Brilliant essay and I'm impressed not only with your musical tastes, but knowledge and passion for foreign policy issues as well. Overall, I agree that we have steadily slipped toward a more unilateral policy. But I wonder (and this includes the Clinton years - i.e., Yugoslavia - too) whether we are making "good" use of NATO to fulfill our geopolitical interests. Under Clinton and Albright, NATO undertook its first military offensive in its history. I'm aware that the US has been supporting covert operations in many former Soviet countries and that we continue to meddle in the middle east. NATO and the US are currently trying to get a ballistic missile shield in eastern European states (supposedly to protect against Iran nukes). Russia knows exactly why this is going in. Putting all the pieces together, I think a lot of our strategies are about marginalizing potential superpower competition, including Russia, and the Asian block of countries. So far it seems we have been cooperative with NATO toward this goal. As far as the Middle East goes, this is a blatant example of our unilateralism gone into utter despair. Iraq was a cowboy adventure that was immoral and set upon false premises. It has probably been a brake on us undertaking other "pre-emptive" wars on other middle eastern countries in the last couple of years, but I could be wrong. I'm not sure what the overall goal of our military is? The scary thing is that this military machine that seems to drive our foreign policy toward more aggressive postures seems to be becoming independent of political party and more a machine that the elected officials will be driving when they step into office. Obviously Bush rode the machine like a drunk bastard. I'm worried about the machine itself - where are we headed?

	From:	Date:
	Justin	Feb 12, 2008 02:24AM GMTFebruary 12, 2008 02:24:04