The real news is not about Obama. It is not about McCain. It is not about Hillary.

In fact, the real news is not about current politics at all. The real news is contained in this headline.

US missile hits spy satellite

From another report comes this.

The USS Lake Erie, armed with an SM-3 missile designed to knock down incoming missiles—not orbiting satellites—launched the attack at 10:26 p.m. EST, according to the Pentagon. It hit the satellite about three minutes later as the spacecraft traveled in polar orbit at more than 17,000 mph.

You got that, yes? We launched a missile from a ship at sea that took only three minutes to destroy a satellite traveling in orbit at 17,000 miles per hour.

Three minutes.

Digest that for just a moment.

In an instant the entire defense establishments of Russia and China—in fact of every nation on earth—have been rendered obsolete, useless. Those two grimy dictatorships of course understand this.

China is continuing to closely follow the possible harm caused by the US action to outer space security and relevant countries.

Translation: China’s web of defense satellites can be demolished in three minutes, making that nation blind in any encounter with the US. She herself  plays the anti-satellite missile game, and is losing. She understands, and fears.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday that the US plans looked like a veiled weapons test and an “attempt to move the arms race into space”.

Never mind that the arms race has been in space since Sputnik.

One must of course feel for Russia, a decrepit and decaying power. Whatever influence she once had in this world—an influence entirely negative—she is now reduced to impotent and vodka-soaked threats. She has no response to the US anti-satellite missile, and can in no way come up with one. She understands, and fears.

Since Sumer the race for military dominance has been a contest between offence and defense. Thus the development of the phalanx, shields, javelins, chariots, artillery, fortifications, armor, longbows and crossbows, gunpowder and all the rest can be seen as responses to military innovation. The castle was invincible until gunpowder, after which all states that depended upon such structures and refused to adapt disappeared.

We have reached a point in the history of arms where one nation has become so dominant in all categories of military technology, innovation, adaptability, logistics, power projection and professionalism that no other nation or any imagined correlation of forces could possible defeat her. Not even Rome could marshal such advantages over her foes, foes that like her fought with muscle and iron.

There is much more that can be said of course. But it needs to be remembered that all military advances in History have led to drastic changes in the political realm. Nations vanished, societies crumpled and cultures were extinguished. From their ruins arose entirely new arrangements of men and machines.

Likewise today our international system—if such a debased and ramshackle concoction of nations and states could be termed such—is based upon obsolete arrangements of power and influence. It begs destruction. Its main elements—the UN, international law, state-to-state relations, multilateral organizations and treaties, NGOs—have long ceased to function by any rational measurement. The foundations behind it are as relevant today as was a French knight at the Battle of Agincourt.

What occurred yesterday on the USS Lake Erie was not just a military success of phenomenal importance. It was a herald of the coming new world. Its birth pangs were announced in a flash of light and fire in the heavens above.

Update: Russia and China are feeling a bit low these days.

During the Cold War, Russian planners were constantly in fear of new U.S. technology breakthroughs. These happened frequently enough to remain real to the Russian generals. Now this satellite shoot down just reinforces the feeling of technological inferiority. The Russians passed this attitude on to the Chinese, who tend to see the U.S. lead as more of an opportunity than as an obstacle.

Yes indeed, US superiority over China in everything essential can be seen as quite an opportunity. In the meantime, as China ponders her infinite ‘opportunities,’ she will continue to concentrate her efforts in the area where she has absolute and total mastery: building all those doodads and plastic contraptions that fill the aisles of Dollar Tree.

Update: The Wall Street Journal weighs in and compares Russian and Chinese reactions. Hat tip: Betsy’s Page.

We talk today of a ‘clash of civilizations,’ meaning the war between Islam and the West. Such wars always offer visions of an existentialist, Armageddon-like struggle to be fought until one antagonist disappears from history.

In the 20th century we can say that the wars against Nazism and the Soviet Union were such. The nature of these civilizations did not and could not allow them to exist side by side with free societies. A century earlier expansionist America had come up against the Plains Indians. Neither culture could exist with the other. One would have to go under. One did. It was the same with the American Civil War. The existence of a slave empire in the South demanded a Sherman, and a Sherman came. It was the same with Spain and the Aztecs.

Republican Rome was faced with just such a war. We call them the Punic Wars (264 – 146 BC). These pitted Rome in a fight to the death against Carthage. It was the greatest struggle of the ancient world, far surpassing the Greco-Persian Wars (490-479) in destruction, intensity, scope and violence. One of its battles saw perhaps the greatest slaughter of men in a day of any battle fought at any time. At its end Carthage suffered the fate that awaited the Nazis, militaristic Japan and the USSR two millennia later.

Carthage was what we would call today a seafaring mercantile state. From her beginnings as a colony of Phoenician Tyre—modern Lebanon—she was predatory and imperialist. Carthage was also a slave empire, like all ancient societies. Wherever she went she enlisted subject peoples for labor and for her military. Carthage dealt with competition in a decidedly un-Adam Smith way. Any foreign ship she found in what she considered her waters—the entire Western Mediterranean—was sunk and the sailors drowned.

There was a far grimmer side to Carthage. Her religion was that which the Hebrew God had demanded that His people exterminate in the Promised Land. It was the religion of child sacrifice practiced by the Canaanites, Amalekites and Phoenicians. In times of national crisis the state would demand that new born infants be brought by their mothers and tossed into a brazen image of the god Moloch, where the child would be burned to death to the sounds of horns and cymbals. After a military defeat at the hands of Syracuse (480 BC) Carthage burnt alive 300 of its own children to propitiate the god. To the cries of ‘Lord, eat!’ the infants were rolled into the flames and turned to ash.

The victims, when scarcely at the edge of the opening, disappeared like a drop of water on a red-hot plate, and white smoke rose amid the great scarlet colour. Nevertheless, the appetite of the god was not appeased. He ever wished for more. In order to furnish him with a larger supply, the victims were piled up on his hands with a big chain above them which kept them in their place.

Such was the moral state of Carthage, a state that spread this gruesome faith wherever she went.

It was Sicily where Rome and Carthage clashed (264 BC). Rome was a land-based power and had nothing to equal the Carthaginian navy. To get to Sicily Rome would have to build a navy. Thousands of Romans perished at sea before Rome had mastered the complicated maneuvers of the naval tactics of the day. Tens of thousands more died in Sicily, in Africa and in the titanic naval struggle with Carthage.

Rome emerged victorious, though both sides were exhausted after a quarter of a century of bloodletting. Rome made the mistake that France and England made at Versailles 2200 years later. The treaty imposed upon Carthage guaranteed another war.

The 2nd Punic War was the bloodiest war of the ancient world. It pitted the greatest captains in history, Hannibal and Scipio Major, in a death struggle. Hundreds of thousands died in the course of this war, 76,000 alone in the great battle of Cannae (216 BC), a slaughter of men never again reached in a day’s battle, not even in the trenches of the First World War.

This was a war to end all wars, a fight to determine who would control the world of the ancient Mediterranean. In a call to arms that would put today’s United States to shame, Rome marshaled army after army after army, most of them perishing in the battles against Hannibal. Yet Rome prevailed (201 BC). Her victory insured that the grotesque Moloch would devour no more children. Fifty years later, as almost an afterthought, Rome did to what remained of Carthage what Cortez did to Tenochtitlan, what Sherman did to Atlanta, what the Americans did to Hiroshima.

The results were momentous. It was the civilization of Rome that would create the first world empire in history, a state that would eventually spread to the Tigris and Euphrates. Where the American soldier fights today, 2000 years ago fought the legions of Rome. It was the civilization of Rome that gave to the world what Gibbon said was one of the best governments ever devised. It was the civilization of Rome that served as an inspiration to the founders of the United States. And always remember that it was in the empire of Rome where the Carpenter chose to be born.

Imagine the state of the world today if Carthage had won and Rome had gone under. Imagine Mexico today if it were ruled by the cannibal empire of the Aztecs, or if Europe were under the sway of the Nazis, or if a slave empire still governed south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Imagine our world if it is Islam that conquers and the West that goes under. It would usher in a new Dark Ages worse than that which followed the fall of Rome in the West (476). The madrassa, the burqua, sharia law, polygamy, misogyny, poverty, tyranny, ignorance, illiteracy and ‘honor killings’ would spread over the world, just as the worship of Moloch would have spread over the world had Carthage won.

To believe otherwise is to ignore history. To believe otherwise is to surrender.

In her titanic struggle against Carthage, when Hannibal himself was at the gates of Rome, there was a senator who counseled negotiation. He was immediately set upon by the Roman people and beaten to death. For good measure his family suffered the same fate.

In that tale lies a great moral.