If I use the term "restrainer" what does that call to mind? A device that keeps an infant safe in the back seat of an automobile? Something Nurse Ratchet used to subdue unruly patients?

No, what I'm referring to today are those eager to see the United States pass on the hot and heavy torch of global leadership. That's what a war-weary and no-longer-so-great Britain did following World War II. A question that should arise: To whom would Americans pass it? Sweden's leaders are good enough but not strong enough. China's rulers are strong enough but not good enough.

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Baden-Wurttemberg is a bucolic state in southwest Germany but its capital is Stuttgart, one of the world's great high-tech centers. Like other German states, Baden-Wurttemberg has its own intelligence agency.

That agency, the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, last week released a lengthy report. An accompanying press release neglected to mention this nugget uncovered by my FDD colleague, Benjamin Weinthal: The Islamic Republic of Iran, which for years has sworn that its nuclear research is exclusively for peaceful purposes, has been deploying agents in Baden-Wurttemberg.

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Wars are contests of wills, and Americans have long had enemies who use guns and bombs in an attempt to force us to submit to their will. But some adversaries take more creative approaches.

Last week, the United States began to defend itself against an impending attack from an international organization. It will take me just a few paragraphs to get you up to speed.

The International Criminal Court was set up toward the end of the last century for what sounds like a noble purpose: to bring to justice perpetrators of such heinous crimes as genocide, in particular those beyond the reach of a credible national judicial system.

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In any number of 1950s sci-fi films, alien lifeforms attack, and earthlings realize that what unites them is more important than what divides them. Over the last few months, we earthlings actually have been under attack by alien lifeforms, yet we are more divided than ever.

How different the current situation might have been had China's rulers said early on: "A virus that came from a bat has gotten loose in Wuhan. We're sorry. But you can count on us to be transparent and cooperative, to work with the international community to contain and eventually defeat this common enemy."

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A century ago, Vladimir Lenin wrote a book titled, "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism." I doubt it occurred to him that imperialism might one day become the highest stage of communism. Yet that day is here.

The end of the Cold War was widely interpreted as communism's downfall. But while the Soviet Union collapsed, communism survived, most consequentially in China.

Analysts on both the left and right didn't get that. After all, China's rulers were allowing private ownership of some means of production, and some Chinese citizens, not all of them government officials or even members of the Communist Party, were getting rich. Isn't that capitalism?

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