AMERICA IS FINISHED as a great power. Not because it no longer possesses the resources, but because it has lost the will. That was brought home to me on both ends of a recent trip through London's Heathrow airport en route to Phoenix.

* No great power permits its citizens to be discriminated against. Yet just keep your eyes open as you go through security at Heathrow (or any other international airport). Off goes your jacket. Off comes your wife's jacket, like yours, to be deposited in a heap in a plastic bin headed through a machine designed to detect something or other. Next comes a Middle Eastern woman, clad head to toe in a black garment, loose-fitting enough to conceal a weapon of mass destruction. No one dares impede her progress through the detectors.

America makes no move to tell the world's authorities that its citizens are not terrorists, and that any sensible program based on statistical probability--some call it profiling--would reverse security priorities. Jimmy Carter proved that any third-rate power can lay hands on American citizens without consequences. The world got the clue, and now treats us accordingly.

* No great power would allow itself to be held hostage to desert kingdoms run by medieval theocracies. Yet America does. We land in Phoenix and hop into a car that can be brought to a screeching halt if our supplies of oil are cut off. So we are afraid to tell our Saudi suppliers to stop financing terrorists, and to stop polluting the minds of their young with anti-Semitic, anti-Western rants. We allow Russia, a country with a GDP less than that of Italy but with lots of oil, to tell us to take a hike when we protest its increasing tendency to return to the good old days of a KGB-dominated society. After all, if we support democratic forces in Russia, Putin might divert his oil and gas to China instead of giving us the privilege of buying it at inflated prices.

Instead of doing what a great nation would do--take steps to stem the flow of our dollars to what Reuel Marc Gerecht aptly described in these pages as "the Saudi Wahhabi multitentacled missionary-money machine, still the most influential conveyer of anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian hatred in the world"--we unleash our secretary of energy to beg the OPEC nations to please let the price of oil drop from an outrageous $70 per barrel to a merely extortionate $60, but most important, please don't cut us off. And, by the way, you have us so much under your thumb that we will send our fleet to protect you should terrorists threaten your oil facility at Ras Tanura. But if our sailors pull a Bible in their duffles, look out. Groveling is easier than paying the price of getting off oil.

* No great power loses control of its borders. We have. The beautifully tended lawns of our Phoenix hotel, its well-staffed kitchen, are as likely as not the work of illegal aliens. These are admirable, hard-working people for the most part. But they are here illegally. And so unsure of itself has America become that we feel a need to adjust to them--to their language, to their demands on our social services. And most come from a country that refuses to allow American firms to invest in its oil and gas industries so as to increase available supplies. Surely a great country would find some way of saying, "No oil, then no immigrants, no remittances." Never in history have so many illegals dared to organize protest marches and assembled in so easily arrestable a mass, secure in the knowledge that their host country's addiction to low-cost pool-cleaning trumps its desire to control its borders.