Anglosphere still hanging in there

Mark Steyn, in The Wall Street Journal, on the success of pro-American leaders:

REMEMBER the conventional wisdom of 2004? Back then, you’ll recall, it was the many members of George Bush’s “unilateral” coalition who were supposed to be in trouble, not least the three doughty warriors of the Anglosphere – the President, Tony Blair and John Howard – who would all be paying a terrible electoral price for lying their way into war in Iraq. The Democrats’ position was that Bush’s rinky-dink nickel-and-dime allies didn’t count: the President has “alienated almost everyone”, said Jimmy Carter, “and now we have just a handful of little, tiny countries supposedly helping us in Iraq”. (That would be Britain, Australia, Poland, Japan . . .) Instead of those nobodies, John Kerry pledged that, under his leadership, “America will rejoin the community of nations” – by which he meant Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder, the Belgian guy. Two years on, Bush, Blair, Howard and Junichiro Koizumi are all re-elected, while Chirac is the lamest of lame ducks; Schroeder’s government was defeated; and the latest member of the coalition of the unwilling to hit the skids is Canada’s Liberal Party, which fell from office on Monday.

No one can say it isn’t so.