America: Keeping you safe in an uncertain world?

I love to read Mark Steyn. I appreciate his sense of humor, and his command of the English language. I also generally agree with his point of view.

Such is the case in his recent column concerning Iran’s growing nuclear threat. Here Steyn compares our governments seemingly endless ability to foment new rules governing every minor detail of our lives – ostensibly for our own good, with a complete lack of ability to protect us

from real threats, such as a millenarian theocracy that claims universal jurisdiction

As he says:

The average Canadian can survive an Arizona hot tub merely compliant with 2009 safety standards rather than 2010. The average Englishman can survive stumbling with his frying pan: You may get a nasty graze on your kneecap, but rub in some soothing pancake syrup and you’ll soon feel right as rain. Whether they — or at any rate their pampered, complacent societies in which hot-tub regulation is the most pressing issue of the day — can survive a nuclear Iran is a more open question. . . . .

But even without launching a single missile, Iran will at a stroke have transformed much of the map — and not just in the Middle East, where the Sunni dictatorships face a choice between an unsought nuclear arms race and a future as Iranian client states. In Eastern Europe, a nuclear Iran will vastly advance Russia’s plans for a de facto reconstitution of its old empire: In an unstable world, Putin will offer himself as the protection racket you can rely on. And you’d be surprised how far west “Eastern” Europe extends: Moscow’s strategic view is of a continent not only energy-dependent on Russia but also security-dependent. And, when every European city is within range of Tehran and other psycho states, there’ll be plenty of takers for that when the alternative is an effete and feckless Washington.

He concludes:

It is now certain that Tehran will get its nukes, and very soon. This is the biggest abdication of responsibility by the Western powers since the 1930s. It is far worse than Pakistan going nuclear, which, after all, was just another thing the CIA failed to see coming. In this case, the slow-motion nuclearization conducted in full view and through years of tortuous diplomatic charades and endlessly rescheduled looming deadlines is not just a victory for Iran but a decisive defeat for the United States. It confirms the Islamo-Sino-Russo-everybody-else diagnosis of Washington as a hollow superpower that no longer has the will or sense of purpose to enforce the global order.

As I said, I like reading Mark Steyn. I just wish he wasn’t so doggone depressing.