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This article, "Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America", published in the NY Review of Books is a cogent exegesis of our current predicament. It's written by William Pfaff, who has been called the Walter Lippman for our age.

On first reading, Pfaff's approach might be considered isolationist. But, I think it raises fundamental questions about the U.S. and its relationship to the rest of the world. The article focuses on our beliefs that we are unique and virtuous and that our kind of democracy is what the world needs. 'Belief' is the right word to use here as Pfaff feels that our Calvinist heritage is what has caused us to believe that we are building a new and better world. These belief is so ingrained that it causes us to leave some fundamental matters unquestioned and to make some basic, but faulty, assumptions about the world and our place in it.

Some excerpts:

The United States today is the leading world power by many if not most conventional measures. With the largest economy and the largest and most advanced arsenal of weapons, it is acknowledged as such and exercises wide influence. However, it is in the nature of political relationships that an effort to translate a position of material superiority into power over others will provoke resistance and may fail, possibly in costly ways. In the present case, it implies the subordination of others, notably the other democracies that are expected to accept US leadership in a new international order, and may resist this for a variety of well-founded reasons.

Today's major democracies are all advanced societies; in some ways, in social standards, distribution of wealth and opportunity, the provision of universal health care and free or affordable education, and certain technologies and industries, many are more advanced than the United States. They are willing to cooperate with the United States in matters of common concern, as they have for a half-century, but not to subordinate themselves to Washington. They are aware that this administration's effort to establish a system of Central Asian and Middle Eastern client states (the "Greater Middle East") has already produced two ruinous and continuing wars, and worsened situations in Lebanon, Gaza and the Palestinian territories, and Israel.

Elephants are also known to trample people, uproot crops and gardens, topple trees and houses, and occasionally go mad (hence, "rogue nations"). Americans, moreover, are carnivores. The administration has attacked the existing international order by renouncing inconvenient treaties and conventions and reintroducing torture, and arbitrary and indefinite imprisonment, into advanced civilization. Where is the stability that Mandelbaum tells us has been provided by this American military and political deployment? The doomed and destructive war of choice in Iraq, continuing and mounting disorder in Afghanistan following another such war, war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, as well as between Hamas and Fatah, accompanied by continuing crisis in Palestine, with rumbles of new American wars of choice with Iran or Syria, and the emergence of a nuclear North Korea —all demonstrate deep international instability.

American efforts to deregulate the international economy and promote globalization, whatever its benefits, have been the most powerful force of political, economic, social, and cultural destabilization the world has known since World War II, providing what closely resembles that "constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation" forecast by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.

he new American militarism, as Andrew Bacevich calls it, encourages reliance on obsolete notions about power based on quantitative military advantage. Power now comes primarily from economic, financial, industrial, political, and cultural assets and influence, in all of which the United States is vulnerable.^[7] If American international hegemony is considered a threat, there are political and economic ways for international society to check it, not to speak of unconventional forms of military resistance, which have been employed with success in Iraq, in Lebanon last summer, and, much earlier, in Vietnam.

War tends now to be driven by nationalism and religious or political ideology. Nationalism and communalism, the defense of a community's identity and autonomy, remain eminently powerful political forces, as in Vietnam three decades ago. The recent history of Lebanon, Iraq, Chechnya, the Palestinian intifadas, failed states, the memory of the Vietnam War, and the specter of rogue nations possessing nuclear weapons combine to make military interventions in the non-Western world an unattractive prospect.

"To have real self-government, a people must understand what that means, want it, and be willing to sacrifice for it." Many nondemocratic systems are inherently unstable. "But so what?" he (George Kennan) asked. "We are not their keepers. We never will be." (He did not say that we might one day try to be.) He suggested that nondemocratic societies should be left "to be governed or misgoverned as habit and tradition may dictate, asking of their governing cliques only that they observe, in their bilateral relations with us and with the remainder of the world community, the minimum standards of civilized diplomatic intercourse."

With the cold war over, Kennan saw no need for the continuing presence of American troops in Europe, and little need for them in Asia, subject to the security interests of Japan, allied to the United States by treaty. He deplored economic and military programs that existed in "so great a profusion and complexity that they escape the normal possibilities for official, not to mention private oversight." He asked why the United States was [in 1992] giving military assistance to forty-three African countries and twenty-two (of twenty-four) countries in Latin America. "Against whom are these weapons conceivably to be employed?... [Presumably] their neighbors or, in civil conflict, against themselves. Is it our business to prepare them for that?"

Yet little sign exists of a challenge in American foreign policy debates to the principles and assumptions of an international interventionism motivated by belief in a special national mission. The country might find itself with a new administration in 2009 which provides a less abrasive and more courteous version of the American pursuit of world hegemony, but one still condemned by the inherent impossibility of success.

The intellectual and material commitments made during the past half-century of American military, bureaucratic, and intellectual investment in global interventionism will be hard to reverse. The Washington political class remains largely convinced that the United States supplies the essential structure of international security, and that a withdrawal of American forces from their expanding network of overseas military bases, or disengagement from present American interventions into the affairs of many dozens of countries, would destabilize the international system and produce unacceptable consequences for American security. Why this should be so is rarely explained.

The noninterventionist alternative to the policies followed in the United States since the 1950s is to minimize interference in other societies and accept the existence of an international system of plural and legitimate powers and interests. One would think the idea that nations are responsible for themselves, and that American military interference in their affairs is more likely to turn small problems into big ones than to solve them, would appeal to an American public that believes in individual responsibility and the autonomy of markets, considers itself hostile to political ideology (largely unaware of its own), and professes to be governed by constitutional order, pragmatism, and compromise.

A noninterventionist policy would shun ideology and emphasize pragmatic and empirical judgment of the interests and needs of this nation and of others, with reliance on diplomacy and analytical intelligence, giving particular attention to history, since nearly all serious problems between nations are recurrent or have important recurrent elements in them. The current crises in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine-Israel, and Iran are all colonial or postcolonial in nature, which is generally ignored in American political and press discussion.

Political and diplomatic action would be the primary and essential instruments of international relations and persuasion; military action the last and worst one, evidence of political failure. Military deployments abroad would be reexamined with particular attention to whether they might actually be impediments to solutions of the conflicts of clients, or reinforce intransigence in the complex dynamics of relations among nations such as the two Koreas, China, Taiwan, and Japan, where lasting solutions can only be found in political settlements between principals.

The United States would not have suffered its catastrophic implication in what was essentially a domestic crisis in Iran in 1979, which still poisons Near and Middle Eastern affairs, since there would never have been the huge and provocative American investment in the Shah's regime as American "gendarme" in the region, compromising the Shah and contributing to the fundamentalist backlash against his secularizing modernization.

Without entering further into what rapidly would become an otiose discussion of the "mights" or "might nots" of the last half-century, one can certainly argue that a noninterventionist United States would not be at war in Iraq today. While obviously concerned about the free flow of Middle Eastern oil, Washington would have assumed that the oil-using states bought their oil on the market and that oil producers had to sell, having nothing else they can do with their oil, and that politically motivated interference in the market by the oil producers would in the mid- and long term fail, as happened after the OPEC oil price rise of 1973.

Israel, with its conventional and unconventional arms, is capable of assuring its own defense against external aggression, if newly aware of the limits of its ability to combat irregular forces. It cannot expect total security without political resolution of the Palestinian question, a problem only it can solve, by withdrawing from the territories to some negotiated approximation of the 1967 border. International engagement would undoubtedly be necessary to a solution, and would willingly be supplied. Forty years of American involvement have unfortunately served mainly to allow the Israelis to avoid facing facts, contributing to radicalization in Islamic society.

"Regime change" is better left to the people whose regime it is, who know what they want, and who will benefit from or suffer the consequences of change.

A hard-headed doctrine concerning the responsibilities of people themselves may seem unacceptable when the CNN audience witnesses mass murder in Darfur, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. However an interventionist foreign policy in which the US aggressively interferes in other states in order to shape their affairs according to American interest or ideology is not the same as responding to atrocious public crimes.

There are limits to the feasibility of humanitarian intervention. It can create its own problems, as nongovernmental groups now acknowledge. Their and UN efforts to feed and support refugees can facilitate aggression by taking the victims off the aggressor's hands, as happened in the initial Yugoslav intervention, where the Security Council limited the UN force to "protection" of civilians while a war of sectarian and territorial aggression was going on.^[10] Eventual military intervention produced the Dayton agreement, which nonetheless left Kosovo and the explosive problem of the Albanian regional diaspora unsettled.

Humanitarian crises are often the current manifestation of intractable historical grievances, as in the former Yugoslavia, and in Rwanda, where the Tutsi, Hamitic cattle-raising people who migrated to the Lake Kivu area some four centuries ago, presumably from Ethiopia, had imposed a form of monarchical and aristocratic rule on the Bantu-speaking Hutus, despite the latter's much greater numbers. German and Belgian colonial authorities left this system as they found it, and it persisted until independence in the 1960s, when the Hutus' bid for democratic power launched the conflicts that followed, culminating in the genocidal upheaval of 1994 against the Tutsis that ended with them once again in power.

This is not, obviously, a situation susceptible to solution by foreign military intervention. However the US Army is pressing for a new Africa Command, possibly based in Djibouti, with "forward-based troops" ready to deal with Africa's "emergence...as a strategic reality" (as Marine General James Jones, departing commander of US forces in Europe, said in December). The 2004 US National Security Strategy declaration identifies "failed states" in Africa as well as "rogue states" as threats to American interests.

US support of the Ethiopian intervention in Somalia, which overturned Islamist rule in that "failed state," together with demands in the US and Europe for military intervention against the Muslim "Arab" tormentors of the Darfur refugees, suggest that in government circles as well as the public mind, the African humanitarian crisis is beginning to be confused with or assimilated to the larger US "war on terror." This is a profound error, and risks setting the United States on a course of endless and fruitless military interventions against Africa's miseries—a "long war" indeed.

History does not offer nations permanent security, and when it seems to offer hegemonic domination this usually is only to take it away again, often in unpleasant ways. The United States was fortunate to enjoy relative isolation for as long as it did. The conviction of Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the country was exempt from the common fate has been succeeded in the twenty-first century by an American determination to fight (to "victory," as the President insists) against the conditions of existence history now actually does offer. It sets against them the consoling illusion that power will always prevail, despite the evidence that this is not true.

we have gone beyond the belief in national exception to make an ideology of progress and universal leadership into our moral justification for a policy of simple power expansion. In that case we have entered into a logic of history that in the past has invariably ended in tragedy.