…it has to be good, right Chris?

That elements of the Left are rediscovering their taste for state-building should come as a surprise to no one. That the Left shares this taste with the neo-neocons¹ should also not be very surprising. That the rest of us should, as a result, be all the more skeptical of the entire venture is therefore just natural.

Some of CAP’s intermediate policy goals for Afghanistan seem especially foolhardy:

• Promote a viable Afghan economy that offers realistic opportunities for the Afghan people
• Sharply curb the poppy trade in Afghanistan and the region
• Promote democracy, the rule of law, and human rights in Afghanistan and the region

The second one in particular is a big loser. The other two, at least, are stated fairly limply and aspirationally. Of course, as Christian notes, the devil will be in the details, and we’ll all be able to hash out our differences at length once the Af-Pak review is released for public consumption.

Matt gets it exactly right:

A substantial swathe of policy elites, starting with Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke and George Bush and now evidently including Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers and Barack Obama really do seem to think that saving the firms is the key. That the world as it existed in the years 1996 to 2006 represents some kind of ideal of economic activity, and that they job is to put humpty-dumpty back together again.

I, too, think this disastrous. If there’s one thing we should all agree on, it’s that the course we were on before the financial crisis hit was unsustainable. Now, unlike some Austrian School devotees who think that stimulus is completely counterproductive, my bigger fear is a deflationary spiral, so I understand the need and desire to send electricity through the system to beef up demand. But the end result has to be not a return to prosperity as we once knew it, with buoyant consumer spending being financed by inflows of investment from abroad, but rather something else. All this demand-boosting should be in order to facilitate a softer landing as we readjust our economy and figure out just what this something else is, not a means to turning back the clock.

Up on the main page, we’ve got a monster of an article about David Riesman’s largely forgotten masterwork of sociology, The Lonely Crowd. You hear echoes of the book every so often if you read your Brooks carefully, but by and large, the book’s insights and descriptive vocabulary have largely been lost on our generation.

Douglas Robertson argues that both Brooks (on the right) and Robert Putnam (on the left) largely misunderstand the lessons of The Lonely Crowd, and therefore misapply its theories in each crafting their nostalgic portraits of a bygone American era. This is necessarily so, he argues, because we are all today—Brooks and Putnam included—increasingly cut off from even the possibility of living “inner-directed” lives, and are poorer for it.

The article has many great passages goring sacred cows, and is well worth your time and effort. One of my favorites:

Did not the young American men who fought in the Second World War collectively comprise “the Greatest Generation”?; was not every man Jack of them a virtual Yankee paladin wholly dedicated to his do-or-die crusade to save not only Europe and Japan but the entire world from the menace of totalitarian fascism? Apparently not; rather they were at best, a passel of phlegmatic of Average Joes who had to be roused from their sleepy political torpor into fighting, and who after the war’s conclusion “bring scarcely a trace of moral righteousness into their political participation [and] ‘ain’t mad at nobody.’”

There’s much more where that came from.

Drezner:

Pragmatically, I seriously doubt that the United States can offer anything to get Tehran to halt its nuclear program. This leads to one of two possible decisions: pre-emptive action to delay the program, or accepting the inevitable. Contra Cohen, the most pragmatic thing for the United States to do is to expect nothing fruitful to come from negotiations with Iran — and to (nonviolently) prepare for the contingency of a nuclear Iran.

Yup. As I’ve suggested before, a first step might entail very formally and publicly extending our nuclear shield to Saudi Arabia and Egypt to prevent them from developing nukes of their own. But I’m not sure how the standoff between Israel and Iran would play out, and whether we have any power to avert tragedy there.

Christian Brose on national interests (via a critique of Zakaria’s latest):

The real sticking point is how a Syria or a Russia defines some of its “interests.” Damascus’s desire to dominate Lebanon is not an interest. Nor is Russia’s attempt to create a sphere of influence in its old imperial stomping grounds and prevent sovereign nations from making free choices about their own foreign policies. Such “interests” should be, in Zakaria’s words, “by definition unacceptable.”

I really would like to have a proper discussion about this, so I’ll try to voice my questions in as even-handed a manner as possible: Are geopolitical power plays “by definition unacceptable”? Are spheres of influence a product of a bygone era? And if so, should we be ashamed of the Monroe Doctrine on some level? Finally, and on a somewhat different line of reasoning, is the promotion of democracy a vital national interest for the United States? [Note: not “an interest”, but specifically a “vital national interest”?]

For my part, the more I read the reactions to the Zakaria article, the more I see outlines of the Athens of the Peloponnesian War in today’s United States. Don’t get me wrong: the Athenian arguments for relatively benevolent hegemony are often quite persuasive. And no, I don’t mean to imply that we’ll be slaughtering Melians any time soon. But the danger we find ourselves in right now is that our brightest minds see the United States as a wholly benevolent power and discern no problem with throwing the nation’s weight around to achieve what they deem to be pure goals. They both overestimate America’s ability to achieve these goals, and underestimate how negatively America’s actions come across to the rest of the world. At the end of the day, it’s not about being loved by the world’s tyrants, but rather about managing one’s challenges and preventing the rise of a spunky neo-Sparta (which needn’t even be as fascist as ancient Sparta was) around which the world’s malcontents can rally, causing us bigger headaches than we care to have.