Thanks to the many readers who have asked about my well-being these 10 weeks that I have been away from this and other columns. My wife and I were in Great Britain, and I was taking, and giving readers, a break from gnashing my teeth almost every week about the appalling condition of Western political leadership.

Despite the rise of international organizations and the globalization of news and popular culture, it is the great powers that create and influence world conditions. From early in the time of the nation state, in the late 16th century, there have been four distinct epochs. From Elizabeth I to the end of Napoleon, France was the strongest European land power, but unable to predominate altogether, and Britain ruled the waves and took what it wanted overseas. This era gave way to a Europe conveniently divided between its major states, which were exhausted and subject to British manipulation, as the happy off-shore onlooker and cutting edge of the industrial revolution that governed much of the overseas world.

Following the U.S. Civil War, Japan’s emergence in the Far Pacific, and the unification of Germany and Italy, (and Canadian Confederation), the powers bunched up and it all became more complicated in the Twentieth Century. The British and French in World War I and the British and Russians in World War II only narrowly defeated the Germans with the help of the Americans, and Germany and Japan were occupied by the Western powers in 1945 and wisely managed into flourishing, democratic allies. It was unclear whether Germany was a western or eastern-facing country until the Western Allied armies occupied three quarters of it and 10-million Germans walked or came in ox-carts to the West to escape the Red Army.

This was and ultimately remains the issue, including in Ukraine and the Middle East: the Western countries are really trying, gently and gradually, to promote the Westernization of the world. We still prefer the democratic and free market system to the alternatives, and the last time democracies went to war with each other was on the US-Canada border in 1812.

The West grew from the Anglo-Saxon-French democratic world a century ago to include all of Western Europe and important parts of the Far East, and this great geopolitical force prevailed over international communism without a major war. In political terms, it has evangelized most of the world. The Western World advanced to the borders of the old USSR in the 1990s, and the long predicted tussle is now under way for the adherence of the satrapies that Russia had acquired over 250 years from Peter the Great to Stalin.

The four remaining major contentious areas that have not adopted the Western model are, broadly, China, India, Russia and the Muslim world. (Africa will come along at its own speed.) China has adopted much of the Western economic model, but though less despotic than ever in its history, is not at all democratic. India is reasonably democratic (though almost dysfunctionally corrupt). Its new leader, Narendra Modi, promises to do to India what Margaret Thatcher did to Britain (and the economic growth rate has risen by a percentage point just since his election three months ago).

Russia, cut in half from its former extent when it was the center of the Soviet Union, and reeling from the bloodless amputations it suffered, is a gadfly, trying to recoup something from its severed body parts; its antics can be tolerated up to a point (Crimea), but have to be discouraged where the legitimate Western interest is threatened. We don’t want to humiliate or suffocate Russia, but we have a right to encourage the western emulators in the former USSR and to discourage their oppression by the pan-Russian nativists. Eventually, of course, we want Russia in the West, too, but voluntarily — with a West spanning from Vancouver to Vladivostok, in both directions.

The Muslim world is understandably distressed by its ineptitude at self-government, and its 13 centuries of retreat, (apart from Turkey, which has only been in retreat for 350 years). Most of the Middle Eastern Muslim masses have been distracted with the red herring of Israel from the misgovernment inflicted on them for decades, and are being riven by mindless seekers of violent sectarianism.

Iraq shows that the West can’t govern or remake the region, but the massacre and dislocation of large numbers of Christians, endless provocations of the Jewish state, and the military nuclearization of the mad theocracy in Tehran, cannot be tolerated — yet our leaders are tolerating them.

The terrorists cannot possibly win: Islam isn’t necessarily a violent faith, and it is not markedly more acceptable to the Muslims of the world than, say, to the Town of Collingwood, Ont., that innocents be massacred, foreigners beheaded, or women flogged for wearing a mini-dress, driving a car, or even seeking to be educated. Islamic discontent, like most revolutions, has become gradually more extreme, but terror is ultimately intolerable and Thermidor always comes.

ISIS and al-Qaeda and the other terrorists (including Hamas) are a terrible nuisance, and some have an authentic grievance, but they are not a threat to the entire West as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were. However, moderate Muslims do have the right to expect some assistance from the West.

These are complicated but manageable geopolitical issues. But we do not now have statesmen who examine them in anything remotely resembling these terms. Everything is cramped into sound bites and improvised from one week to the next with little knowledge of the past or thought for the future. The disillusionment of the United States with the squandering of scores of thousands of casualties and trillions of dollars in the Middle East is commendable, but the West will not prevail or even reverse its present decline with an isolated and ineffectual America and a torpid, cowardly Europe.

The United States must return to the pre-Vietnam and First Gulf War policy of sensibly identifying and defending its national interest with its allies and neither be lured into quagmires nor paralyzed by fear of taking righteous and proportionate action. It was quite correct, after the successful end of the Cold War, for the United States to retrench somewhat, but in an orderly manner. This policy is working in Asia, as this week’s visit of Mr. Modi to Japan demonstrates that the two countries are edging closer together as the regional containment of China proceeds.

But in Europe and the Middle East, American withdrawal has exposed the moral bankruptcy of the (supposedly united) Europeans. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, should be the first responsible leader of a great power that Germany has had since Bismarck was fired by the hyper-active adolescent Wilhelm II, 125 years ago. The world, including, apparently the Germans, is waiting for Germany to lead, not just to posture and continue a toothless and unnecessary dependence on Russian natural gas. The French and British are hopeless and no U.S. president can draw red lines and abandon them, abdicate the powers of commander in chief to the Congress, and have his feckless retreat defined as not doing “stupid stuff,” and retain any credibility.

There is a role here for Canada, which it is ducking. There is no excuse for not supplying the Ukrainian defense effort, and Canada’s record is more lamentable than most because of Stephen Harper’s tough talk. Harper has declared that increased defence spending is not justified, having reduced it by $2-billion in seven years amid procurement blunders, notwithstanding frequent press releases about impending Canadian rearmament. Harper was finally bullied last week by the vocal remnants of NATO into an “aspirational” increase. But he is, as the British say, “all mouth and no trousers” — the mouse that roared, a paper polar bear.

Canadians are not braggarts or posturers and do not wish and will not accept to be a loud-mouthed national laughing stock. The West has a winning hand, and all it seeks is human rights and general prosperity, but our leaders are increasingly shilly-shalliers, placemen, and, in Cromwellian terms, “decayed servitors.” It won’t do, and cannot continue.

cbletters@gmail.com. From the National Post.