An interesting quote from an article in Foreign Affairs:
"'Whatever became,' asked The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, 'of the conservative suspicion of untrammeled power...? Where is the conservative belief in limited government, in checks and balances? Burke spins in his grave. Madison and Hamilton torque it up, too.' Washington, Hertzberg argued, should voluntarily relinquish its power and forgo hegemony in favor or a multipolar world in which the United States would be equal with and balanced by other powers.
"No one can doubt the utility of checks and balances, deployed domestically, to curb the exercise of arbitrary power. Setting ambition against ambition was the framers' formula for preserving liberty. The problem with applying this approach in the international arena, however, is that it would require the United States to act against its own interests, to advance the cause of its power competitors -- and, indeed, of power competitors whose values are very different from its own. Hertzberg and others seem not to recognize that it simply is not realistic to expect the United States to permit itself to be checked by China or Russia."
Hertzberg's argument is one that I've been pushing for weeks, and it disappoints me to see it so well-refuted. So much for idealism, never mind trying to get neo-cons to adhere to some historically coherent version of their ideological namesake.
[momentary vitals]
mood - Bored!
track - The White Stripes, 'Seven Nation Army'
text - "Why the Security Council Failed." Foreign Affairs [link]
