Posted on 12/01/2008 3:24:58 PM PST by limitedgovernment67
Professor John J. Mearsheimer states…
Fortunately, there is a strategy that has proved effective in the past and could serve again today: “offshore balancing.” It’s less ambitious than President Bush’s grand plan to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, but it would be much better at protecting actual U.S. interests. The United States would station its military forces outside the region. And “balancing” would mean we’d rely on regional powers like Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia to check each other. Washington would remain diplomatically engaged, and when necessary would assist the weaker side in a conflict. It would also use its air and naval power to respond quickly to unexpected threats. But—and this is the key point—America would put boots on the ground only if the local balance of power seriously broke down and one country threatened to dominate the others.
It is hardly cynical to base U.S. strategy on a realistic appraisal of American interests and a clear-eyed sense of what U.S. power can and cannot accomplish.
The Democrats have done a good job of portraying Republicans as people who want perpetual war in Iraq. Of course, that couldn’t be more wrong. We can debate the merits of past decisions that have been made — and there’s no doubt that the Bush Administration made some right decisions and some wrong ones, but will undoubtedly be judged as a net negative.
Those in the White House that took us to war were a different breed of Republicans, ones that we have never seen before. These were the intellectual posterity of leftist Leon Trotsky and carried on the far left liberal foreign policy tradition of Woodrow Wilson.
(Excerpt) Read more at policyinaction.com ...
The only long term or short term solution is kill the bad guys and the people that support them.
We don't need to re visit the Clinton policy.
Well, then we should take out Mecca and Medina followed by Qom, Somalia and Yemen. Should issues persist, SA, Pak and Iran should go.
What we need is a discussion of the United States’ national goals and an agreement as to what they are. Then, as much as possible, we need a discussion of the strategies which should be used to reach those goals and the costs of each strategy.
Then we, as a nation, could figure out how to move forward.
That “off-shore balancing” was exactly what the US has been doing since WWII, for the most part. It broke down when every player in the balancing act became unacceptable.
The balancing strategy becomes useless when every side degenerates into ideological enemies of the US and obtains sufficient power to blackmail the world, either through stopping the flow of oil or by developing WMD’s. They become independently dangerous to all their neighbors, and the US. There is no point in balancing a pit of vipers against each other, when they can all attack outwards.
Mearsheimers strategy has been obsolete since the 1980’s.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
So is the middle east, making Mearsheimer's 17th century picture of great power politics hopelessly irrelevant there. Iran is already the dominant power in the middle east, and nobody is balancing them, onshore or off. Instead everyone is watching them get nuclear weapons while sitting on their backsides.
The one being balanced against is the US. Everyone else in the world wants us to lose and go home, simply because they find our power in the world annoying.
Mearsheimer's blind spot has always been the role of ideology and moral differences in world politics. He pretends there aren't any, that all states are the same, rationally seeking power for the sake of greater security for themselves. This is transparently false.
Nothing says right like a leftist internationalist who wants America crippled diplomatically and militarily and who wants a nuclear Iran.
nothing says conservative like a dimwitted college professor engaged in the onannistic notion of “realism” wherein western internationalists presume that everyone will act according to their rules of the game.
And nothing says “real” like an ideology which believes taht setting off a nuclear arms race in the middle east will lead to deterrence rather than a Muslim leader gambling that an America president will be unwilling to respond to a nuclear attack if he cannot properly prove its origin to the standards of the international left.
True conservatives don’t love Islamists more than they love America. True conservative throw Russell Kirk’s 10 principles into the fire.
I just noticed. Real conservatives do not allow their blogs to become bordellos.
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