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19

Nobody has ever had to balance transformational and conservative
roles on a global scale before.
From an American point of view, the Arab Spring is just another
complication of this global task — a sudden thunderstorm with
flashes of lightening, driving rain and unpredictable gusts of wind as
we hop one-legged on the tightrope changing our pants. The Islamic
world is entering new territory as it struggles to integrate religious
and liberal political values; as the United States tries to juggle its
geopolitical interests with its values at a volatile moment in world
history, we are almost certain to get the balance wrong much of the
time.
Here, however, history offers some hope. As I wrote at the beginning
of this post, the United States has been doing two things for more
than 200 years: getting foreign revolutions wrong, but somehow still
pushing its global revolution forward. America’s success as a
conservative revolutionary power on a global scale depends less on
the clever policies of our presidents and our secretaries of state, and
more on the creativity and dynamism of American society as a whole.
It is power of a free people more than the brilliance of our intellectual
and social establishment that has brought the United States this far; in
that truth lies the secret of our revolution and of our success.

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