THE ARCHBISHOP AND THE PROFESSOR JUST DON’T GET IT

The Archbishop of Canterbury and a professor of theology at a prestigious university have seen fit recently to criticize the United States for a host of failures on domestic and international fronts.

To read their comments, you would think that the US is anything but a success in areas that count the most.

I suggest it is just possible that these folks make the mistake of thinking that expertise in one area makes for expertise in a lot of other areas.

It just ain’t so.

Diplomacy, geopolitics, military science, and foreign policy of all sorts are all disciplines in their own rights.

Doctorates in theology just do not cut it in military or political science, regardless of what the good doctors think.

For the good professor to say that the nation state system and its dynamic is in itself inimical to a Christian way of dealing with the world is nonsense.

For the Archbishop to condemn the US as an imperialistic menace is nonsense as well. He condemns the British Empire as well, but says the US is even worse.

Poppycock!

Both men, Archbishop and professor, credentialed in their in their own spheres of interest, have looked and they have not seen.

They have failed to do what Kipling says he and his brothers and sisters have done:

If England was what England seems,
‘N not the England of our dreams,
But only putty, brass ‘n paint,
How quick we’d drop ‘er.
But she ain’t.

The US is not England, but the US has accepted the mantle formerly carried by that little Island off the coast of Western Europe.

It is operating within a framework of law and order that has endured for centuries and which is now under attack.

The US is not a force of evil, preying on the helpless of the world.

On the contrary, the US is very likely the last real hope for justice and order in this increasingly anarchical world.

Isn't it nice to be on the right side of things?

The formers guardians of the gates have either been incapacitated or have given up the effort.

US outreach of all sorts deploys to the far corners of the earth: medical; military; economic; technological; charitable;, etc., etc., and on and on. And I could go on with specificity.

I say to the listeners and readers of the Archbishop and the professor and to others of their type, take what they say on matters foreign to their training and profession with a grain of salt.

They do not know what they are talking about.

They just don’t get it.