At first glance, you’d think Romney and Reed would know each other well from their time together as cyborgs taking orders from the distant, politically ambitious planet that sent them. ~Bruce Reed

Both neoconservatives and their foes, it’s worth pointing out, have a vested interest in inflating the current crisis: The neoconservatives because it lets them argue that defeat in Iraq means defeat for all time, the realists and liberals because it lets them suggest that their wise counsel is all that stands between us and a Bush-created abyss. But while this is a tough moment for America, no question, it’s still the case that we’ll probably leave Iraq with our long-term advantages – economic, military, geographic, demographic – over our rivals more or less intact. ~Ross Douthat

On behalf of non-interventionists, let me say that we are probably one of the few foreign policy factions that have little to gain and much to lose by making Iraq into the ultimate test of hegemony.  As I have suggested before, the Iraq war is terrible (elsewhere I have called it an abomination) and the nakedness of its aggression is almost unprecedented in our history, but it is not ultimately quite as significant for America as many people, both pro and anti, have claimed.  Many people seem to mistake their evaluation of the worthiness or rightness of the conflict for an assessment of its overall significance.  To show that you are really, really for being in Iraq, you have to say all sorts of untenable things about how epic and “cosmic” and elemental the struggle is and how central Iraq is to the struggle.  The Iraq war can’t just be the right war–it has to also be the most important front in the most important war ever fought by anybody ever.  To show that you are really, really against being in Iraq, you have to say how it will bring ruin to every house and cause the sun to darken in shame.  The immorality and injustice of the war are no less real when the war is not also the beginning of some dramatic contraction of American power.   

Iraq illustrates why hegemony is a bad idea in principle on moral, constitutional and strategic grounds, not proof that America is somehow suddenly in decline as a world power.  Viewed for the long term, hegemony does not endure in any case, but interventionism seems the surest way to make sure that whatever predominance America has had will vanish much more rapidly.  This is something that has never made much sense to me about interventionism.  The people who support interventionist foreign policy claim to taking pride in having America as the predominant power in the world, but theirs is the pride of the impatient child or Madeleine Albright: “What’s the point of having this superpower you keep talking about if we never use it?”  Smart strategists who want to keep their country on top first of all don’t talk about how predominant their country is (they would rather downplay the disparity of power most of the time and avoid encouraging rivalry or envy), and they certainly wouldn’t go around upsetting the status quo that keeps their country on top.  What hegemons don’t do, if they want to remain hegemons, is to start preaching revolution and starting wars.  Iraq signals danger for the hegemony only if Washington tries to imitate this war in the future.          

The National Journal article, for its many flaws, captured an important aspect of the foreign policy debate: the overwhelming consensus that American hegemony was endangered but was obviously desirable and something worth preserving.  The positions in the debate might be summed up this way:

Neoconservative: We are the only ones with the clarity and understanding to run the world properly, and if we ever weaken in our resolve for one moment we will all die or be enslaved by Islamofascists.

Interventionist (Liberal): Running the world requires cooperation with international institutions and an increased awareness of the interdependency and complexity of the world.  Every ailing chicken is our concern.  We have to care a lot about that chicken, too.

Realist: Everyone else is too ideological to run the world, but we will run the world through effective diplomacy, bipartisanship and a willingness to acquiesce in totally pointless wars from time to time to show the world our “leadership.”

Libertarian: The world will run itself–spontaneous order, baby!

Paleoconservative: Running the world is for fools who don’t know anything about history.  We can’t run the world and we shouldn’t try.  If we try, we will destroy ourselves or become slaves to our government.

As a veteran of the George Wallace campaign on the American Independent Party line in 1968, Mr. Viguerie certainly knows how to make mischief for the major parties. Back then, the Wallace candidacy badly harmed the candidacy of Democrat Hubert Humphrey; 40 years later, a third-party crusade on the right would do far more damage to the Republican nominee. The same Republicans who encouraged (and financed) Green candidate Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004 just might find themselves facing the business end of a spoiler campaign in November 2008.  The most appropriate vehicle is the Constitution Party, a far-right, theocratic outfit that claims to be the biggest of the nation’s third parties. ~Joe Conason

Of course, theocratic isn’t really an accurate description of the Constitution Party.  Yes, there are some Theonomists running around out there who vote CP, but my impression has always been that it is a group of Christian conservatives who actually think the Constitution says what it says.  I can see how this might seem frightening to some, but theocratic?  Not really.  The good folks of the CP are very keen on Scripture, to put it mildly, and some might say that they treat the Constitution as if it were Scripture, but I suppose I would tend to prefer people who take the fundamental law of the government that way rather than treating it as if it were toilet paper.  In the odd event that Ron Paul does not win the GOP nomination, I will be pleased to support the Constitution Party in ’08.

Some wags say the party is hopelessly divided over issues ranging from abortion and Iraq to gas prices and immigration. ~David Hill

If you ask me, the problem with Republicans and abortion is not that the party is “hopelessly divided” but that they’re all together too willing to overlook fundamental differences in pursuit of having a “strong” and “electable” candidate who promises to torture and bomb as many foreigners as possible.  If you were to ask me again, I would say that the party is not divided about Iraq all that much and the number of Republicans for whom Iraq is a deal-breaker is (unfortunately) fairly small.  The problem the GOP has is not too much disagreement and fractiousness over Iraq, but a mind-killing conformity on the one policy issue where they are as wrong as can be.  The one question where the GOP is “hopelessly divided” is on immigration, since the party apparatus is for lots of it in whatever form it might take and the constituents are by and large not.  Mr. Bush and the Senate GOP have resolved this division through total collapse and surrender to the forces of amnesty.

The fact that, say, India and Brazil “don’t hesitate to assert narrow national interests that often have little to do with Washington’s agenda” tells us very little about whether America’s headed for a long-term slide, any more than the mere existence of France, Austria, Spain and Prussia spelled Gibbonesque doom for the eighteenth-century Britain. ~Ross Douthat

Agreed.  The National Journal piece is unpersuasive, since it takes as its point of departure the fantasy that being the “lone superpower” has entailed being able to rule the world and dictate the policy priorities of all countries.  India and Brazil assert “narrow national interests” (as opposed to the broad national interests of another country?), and this is different from the past…how exactly?  It is not the assertion of their national interests that is notable, but that both countries are now relatively much wealthier and more developed than they were even 15 years ago.  Their disagreements with the U.S. matter more to us today, because they have more significance in the world than they did at the end of the Cold War.  This is a new situation.  It is not inevitably a path to decline, unless successive administrations mismanage the situation so badly that we fail to turn the rise of these countries to our advantage.  This rise of India and Brazil is why Americans have started paying much more attention to both and why Washington has been trying to butter up both of them with different kinds of incentives (lower duties on ethanol for some, nuclear technology for others). 

Not that long ago, India and Brazil used to be stalwart NAM states that viewed U.S. policies with tremendous suspicion and kept themselves at a distance.  Now that they are aspiring to higher, regional power status themselves, they are finding points of agreement and mutual benefit, as well as points of conflict.  This is what some call “international relations.”   

What is interesting about Indo-American relations is not how fraught or difficult they are, but how much more often India and America are cooperating (two Presidents have now visited India after exactly zero had visited previously).  Under old Congress governments, this would have been unlikely.  Under Manmohan Singh and a Congress chastened by a decade of BJP rule, it is now not that surprising.  Arguably, the rise of a wealthier, stronger India that has some real pro-American tendencies is good news for American power, provided that Washington knows how to handle this changing situation.  If Mr. Bush’s treatment of an emboldened Europe is any indication of how Washington responds to changing international realities, I wouldn’t hold my breath that the government will know how to correctly bind India to the U.S. 

According to National Journal, now that this imagined ability to rule the world by diktat is supposed to be ending, it’s all downhill from here.  Well, this is, to put it mildly, silly.  The “rise of China” didn’t spring out of nowhere–it has been happening for my entire lifetime (or, to take a Zhou En-Lai-like perspective, the apparent rise began in 1945 but it still remains too early to tell at this point whether China is actually rising or falling), which would be the same period during which America has continued to be the predominant power in the world.  Everything depends on knowing how to bind strong allies to oneself, divide hostile powers and set them against each other and wield one’s own power in a limited, conservative fashion.  If there was broad public consensus that the Iraq war was still a great idea and there were people advocating that we engage in a lot more such wars, we might start prophesying an age of decline.  The healthy response of the public to regard this war as rather mad and pointless at this point is a good sign that there will not be another such wasteful, useless, power-depleting display for some time.

One point where the article is least persuasive is when it talks about Venezuela:

That Chavez feels free to constantly bait Washington and attempt to revitalize Fidel Castro‘s populist socialist revolution in Latin America is a testament to perceived U.S. weakness.

Viewed another way, the correct way, giving Chavez all the rope he wants to hang himself (and ruin Venezuela in the process) seems to be a confirmation of just how irrelevant and unthreatening Chavez and Chavismo really are.  Venezuela is basically a Latin American Zimbabwe, but with oil instead of agriculture as the source of the wealth that the ruling clique will exploit until the system collapses, and it will continue to descend into the depths of the basket-case nightmare states of the world.  People let Mugabe say and do what he wants because he is impotent beyond his borders; Washington puts up with Chavez’s bloviating and mockery because I think they know that he isn’t the dire threat that the Santorums and Romneys of the world try to make him out to be.

The one part of the article that’s really worth reading is the Luttawak section.  (Luttawak doesn’t buy the decline theory, and he also says that we should ignore the Near and Middle East as much as possible–he’s two for two this month!)  Luttawak is mostly talking about underlying structural strengths and not at these accidental ups and downs.  The section after that is marred in a number of ways.  Yes, Constantine XI probably did have a sense that the “scales of history hung in the balance” in May 1453, since an important strain in Byzantine religious ideology held that the fall of the empire would coincide with the end of the world.  Gavrilo Princip was not a “Bosnian nationalist” for two simple reasons: he was a Serbian nationalist, and there is no such thing as the Bosnian “nation.” 

The article is also somewhat interesting for including a Kagan quote that captures the paranoia and irrationality of the prominent neocons better than anything I have seen lately:

“That worries me more than anything,” Kagan said, “because already we’re seeing Iraq treated like a political football even though our very existence could be at risk….”

Our very existence is at risk…from Iraq?  What is it that threatens our very existence?  Kagan has no idea.  This is just the sort of alarmist stuff they have become so accustomed to saying that they probably don’t even know what they mean at this point.  This is crazy stuff.

Matt Yglesias makes the solid point that ought to be much more obvious to most people than it is that someone’s attitudes towards a country and his opinion of the merits of that country’s government’s foreign policy need not have anything to do with each other.  Arguing for Sarkozy’s relative anti-Americanism (or lack thereof) or Brown’s relative pro-Americanism (or lack thereof) is fairly pointless, since both men can admire things about America (e.g., pro-market economic policies, relative independence of the central bank, etc.) and may even like to visit America (as Brown does) without endorsing any of the policies that most Europeans of all political persuasions find dreadful.  (It is a sobering reality that some of the most robustly pro-Bush European leaders tend to be ex-communists from the old Warsaw Pact–such is the reality of the neocons’ much-vaunted, mythical “New Europe.”)  The problem is definitional: if you consider any criticism of U.S. policy by foreigners proof of their “latent” or “strong” anti-Americanism, you have already confused things hopelessly.  There is virtually no more culturally pro-American people in Europe than the Germans, but just because Germans love stories about the American frontier doesn’t mean that Germans want to endorse the next generation of New Frontier foreign policy. 

It was good for a joke to find out that Richard Perle liked to vacation in the south of France, but this actually helps put his contempt for French foreign policy in perspective.  There are few more triumphalist creatures on the planet than the American tourist abroad, and it stands to reason that someone who routinely vacations in another country will tend to develop–perhaps as some strange coping strategy–distorted opinions about everything related to that country.  In fact, it seems probable that someone who sees a country through the eyes of a tourist, even someone who regularly summers in another country, will probably come away with a far more negative assessment of that country’s government and its policies than someone who has never been there.  Familiarity breeds contempt and all that.  On the other hand, stunningly ignorant, provincial members of the administration share the contempt towards Europeans of their ocean-hopping associates, so sometimes there’s no telling.

I have not yet made up my mind how much I like Natacha Atlas’ music.  Her rendition of the Bollywood-style “Janamaan” (an attempt to render jaan-e-mann)  on one of her newer albums was a surprise (and fairly good).  As it happens, there was also a recent Bollywood release called Jaanemann.

But is it unbearably snobbish or sniffy to note that, whatever one’s own literary credentials, it requires considerable generosity of spirit to grant any of these volumes the title “book” in anything other than the meanest, lowest, technical sense of the term? ~Alex Massie on those Threshold “books”

I don’t think so.  In fact, I think Mr. Massie understates the extent of the generosity it requires.

Abraham Lincoln is thought to have been a kindly Christian driven reluctantly to war.  He was actually an agnostic and an  avid power-seeker who embraced violent measures readily.

George W. Bush is thought to be a kindly Christian driven reluctantly to war.  He is actually a theologically-confused power-seeker who embraces violent measures readily. ~Clyde Wilson

Read the whole post.

But for me, the more-significant op-ed in today’s Journal is by historian Mark Moyar, whose work on the origins of the Vietnam War — based on part on new information from the communist side of the conflict — has been a revelation (here’s a hint: if Indonesia doesn’t immediately pop into your mind when you think about the reason for the Vietnam intervention, you haven’t read your Moyar). ~John Hood

Well, I haven’t read my Moyar, but it makes sense that there would have been concern about the implications for the region of a successful communist takeover of South Vietnam, since Indonesia was at that time under the rule of a partly Marxist and communist-friendly strongman, Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president and dictator (and father of the former President Sukarnoputri, the first elected post-Suharto Indonesian President).  This doesn’t require reading some guy named Moyar, but would require a basic knowledge of the region’s geography and political makeup in the late 1950s and early 1960s.