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Scott Payne of the League of Ordinary Gentlemen has engaged me in an email back-and-forth on the winding down of the Iraq War and about the future of American military adventurism. The result is “The “Do Something” Syndrome of American Foreign Policy – An Interview with Dr. James Joyner.”
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Repeating the comment I posted over TLOG:
Walter Russell Mead’s characterization of the different streams in American foreign policy thought is useful in this context. For the last couple of decades both of our major political parties have been dominated by Wilsonians and Hamiltonians (optimistic idealist internationalists and optimistic realist mercantilists). Both of these schools favor intervention. The other schools (Jeffersonian and Jacksonian) tend to be both pessimistic and non-interventionist. Since by my reckoning James is a Jacksonian with some Jeffersonian inclinations and I’m a Jeffersonian, it’s not surprising that both of us would be chary of foreign interventions.
