(Courtesy of Instapundit)

From global superpower and world cop, America is now recasting itself as feel-good therapist for rogue regimes — seeking to know what’s really on the mind of Kim Jong Il, and ready to break bread with the ayatollahs. It all sounds so civilized.

But I am more worried now than I have been since that clarifying and awful morning of Sept. 11, 2001. While America’s policy may be shifting, the nature of our enemies has not. We are now seeking good-faith deals with governments that rule by terror, and lie and cheat with an impunity that our own leaders cannot afford.

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[W]ith terror-based governments, regime change remains the only real answer. And if America is now living in a dream world in which there is no war unless we choose to declare it, our best hope remains that these regimes — like the former Soviet Union — will collapse from within. On that score, our real allies are not the tyrants who now deign to haggle with us over “stability” while pursuing weapons of mass murder and supplying roadside bombs to terrorists.

Our natural allies are the people living under such tyrants; people who desire not a false détente while their despots build bombs, but the genuine rights and freedoms that America not so long ago was promising to support.