The article is quite explicitly isolationist, but that doesn't mean they're wrong about the motivations behind what they call the "grand strategy". I looked at the book they mentioned (_The Grand Chessboard_ by Zbigniew Brzezinski) and it seems to jibe with their argument. I don't know if those views are shared by the rest of the US foreign policy establishment; I'd be interested in what Gautam Mukunda has to say about it.
Ronnie N. Carpio Me: They aren't. Well, it's complicated. Advance warning - everything I write below will be very telegraphic. The real argument covers 144 pages, I wrote it up as my senior thesis, and it's in very, very, very great detail. Since I spent a year and a half of my life exploring this topic, it's a little difficult for me to condense it and still preserve the flavor. Whatever I write will be grossly oversimplified. Some people in the establishment sort of share them - most do not. The views are in general very unpopular. The most prominent person to share those views is Paul Wolfowitz (I think) although he has sort of disavowed his agreement with them. But I should add that I do, to some extent. I don't want other Great Powers to emerge, because the historical legacy of multiple Great Powers is that very bad things happen - lots of wars and tensions between them and the inevitable rise of a new and aggressive power that disrupts the international system. The natural state of the international system is hegemony - it is the only stable configuration and the one that is best for everyone involved, because the hegemon provides public goods (collective security, free trade, protection against financial crises, the lender of last resort, and so on) that can only be done by a hegemon. When you have a hegemon you have peace, stability, economic growth, and (when the hegemon is democratic, like Great Britain or the United States) the slow spread of freedom and democracy. When you _don't_ have a hegemon, you get constant warfare, economic problems, and the collapse of democracies that are overstressed by the international situation. See Robert Gilpin's superb _War and Peace in World Politics_ for an exploration of this topic from an economic standpoint, or you can ask me to e-mail you a copy of my senior thesis for a psychological and philosophical approach that reaches similar (but not identical) conclusions. But there are degrees to this argument. In particular, it's leavened by the presence of liberal democracy. I would be much more comfortable with a world in which liberal democracies approached the (democratic) hegemon than I would be one where dictatorships did. Thus I oppose greater Chinese defense spending, but I favor greater European defense spending. The fact that I think that the world is best served if there is no near-peer to the American military doesn't mean that I think that European militaries should be _useless_, which is what they are perilously close to becoming. Europe could double its military spending and effectiveness and still not even approach the United States. It _should_ do that. What I (and many other American commentators) object to is a Europe that "free rides" on American efforts - that makes little or no effort to help in the provision of collective security or other public goods - but seems to spend a great deal of effort hindering American attempts to do the same, or criticizing the way we choose to do so without offering any useful alternatives or (ever) offering to help do the job. Even more troublesome, I think, is the apparent belief of most leftist elites (but, it seems clear to me, _not_ the vast majority of the populations of nations ranging from Britain and Australia to Germany and Spain) that if, for example, European interests are threatened (as in Bosnia and Kosovo) the US should act, taking the overwhelming majority of the risks and burdens. If _global_ interests are threatened, the US should act, again taking the overwhelming majority of the risks and burdens (see the Gulf War). But if American interests are directly attacked (9/11, or the acquisition of WMD by terrorist states) then we should either do nothing, or act only after getting the consent of other nations - who will, again, do little to actually _help_ once things get difficult. This is, to me, a problem, and completely unacceptable. So it's not that the US is trying to encourage parity with other states. It's not, and if it is, it should stop. Nothing could be worse for both the US and the world. But a constant thread of American foreign policy for _57 years_ has been urging every other Western country to spend more on defense. We have _never_ shifted from that position. So it's impossible to argue that we've been trying to get the European states to become ineffectual. We've been making great efforts to procure exactly the opposite result. So, short summary - there is no consensus on any of these things in the foreign policy establishment. Some think it would be good for other countries to become peers of the US (although this is very uncommon). The mainstream view, to the extent there is one, is that Europe should spend a lot more on defense. A few people on the other side of the spectrum want things to stay the way they are. My own view is that the other Western countries can, and should, spend more on defense and do a great deal more to take up the burdens of providing collective goods, without in the least blurring the status hierarchy or weakening an American hegemony that is, in the long run, the best thing the international system has going for it for _everyone_ involved, not just the US. Actually, one final point - one of my mentors, Sam Huntington, is perhaps the most prominent single proponent of the argument that American hegemony is good for everyone _but_ the US - that paying the costs of hegemony hurts the American economy while providing good things for everyone else. So he thinks we should back off and let other countries gain power, _even though_ it would almost certainly be bad for the regions where they do that. At least, I think that's what he believes. His view probably best reflects the mainstream in political science - my own, that American hegemony is good for both the world and the US, is quite heretical. Gautam
