of course admitting any responsibility for the plights of their respective populaces. The U.S. was doing nothing blameworthy in any of those three countries and never had; it is not responsible in any manner for violence, dislocation and eventual fragmentation in the nations now or at any point over the past half century.
In fact just the opposite. Washington's faultless, noble, beneficent, healing role needs to be universalized: "Solving foreign-policy problems today requires us to think both regionally and globally, to see the intersections and connections linking nations and regions and interests, to bring people together as only America can. I think the world is counting on us today, as it has in the past. When old adversaries need an honest broker or fundamental freedoms need a champion, people turn to us."
And, at least implicit in her contentions, having witnessed the effects of recent U.S. armed interventions in the Middle East and South Asia, the world is even more insistent that Washington extend its presence and enforce its mandatory model elsewhere. Everywhere.
Clinton continued: "I see it on the faces of the people I meet as I travel - not just the young people who still dream about America's promise of opportunity and equality, but also seasoned diplomats and political leaders who, whether or not they admit it, see the principled commitment and can-do spirit that comes with American engagement.
"And they do look to America - not just to engage, but to lead. And nothing makes me prouder than to represent this great nation in the far corners of the world.
"Americans have always risen to the challenges we have faced. That is who we are. It is in our DNA. We do believe there are no limits on what is possible or what can be achieved."
Again, an individual who proclaimed that everyone else dreamed of being like him, that he possessed unlimited talents and abilities, and that his superiority was moreover a matter of genetic inheritance would likely soon end up on a locked psychiatric ward. Even if he didn't account for the preponderance of the deadly weapons in the world and didn't have a sixty-year history of almost unbroken violence against others, often against defenseless victims.
One of the privileges of egomania writ large - megalomania - is the right to lecture others on one's unique, suprahuman, ineffably lofty qualities and to dress them down for not possessing them.
In introducing Clinton on September 8, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, reminded the audience that in slightly over a year and a half she has visited some 64 countries, a third of United Nations members, and "has racked up 350,000 miles in the process."
The following comments indicate to what extent her worldview and views of the world alike have been expanded by those travels:
"The world looks to us because America has the reach and resolve to mobilize the shared effort needed to solve problems on a global scale, in defense of our own interests but also as a force for progress. In this we have no rival. For the United States, global leadership is both a responsibility and an unparalleled opportunity."
Though she displayed either uncharacteristic modesty - an unlikely enough prospect - or the obligatory deference to her predecessors that she expects her successors, and history, to confer on her in stating:
"We know this can be done because President Obama's predecessors in the White House and mine in the State Department did it before....Those were the benefits of a global architecture forged over many years by American leaders from both political parties.
"That is why we are building a global architecture that reflects and harnesses the realities of the 21st century."
She was referring most immediately to George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice as alleged visionary leaders that with her and Obama have accomplished nothing less than building a planetary political-economic-social-military structure for an entire century. And, not to be unduly humble, a new millennium into the bargain.
Although American global dominance rests squarely on a World War Two-level $708 billion defense budget for next year, six international military commands, six navy fleets, eleven aircraft carrier strike groups, the world's largest nuclear arsenal and in general the ability to dispatch overwhelming and crushing military force anywhere in the world at short notice, another of the prerogatives of international hubris is, as noted earlier, to attribute that supremacy to genetically determined entrepreneurial and ethical advantages. According to America's top diplomat, the globe's sole superpower is entering yet a higher and more refined avatar, "national renewal aimed at strengthening the sources of American power, especially our economic might and moral authority."
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