Call me crazy, but I think Bob Costas’s interview of George W. Bush has been way more enlightening and substantive than what you typically see when people interview politicians. No horse race stuff, no goofy gotchas — just serious questions about the US-China relationship and the conflict in Georgia along with, of course, some stuff about sports thrown in. If you could see that kind of attitude brought to Meet The Press, I think it’d be a good thing.

What’s more, to his credit faced with serious questions Bush mostly gave serious, reasonably impressive answers (UPDATE: Of course there was the “I don’t see America having problems” moment, but still…) . Still, someone should really make sure that all prominent U.S. officials can say “Dmitry Medvedev” as it was a bit odd watching Bush twist and turn to try to avoid using his name.

Robert H. Reid for the Associated Press: “Iraq’s foreign minister insisted Sunday that any security deal with the United States must contain a ‘very clear timeline’ for the departure of U.S. troops.”

Appeasement!

Or, look, jokes aside how about if we were to respond to this by . . . negotiating a very clear timeline for the departure of U.S. troops from Iraq? I understand that the geostrategists of the American right are loathe to abandon their neoimperial fantasies but surely the cynical political opportunists of the conservative movement can see the appeal of declaring victory.

Tom Friedman’s column on Denmark and energy policy over the weekend tried to get at a difficult to express point. Roughly speaking, in America when energy gets expensive quality of life declines. And Denmark has adopted policies that make energy expensive. Ergo, you might conclude that in Denmark quality of life is low. But in fact, Denmark is a rich and happy society in which people enjoy a great quality of life. The reason is that cheap energy over a prolonged period of time doesn’t buy you happiness — it buys you infrastructure that’s adapted to wasteful use of energy.

Denmark, by contrast, some time ago adopted policies aimed at promoting energy efficiency and conservation and, consequently, has an infrastructure that’s well-adapted to energy being expensive. Not only does that make Denmark greener than the United States but it also makes Denmark much less vulnerable to energy supply shocks than the United States is. In America, though, energy companies have traditionally had a lot of political power and the general thrust of our policies is to encourage lavish energy consumption and thus we have a waste-friendly infrastructure. I might add to what Friedman says that while converting to a more efficient model would certainly cost money in the short-run, that you ought to put this in the perspective not only of climate change but also of how much of our (costly) foreign policy is driven by a desire to avoid energy price shocks.

Photo by Flickr user jimg944 used under a Creative Commons license

John McCain likes to go in for ferociously anti-Russian rhetoric and has embraced silly anti-Russian ideas, so I wasn’t surprised to see that his rhetoric on the Russia-Georgia conflict involves strongly taking Tblisi’s side. I am, however, a bit curious to learn that he’s decided to make this a campaign issue, with national security adviser and former registered lobbyist for Georgia Randy Scheunemann condemning Barack Obama for moral equivalence. James Poulos is not impressed:

None of which means I don’t have a soft spot for Georgia, love their flag, or support the rule of law and representative government over fiat and autocracy. I do. Nor am I certain that Russia will stop attacking Georgia proper when it should, which as of this writing is today. Even more important, for American purposes, than determining the precise percentage by which Saakashvili is responsible for his own country’s woe is making clear that the McCain campaign’s attempt to cast foreign policy prudence as something only an idiot like Obama would consider is a serious blunder of epic proportions and an embarrassment to thinking people everywhere.

Now of course things get said on the campaign trail that aren’t necessarily indicative of how actual policy would be conducted. But as I’ve written before throughout the past ten years McCain and his supporters have fairly consistently articulated a foreign policy philosophy that seems actively hostile to the idea of prudence. David Brooks’ 1999 pro-McCain article “Politics and Patriotism: From Teddy Roosevelt to John McCain” worried “that we have become a nation obsessed with risk avoidance and safety” and cited McCain as the politician most likely to follow Roosevelt (NB: Eric Rauchway says Brooks and McCain misunderstand Roosevelt) in using “foreign-policy activism and patriotism as remedies for cultural threats he perceived at home.”

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