The Decline of the American War Hawk

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/the-decline-of-the-american-war-hawk/284340/

?n2a0vv

***SNIP

So what's going on?

"What’s happening can be more accurately described this way: Americans have lost faith in the high politics of global affairs," Brooks hypothesizes. "They have lost faith in the idea that American political and military institutions can do much to shape the world. American opinion is marked by an amazing sense of limitation—that there are severe restrictions on what political and military efforts can do."

Wait.

What on earth is "amazing" about that?

There are, in fact, "severe restrictions on what political and military efforts can do." How could anyone argue otherwise, much less express surprise at that assertion? U.S. political efforts cannot induce North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. The U.S. military could not prevent sectarian violence in Iraq during the aughts.

The War on Drugs cannot defeat the cartels.

Is the reality of these severe restrictions really in dispute? And is perceiving them really something Americans have just started to do? The World War II generation, darlings of national-greatness conservatives and neoconservatives alike, showed that they "sensed" the "severe restrictions on what political and military efforts can do" at Yalta, and later at the 38th parallel. A generation later, the limits of political and military efforts were on display in Vietnam and Cambodia.

[sibelian]

1. I think you already know the answer to your questions, xchrom.

[xchrom]

2. ...

[truebluegreen]

3. What's amazing is that Americans are finally "getting" it.

Thank Dog.