ALWAYS JACKSONIAN:

US military on the move (Jim Lobe, 6/16/04, Asia Times)

"The most serious potential consequences of the contemplated shifts would not be military but political and diplomatic," wrote Kurt Campbell, a former senior Pentagon official now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Celeste Johnson Ward, in a Foreign Affairs article last year. The redeployments, they warned, could be construed as the beginning of a withdrawal from what Rumsfeld last year scornfully called "Old Europe".

And that, in turn, could reinforce traditional isolationist tendencies in the US that, before World War II, sought to prevent Washington from engaging in political "entanglements" with European countries or international institutions in ways that might constrain its freedom of action in the Americas or anywhere else.

Indeed, the repudiation of permanent alliances in favor of "coalitions of the willing" - a major feature of the Bush administration's post-September 11 policies as it was in the Wolfowitz-Libby paper - not only recalls isolationism; it is also entirely consistent with the strategy underlying the proposed redeployments. [...]

This is not surprising, because most of the same people - including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy - who led the drive to war in Iraq remain in charge of implementing the new global strategy.

Writing in the same breath of an imposed Pax Americana and a return to isolationism demonstrates a disregard for coherence.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 16, 2004 9:49 AM