Robert Frost defined a liberal as someone too broad-minded to take his own side in a fight. In their desperation not to take their own side, today’s anti-imperialists take at face value the flawed arguments of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialists just so they can condemn their own country for its imperialism. And, in their condescension, liberal commentators assume the West was always in the position of the aggressor, the hegemon, the empire builder, and that we have nothing to offer to the rest of the world but apologies.
