American power: indispensable or ineffective?

AS MASSED ISRAELI troops await the command to invade Gaza, two hulking US Navy aircraft-carriers have been sent to support Israel. Their task is to deter Hizbullah and its sponsor Iran from opening a second front across the Lebanese border. No other country could do this. The carriers are a 200,000-tonne declaration of American power at a time when much of the world believes that American power is in decline.

The coming months will test that view. It is hard to exaggerate the stakes. On October 20th President Joe Biden called this “an inflection point”. He warned of the need to repulse Hamas’s terror as well as Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. China’s threat to invade Taiwan lurked unspoken in the background.