In The New Criterion, Mark Steyn reviews Norman Podhoretz's new book based upon his book-length essay, "World War IV":

There were two forces at play in the late twentieth century: in the east, the collapse of Communism; in the west, the collapse of confidence. And, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation at home only accelerated.

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Europe can plead demography in mitigation. But what explains our media, our political class, our “isolationists right and left”? Twenty-five years ago, the Hudson Institute’s Herman Kahn wrote a book called The Coming Boom, predicting the eponymous prosperity but also observing en passant:

Two out of three Americans polled in recent years believe that their grandchildren will not live as well as they do, i.e., they tend to believe the vision of the future that is taught in our school system. Almost every child is told that we are running out of resources; that we are robbing future generations when we use these scarce, irreplaceable, or nonrenewable resources in silly, frivolous and wasteful ways; that we are callously polluting the environment beyond control; that we are recklessly destroying the ecology beyond repair; that we are knowingly distributing foods which give people cancer and other ailments but continue to do so in order to make a profit.

It would be hard to describe a more unhealthy, immoral, and disastrous educational context, every element of which is either largely incorrect, misleading, overstated, or just plain wrong. What the school system describes, and what so many Americans believe, is a prescription for low morale, higher prices and greater (and unnecessary) regulations.

A generation on, it’s easier to see that the assumptions underpinning such self-flagellation are “unhealthy” far beyond environmental regulation. Large numbers of people cannot conceive of the morality of national purpose, without which it’s hard to resist any kind of existential threat. The same networks which offer drearily parochial coverage of the Olympics to the point where you’d barely know there were any other countries competing except as exotic background extras in a Team USA victory parade insist after the commercial break that in their war coverage they’re simply impartial arbiters with no dog in the fight.