Dan Drezner urges neoconservatives to pay more attention to Thomas Jefferson:

It’s often forgotten that as president, it was Thomas Jefferson who established the U.S. Military Academy. I was struck by a quotation of Jefferson’s that is mounted on the stairwell: “I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.”

Drezner goes on to say that he hopes neoconservatives “realize that there is more than one way to think about the use of force in world politics,” but I suspect he knows as well as anyone that they realize this and they don’t care. Neoconservatives assume that power is there to be used and used often, and at least for some of them it has to be used for grandiose and ambitious purposes, or else it isn’t worth having. They also mistakenly believe that power will atrophy when not exercised frequently, which is why they wrongly believe that constantly frittering away U.S. strength in one conflict after another is perfectly acceptable and even desirable. Neoconservatives and many other hawks and hard-liners along with them view these things as former Secretary Albright did when she reportedly asked Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” The idea that the U.S. ought to conserve its strength, husband its resources, and exercise restraint gets in the way of activism and meddling overseas, and so they’ll have none of that.