IV. Comment on the following quotations:

• I have thought that all the causes tending to the maintenance of a democratic republic in the United States can be reduced to three: The particular and accidental situation in which Providence has placed the Americans forms the first; The second comes from the laws; The third flows from habits and mores. (Alexis de Tocqueville)

• America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still (E.E.Cummings)

• America is a mistake, a giant mistake. (Sigmund Freud)

• What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others (Carlos Fuentes)

• ''Do not lead an American to speak of Europe,'' he wrote. ''He will ordinarily show great presumption and a rather silly pride. (Alexis de Tocqueville)

• You can always rely on America to do the right thing, once it has exhausted the alternatives (Winston Churchill)

Text 2 The isolationist temptation

A growing number of Americans would like fewer entanglements with foreigners

For many Americans, it's a mad, mad, mad, mad world out there, and getting worse. During the Salman Rushdie affair 17 years ago, angry Muslims were content merely to call for the death of the allegedly blasphemous author and his publishers. This week, they were calling for the death not only of some allegedly blasphemous cartoonists but also their compatriots. And people from neighbouring countries. And Jews. And, inevitably, Americans.

What's the point, some Americans grumble, of engaging with such people? We gave the Iraqis freedom, runs the argument, and they repaid us with roadside bombs. Palestinians got the vote and used it to elect terrorists. And dealing with the rest of the world is scarcely more rewarding: old Europe sneers at us, the Chinese steal our jobs and Mexicans are quietly re-conquering the south-western United States. Wouldn't it be simpler to build a fence around our vast, rich, sane nation and let the rest of the world go hang?

It is a sign of the appeal of such sentiments that George Bush devoted much of his state-of-the-union speech to them.

“The road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting—yet it ends in danger and decline...America rejects the false comfort of isolationism...Isolationism would not only tie our hands in fighting enemies, it would keep us from helping our friends in desperate need...American leaders—from Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy to Reagan—rejected isolation and retreat, because they knew that America is always more secure when freedom is on the march.”

Mr Bush oversimplified, using one word—isolationist—for several disparate opponents. But he is right to worry. Partly in reaction to the president's hyperactive foreign entanglements, various forms of isolationist sentiment are indeed on the rise. A Pew poll in October found 42% of Americans agreeing that the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” That figure had jumped by 12 points in three years to its highest level since the mid-1970s (after the humiliation of Vietnam).

Although Mr Bush was hardly fair when he described all advocates of a less muscular foreign policy as “isolationist”, he has correctly identified one of the strongest currents against which he must swim. Many Americans wish to disengage from the world in one or more of four ways: by fighting fewer wars, by trading less freely, by allowing fewer foreigners into their country or by giving less foreign aid.

The purest isolationists, ironically, are to be found in the president's own party. Since Mr Bush came to office promising a “humble” foreign policy, they feel betrayed that he has practised the opposite. “Why would a president use his state of the union to lash out at a school of foreign policy thought that has had zero influence in his administration?” fumes Pat Buchanan, a former presidential aspirant and voice of the GOP's nativist wing. The answer: “His foreign policy is visibly failing, and his critics have been proven right.”

Iraq never attacked America, argues Mr Buchanan, so America did not have to attack it. As for the idea that America's security depends on ending foreign tyranny, that is “noble-sounding nonsense”, writes Mr Buchanan. “Our security rests on US power and will, and not on whether Zimbabwe, Sudan, Syria, Cuba or even China is ruled by tyrants. Our forefathers lived secure in a world of tyrannies by staying out of wars that were none of America's business.” Mr Buchanan thinks foreign aid is “the looting of America for the construction of the New World Order”. He is proudly protectionist and he fears that Hispanic immigration threatens not only America's survival as one nation but also Republican dominance of American politics, since Latinos usually vote Democrat.

Mr Buchanan has been singing this song for some time: it was part of his pitchfork rebellion against Mr Bush's father in the Republican primaries in 1992. But in damning the Iraq war and the use of force to spread democracy, Mr Buchanan is part of a much broader (and potentially more potent) movement.

On the right, there are two main groups: small-government conservatives and foreign-policy realists. The former point to the huge cost to the taxpayer of the Iraq war and the Pentagon. The latter, typified by Brent Scowcroft, the first President Bush's national-security adviser, think that the old policy of propping up Arab strongmen brought “50 years of peace” to the Middle East.

For different reasons, almost everyone on the left opposes the war. The people who have enough spare time to go on marches and listen to Cindy Sheehan tend to think “BusHitler” invaded Iraq to enrich Halliburton. A larger, quieter group thinks the administration launched an avoidable war and botched it. Overall, the proportion of Americans who think the Iraq war worth fighting has fallen from 70% in April 2003 to about 45% now.