Back To Realism And Modesty

October 1, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under International Affairs 

Andrew Bacevich on how the U.S. has matched financial with foreign policy recklessness:

A season of reckoning is upon us. To say that is not to imply that the United States is now condemned to an irreversible downward spiral. It’s not. It is, however, time for us to clean up our act and to put our own house in order. When it comes to foreign policy, that means restoring a balance between our commitments and the means that we have at hand to meet those commitments.

And that means, above all, revisiting and revising the deeply defective notion of open-ended “global war”–World War IV!–as the proper response to the threat posed by violent Islamic radicalism. We need a new framework for national security strategy, one that junks the global war on terror in favor of an alternative that is affordable, sustainable, and relevant to the variety of challenges that we face. Realism and modesty must become our watchwords.

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