I say this is an astonishing piece because its author has come so far since 9/11 as to make a complete

I say this is an astonishing piece because its author has come so far since 9/11 as to make a complete

reversal: it’s as if Wendell Wilkie had suddenly morphed into Robert W. McCormick. Here’s Sullivan a

few days after 9/11, in the same newspaper:

“This was the myth of the place apart, the city on the hill, the eternal elsewhere. And when you saw

the squeamishness of Americans to intervene abroad, their often dangerous reluctance to embroil

themselves in foreign entanglements, it was at some level this myth that prompted them. Isolationism,

for all its faults, was always the flip-side of American exceptionalism. It was a naivete that was

nevertheless founded on a dream that refused to die.

“But in one morning, this dream ended as America was wakened from its long sleep. The elsewhere is now

somewhere. The refuge is now insecure. The threat from without is now also within. The new world is now

just the world. Isolationism is no longer even a choice. It is lying in the rubble in downtown

Manhattan.”

“Isolationism,” averred Sullivan in his previous incarnation as the Avenging Angel of 9/11, “is

dead.” What one has to wonder is how, or why, it was suddenly revived in Sullivan’s mind. While I am

always glad to see new converts, surely such a complete turnaround requires a bit of an explanation,

or, at least, more of an explantion than Sullivan is giving.