America's Future in the World

More reporting on the strains the occupation is placing on our troops. The absence of a long term plan is obvious to our voters and our enemies.

If you've been reading me regularly you know I'm a regular reader of Defense and the National Interest. It's written by traditional (pre-Karl Rove regime) conservatives so I agree with their foreign policy and hate their domestic advice. Even when I disagree I always learn something new.

They have a new post about long term strategy. It's really very optimistic. If you believe that America's ideals (Democracy, crass capitalism, human rights and trashy pop culture) are the birthright of humanity then you believe that our enemies abroad are doomed. The PC phrase for this is "global democratization." Our enemies are fighting the tide. Nations accepting global democratization (Europe, east Asia, Latin America) have mostly prospered. The alternative is stagnation and poverty. If our enemies get weaker every year we should maintain a strong defense and show great hesitation before intervening abroad. A Cold War with our enemies is ideal. Read How American Can Prosper: it does a much better job than I can.

The only way to stop the invasion of global democratization is to centralize control of the media and the economy. This is economic suicide and can't work without steady oil income. Read up on Thomas Friedman's First Law of Petropolitics. The only anti-American tyrannies prospering have steady oil income. Islamic terrorism thrives because they get spare petro-dollars (and I do mean US dollars). This isn't a long term strategy for them: oil fields always decline and high prices aren't stable. Anything we do to tamp down demand forces the terrorists to get day jobs.

I'm a bigger supporter of spreading our ideals. My work gets republished in Japan and Poland, but not Russia and Saudi Arabia.