In addition, it is not at all clear, today, that Americans have roused themselves from the post-Iraq torpor on which Obama played in mounting his policy of retreat. Yes, the new horror of beheadings and crucifixions conveyed by social media moved the President's foreign policy approval rating steeply downwards and built popular support for the air campaign against IS; but did that amount to a tacit endorsement of the new role Bret Stephens proposes, namely, that of America as global constabulary absent a global empire?

If that popular endorsement is forthcoming between now and the presidential election of November 8, 2016, it will only be because a Republican candidate ignores the consultants who will advise another anti-Obama, domestic-policy-oriented campaign, takes foreign policy seriously, and conducts what amounts to a national educational campaign. Such a candidate will also have to fill in what would seem to be left unaddressed in Stephens's prescription: Won't the American constabulary require permanent garrisons at key potential flashpoints around the world, similar to (if much smaller than) the garrisons that protected the threatened "neighborhoods" of central Europe and South Korea for decades?

If Nato really is rendered defunct by Vladimir Putin over the next biennium, and if much of Europe remains in a state of advanced denial about its peril (a denial manifest in the failure of virtually every European Nato member to fulfill its defence-spending obligations), what should be the shape of the new, post-Nato international security architecture for the future?

What, if anything, is left of the Anglo-American "special relationship" with reference to a "coalition of the willing" in support of American leadership in policing the world's most dangerous neighborhoods?

Can Australia and particularly its navy (working in close partnership with the US Navy) become America's principal security partner in keeping open the maritime trade routes that are threatened by possible Chinese naval interdiction at key choke-points throughout the western Pacific? Might Japan be a third partner in any such enterprise (and should it, given the history of the 20th century)?

But those important questions will remain moot unless and until some Republican candidate explains to the American people the central truth in Bret Stephens's analysis: that "if the world's leading liberal-democratic nation doesn‘t assume its role as world policeman, the world's rogues will fill the breach, often in league with one another." And that, to return to historical analogies, will lead us deeper into the dangerous disorder created by the Obama scuttle. For absent American leadership, the world of the early 21st century will, as Stephens puts it, look a lot "like the 1930s, a decade in which economic turmoil, war weariness, Western self-doubt, American non-involvement, and the rise of ambitious dictatorships combined to produce catastrophe".

As of early 2015, no major figure in American public life seems willing to put that case before the American people. But someone is going to be elected President on November 8, 2016 and inaugurated the following January. And absent a clear mandate to repair the damage done by the Obama scuttle — a mandate that has to be created over the next two years — the 45th President of the United States is going to wake up, not long into his or her first term, and wonder why the job ever seemed attractive in the first place. For such will be the chaotic and dangerous mess that inevitably lands on the one desk in the world, the desk in the Oval Office, where something constructive can begin to be done about it.