I hadn’t seen this until today, but I think it sums up nicely everything that is wrong with our foreign policy establishment today:

On the second point, Quiggin is trying to frame the debate by using the Very Scary Terms “aggressive war” or “non-defensive” war.  Aggressive to whom? One state’s “aggressive” or “non-defensive” war is another state’s “defensive” or “prudential” action.

Of course.  The Japanese invasions of East Asia were really just defensive (and were part of an effort to free East Asia from perfidious colonialism!), after all, and who’s to say whether the invasion of Poland was really aggression?  The German government said that the other side had fired first, and who are you going to believe?  Come to think of it, one state’s experience of brutal conquest is another state’s war of liberation.  

During WWI, Germans cultivated the “ideas of 1914,” chief among them being the belief that they were engaged in a purely defensive war.  They would be pleased to know that Drezner would agree with them.  Likewise, our invasion of Mexico was really just “retaliation” for Mexican “aggression,” and our conquest of the Philippines was a “prudential” response to the crazy Filipino notion that they should have an independent country, which was clearly a very dangerous idea for them to have.  Hundreds of thousands of them had to die before they learned to stop being so aggressive.