There is a lot that is very wrong with Paul Johnson’s tedious column in Forbes today, but this passage was probably the worst:

These forces are provided at huge expense by the American taxpayer and are staffed by thousands of dedicated young American men and women whose express purpose is to protect civilization from barbarism.

Er, no, their express purpose is to defend the United States and the Constitution against their enemies. One might like to believe that this has something to do with protecting civilization, but that isn’t why Americans serve in the military and it isn’t what they’re called on to do when they join. It’s a good thing, too. Providing for the common defense of the United States and the defense of those allies with which the U.S. has defense treaties is already quite demanding enough, and there are more than a few Americans always eager to keep adding to the list of commitments that the U.S. should take on. If the U.S. military’s “express purpose” were protecting civilization from barbarism, it would have an impossibly grand purpose that it could never fulfill, but it would exhaust itself and bankrupt the nation in the process. Unfortunately, this rhetoric of protecting civilization that Johnson deploys here is just a bad ideological excuse to cover up for starting a war against a government that had not attacked us and posed no threat to us. I don’t pretend to understand a definition of civilization that includes approving the starting of wars without just cause.

Having made this preposterous claim, Johnson continues:

That, as they see it and have been taught to see it, is precisely what America stands for; it is the principal moral justification for their nation’s immense power and riches.

As hard as it is for some people to accept, America doesn’t have a mission civilisatrice. Nor does America have some sort of noblesse oblige that it has acquired on account of its power and wealth. The U.S. should not abuse the power and wealth it has acquired, nor should Americans pretend that all of the land-grabs and displacements of whole peoples that are part of our history are somehow justified after the fact if we devote ourselves to global moral uplift. There could be rare, extraordinary cases when American intervention becomes necessary, but that simply underscores how unnecessary and inappropriate intervention is most of the rest of the time.

The idea that America came to “the rescue of civilization” in 1917 by entering WWI is bizarre. One could argue that civilization was far past the point of being rescued in Europe; it had been destroyed. Regardless, it is a strange, very antiquated idea that American involvement in WWI rescued anything except for the Allied war cause. Plunging the U.S. into WWI has some part in creating the conditions for the “Carthaginian peace” imposed on Germany after the war, which had rather unhappy consequences for the world. Tipping the balance in favor of the Allies may have facilitated the consolidation of Bolshevik control in Russia, which the Allies then belatedly, half-heartedly tried to undo. Wilson’s role in breaking up the Austrian empire created a vacuum filled by fanatical nationalisms that plagued central Europe, and which continue to plague some parts of Europe to this day. Far from coming to the “rescue” of civilization, Wilson unwittingly contributed to its practical annihilation in many parts of the world.