Very much enjoyed your post. I’m new to your blog and it made my day.

Here’s part of the piece I posted at http://www.insomniactive.wordpress.com in response to the Brooks/Larison face-off.

Of course, both of these guys have a point. Larison is pretty impossible to argue with when he says, essentially, “multi-polarity means a greater diversity of irreconcilable self-interests, so get over it.” And as he notes, the collapse of the Doha round makes a fine Exhibit A.

But he goes too far in introducing the idea that because the 20th century was a historical exception, we should be comfortable returning to a 19th century posture of “every man for himself.” Unfortunately, easily the greatest source of the 20th century’s exceptionalism is that it has produced the seeds of the planet’s sudden annihlation, and those seeds are now in their seventh decade of spread and germination. Ok that sounds a little melodramatic, but it’s also not wrong.

Nuclear non-proliferation–which amazingly, has received precisely *no* air time in the U.S. Presidential campaign–*must* be foreign policy job #1 for every responsible nation. And anything other than the broadest-based multi-laterilism won’t get job #1 done. To say that China sympathizes with Iran’s nuclear aspirations has much basis in fact. But I sympathize with my labrador’s desire to eat the whole bag of chow. I don’t let her do it, because there will be consequences to her and to me which are far more predictable than the consequencs to China of a nuclear-armed Iran.

In Michael Dobbs’ new Book, One Minute to Midnight, (highly recommended, btw) he recounts an episode during the Cuban missile crisis when the pilot of a single-seat F-106 airplane muffed his landing at a foggy Terre Haute airstrip and skidded off the runway. This would have been the 19th century equivalent of falling off a horse, except that the plane had in its hold a 1.5 kilo-ton nuclear war head, about a tenth the size that was dropped on Hiroshima. And then there’s the one about the sub that got away: U.S. forces tried madly but in vain to track down and force to surface a Soviet submarine which had been escorting two vessels toward the quarantine line. That the sub was never located was fortunate: it was packing a nuclear tipped missile and piloted by a captain under orders to use it.

And all this, nearly 50 years ago. God only knows how many near-misses there have been since.

No, the “new” international order has as much in common with the geopolitics of another planet as it does with those of the 19th century, with the proliferation of of nukes being the game changer. If there is one use for a multilateral institution with real teeth, nuke non- prolif is it. The details of such body are well above my pay grade. But the next POTUS can’t afford to say the same thing.

Can you recommend some things to read on the topic of globalization and free (or “free”) trade that are especially good? I am going to be writing something soon about left-wing critics of globalization, and I would like to be more informed about these issues than I presently am.

Thanks …

Brooks decries that nothing gets done on the world stage and advocates for mechanisms to get things done. He says the League of Democracies could be that mechanism, but he doesn’t seem to recognize that any mechanism that countries create together will be bogged down in torpor and recalcitrance. The interests of countries, even democratic ones, will eventually conflict. And, the moral League of Democracies will be another UN or EU, connected in word but divided in action.