RUNNING AN EMPIRE
Gideon Rose believes there’s more to intervention than fighting wars and that we’re not doing a very good job of administering what he terms our “de facto empire.” While I reject his characterization of our paternalism as “empire,” he has some good points. Many of us resisted peacekeeping and nation building in the 1990s. However, like it or not, that mission will be one in which we’re increasingly engaged. We might as well get good at it.
Besides getting used to it, we’d also best learn how to keep “Congress & the Bean Counters” from turning it into a Camp Swampy of ‘pork & bureaucracy’.
Done well, it will show the best we can be. Done ‘as usual’, it would rightfully become the butt of ridicule, mostly deserved.
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