Someone recently proposed a policy for a "coalition of nuclear powers" (USA, France, England, Russia, Israel) that sounded pretty good.

As I recall the policy was "We can have them, and nobody else can. Any other country that attempts to acquire nuke capability will have a glowing hole where their facility used to be.

Somehow I can't see the Democrats agreeing with that. Preemtive surrender seems more their game.

Ray -- With the exception of Israel, that's pretty much the nonproliferation regime. It has not been an outstanding success.

The Democratic party will not prove itself serious until it is willing to kill America's enemies (not just hopped-up Somalis and Haitians).

And if something is believed to be an eventuality, then what would they do about Pakistan and North Korea right NOW? None of the echoes has given any idea.

"Muscular Multilateralism"? I guess that means the U.S. provides the muscle and the rest the multilateralism.

These guys really crave Euro-blessings.

It also means that we should continue to take our chances with some potentially dangerous totalitarians who have demonstrated their capacity for ruthless and reckless actions by tolerating (appeasing) them, as we have prior to 9/11. With the exception of Liebermann and Gephardt the remaining 7 dwarfs have been fairly clear on that.

Genecis: Appeasement runs in both parties. To take the most recent examples, the Bush administration is currently appeasing tyrants in several nations that abut Afghanistan, and it should go without saying that those business interests that are closest to the administration have a long, long history of cozying up to dictators, all in the service of Mammon. Beyond this, a fair portion of the "potentially dangerous totalitarians" in the world are American products anyway--Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, etc. Their manufacture is a bipartisan effort. I'd say, after all, that Al Qaeda was a Republican project, but the war in Afghanistan has roots in the Carter administration...

OJ: "Had and used WMD?" Bill Hicks had a wonderful joke regarding the first Iraq war:

[Impersonating government press liason]: "Iraq...incredible weapons, awesome weapons."

[Unnamed questioner]: "How do we know that?"

[Press liason]: "We looked at the receipt."

The short point of it being: your beloved President Reagan's administration is partly (though not entirely) responsible for those WMDs (actually more like WSDs) that Hussein _did_ have. Were Republican adminstrations, then or now, ever really interested in ridding the world of WMDs, they could just as well turn off the spigot.

Of course, and just as an aside, the evidence is rather convincing at this point that WMDs hadn't existed in Iraq for upwards of 10 years.

I can't see anything in the Traub article, as quoted, that doesn't make complete sense. Iraq was hardly a "side issue" to Iraqis, but to Americans, the national security implications of the most recent Iraq war are minimal compared to any number of other hotspots not as high on the neocon hit list. In the meantime, a large portion of the world, whether totalitarian or democratic, now sees the one remaining superpower as a threat. In the long term, this will not be good for America.

M:

Why?

M. - one appeases that which one fears. The US is not afraid of Turkmenistan.

Mr. Hamlen: A touching homily, but I fail to see how it applies. How, exactly, did the Clinton administration (the only Democratic administration to preside after Saddam's fall from the rank of "ally" conferred by every administration since the early '60's) "appease" Hussein? By bombing his country regularly for 8 years? By imposing a program of sanctions which, coupled with the aforementioned bombings, is likely responsible for the complete lack of WMDs found there post Bush-war?

Genecis seems to believe that this is equivalent to "tolerating" his regime, which is then equated with "appeasement." I find this entire line of reasoning devoid of reason: given the dozens of totalitarian regimes operating in the world today, by Genecis' line of thinking we are actively tolerating them if we are not attacking them. This is ludicrous. We pick the battles that most need fighting; for eight years of the Clinton administration, Hussein was not one of those battles. I would tend to agree, although I would also fail to rank the battles they did choose to fight very highly, either.

I assume that Genecis doesn't want to think about how we are actively _aiding_ totalitarian regimes, which is another thing altogether. My point regarding Turkmenistan (and Kazakhstan, etc.) is not that we aren't "afraid" of them (although these monsters do have a way of growing with time--see Al Qaeda, Baathist Iraq, etc.--so perhaps we should be). It is that we are actively _doing harm_ by _supporting_ them--we sold arms and sent "advisors" to these countries. We claim to oppose evil in some places while abetting it in others. I find this objectionable. Do you?

Oh, and OJ, in answer to your simple question, a typically verbose response:

Because history is rife with examples of superpowers that were viewed as threats by most of the rest of the world and were subsequently not superpowers anymore.

Because a central tenet of postwar American diplomacy, and a brilliant one, was that even if America could and would largely act in its own interests, it would work through an international structure wherever and whenever possible in order to give other nations a stake in those interests. This tenet was adopted (some say) precisely because of an awareness of the above historical observation regarding world superpowers. My own, amateur observation is that this approach usually worked. We (meaning the Bush administration and the "conservatives" that dominate it) are now abandoning it, facetious "coalitions of the willing" notwithstanding. It matters little which part of the world you look at--Europe, Africa, Arab nations, South and Southeast Asia--anywhere from 70-90% of the population is opposed to U.S. foreign policy and sees the U.S. as a threat. The correctness or incorrectness of this view does not matter; what matters is the question of when the world truly will determine that we are the common enemy. If and when that occurs (and I believe that the first rumblings have already been felt), our decline as a superpower will have commenced.

I do not want this to happen. I believe in the "American experiment" and I want it to spread. I am therefore highly alarmed by recent American foreign policy. The arguments follow from there.

M:

Name one that lost its empire when viewed as a threat. They lose their empires when they cease to be threatening.

M. Bulger:

I will take that 90% opposed to US foreign policy seriously when they stop buying American goods and services, and stop begging Americans to buy theirs.

As the US' status as hyperpower was and is derived from the US' economic dominance of the world, a total boycott of American trade would surely be the most effective way to bring the US to heel.