As a nation and society, we have a long and persistent history of adopting a decidedly illiberal attitude when income growth lags. Jostled by hard times, we feel little remorse about dispatching those who transgress, trespass, threaten or terrorize us…

But in truth, Americans have little sense for globalization’s many frontiers. By and large, our companies are absent from those rough neighborhoods, even as our “global cops” regularly roar in to do their nasty business, drones a-blazing. We cast Chinese and other nationals willing to do real business there as “free riders,” by which we mean that they profit after we’ve taken care of the dirty work.

But having abandoned the logic of nation-building because we could never sufficiently rein in our inveterate bossiness to permit success, we now specialize in the hardest of hard powers: the extrajudicial killing of those who would do us harm. No, we will not wage pre-emptive war, but we will assassinate pre-emptively, finding great moral solitude in that now-symmetricized conflict…

What’s even scarier is how the Dirty Harry swagger creeps into our relations with fellow great powers. After waging war across Southwest Asia for a solid decade, we now strategically “pivot” to an East Asia essentially bereft of organized war to fuel a regional arms race in the name of containing a dangerously “opaque” China.