I’ve written a bit about John McCain apparent ignorance of economic policy, but it’s also worth noting the vacuity of his thoughts on national security. Check out this farce flagged by Kevin Drum and Steve Benen:

John McCain says in almost every stump speech that he knows how to capture Osama bin Laden and that he’d follow the al Qaeda leader to the “Gates of Hell.”

So Washington Wire was wondering, what does McCain know that President Bush and the Pentagon don’t about how to sweep up America’s most elusive enemy.

“One thing I will not do is telegraph my punches. Osama bin Laden will be the last to know,” he said today while riding on the back of his bus between Florida events. In other words: he’s not telling. Why not share his strategy with the current occupant of the White House? “Because I have my own ideas and it would require implementation of certain policies and procedures that only as the president of the United States can be taken.”

On the small issue of fighting al-Qaeda, in short, he has no ideas whatsoever. Instead, he has a silly slogan about the gates of hell. Macho posturing? Check. Ideas about keeping the country safer? Not so much. But he’s virtuous so who cares, right? Plus, though McCain may not know much about fighting al-Qaeda he really loves war which passes for statesmanship these days, I suppose.

I’d like to revisit the false populism issue from Bush’s State of the Union address the other night. Obviously, the Colombia Free Trade pact is hardly the most important thing in the world (Colombia’s just too small for this to make a big impact on the US economy one way or the other), but the claim that “If we fail to pass this agreement, we will embolden the purveyors of false populism in our hemisphere” is an excellent example of the complete lack of strategic thought that characterizes this administration. James Poulos, like me, didn’t understand how Hugo Chavez would be emboldened by our failure to ratify the agreement. Daniel Larison explains:

It’s like this, James: if you push for more neoliberal policies in Latin America, that will magically reduce the popularity of the “false populism” that has flourished on account of the backlash against the last round of neoliberal policies pushed by Washington, whereas if you don’t support those policies “false populism” will run wild. That’s clear, isn’t it?

That’s really it, though. In Bush world, first you set out to do something. Then if that thing seems to not be working out or causing problems, what you need to do is do it again harder. Anything else, after all, would only embolden the bad guys. It’s that simple and it’s that dumb.

Now that I read it, I have a lot of sympathy with the arguments made by Parag Khanna in his “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony” article in The New York Times Magazine. However, in the interests of sobriety it’s worth flagging two important caveats. One is that one shouldn’t understate the extent to which the US/EU/China “big three” is still an unequal triad. The United States is a lot richer than China. We have a much larger and more competent military establishment. And while China is beginning to play a global role, we have much more deeply entrenched relationships with countries in every region of the world — including places like Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in China’s back yard.

Meanwhile the EU, were it a cohesive nation-state, would be an extremely mighty power. But it isn’t one. When Europe acts with common purpose, it’s a very influential player, and it’s every bit America’s equal in certain commerce-related aspects of international relations where this happens, but Europe simply has much less institutional capacity to act in this way than does the United States.

On top of that, the big thing to keep in mind when considering any particular “declinist” thesis about American hegemony is that we’ve actually been on the decline for a good long while. In 1945-46 the U.S. economy completely dominated the world, contributing some absurdly high share of total output. Every other significant country on earth had been completely destroyed by war, and we had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Over time, this dominant position unraveled and Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony, a study of America’s efforts to forge a diplomatic system to continue to get bye in this new world actually came out decades ago. The collapse of the Soviet Union created a kind of illusion of a return to hegemony since international politics had been organized as “USA or USSR” for so long, but all along throughout the postwar period other countries have been gaining in importance.

What happens, I think, is that whenever the United States makes policy blunders such as Vietnam or Iraq, the fact that hegemony has been slowly slipping through our fingertips for decades suddenly becomes apparent. But we’re still the most important country out there, our economy’s still growing in absolute terms, and when our country implements sound policies the whole issue fades into the background.

That said Khanna is fundamentally correct that the United States is not the be-all and end-all of world affairs and that it’s increasingly possible to imagine important diplomatic and commercial endeavors being undertaken that we’re not involved with. As Kevin Drum remarked “it’s a useful article if only because it’s so rare to see foreign policy pieces in the mainstream media that aren’t almost completely America-centric” and it’s fascinating and refreshing to see a take on world affairs that’s not dominated by a “pro-American reformer versus anti-American despot — go!” narrative.