Pax Americana

A good day for grand strategy pieces. First the Layne/Schwarz piece on the home page and this one from Michael Lind, who's American Way of Strategy should be required reading for anyone interested in the topic.

In Salon today, Lind writes:

Defenders of U.S. hegemony, a group that includes most of the members of the Democratic as well as Republican foreign policy elites, argue that American primacy is necessary to avert what I think of as the Two Spirals -- the spiral of arms races and the spiral of protectionism. According to what is called "hegemonic stability theory," both world peace and world trade depend on a single overwhelmingly powerful country that provides other nations with the public goods of security, market access and a global reserve currency. If the U.S. were unwilling to sacrifice its soldiers and treasure on behalf of the interests of other nations as well as its own, then the other great powers -- in particular, Germany and Russia in Europe and Japan and China in Asia -- would arm themselves to defend their interests, and mutual suspicion might lead to arms races and regional or global war. And if the U.S. were not willing to sacrifice its own industries to export-oriented countries, other nations might abandon the idea of a global economy and the scramble to lock up markets and raw materials might also lead to regional or global war. The geopolitical parade of horribles invoked by America's foreign-policy establishment always leads back to the same grand marshal -- the next world war, Dubyah Dubyah Three.

It would be remarkable indeed if the economic crisis did not provoke an even more wide-ranging appraisal of America's strategic posture.

(AP Photos)