Mark Goldberg links to the UN Foundation Insights report from several months ago on strengthening multilateral non-proliferation efforts which concluded that the sort of posture Barack Obama and John Edwards are talking about adopting could be extremely useful.

William Hartung notes that the best deal the Bush administration could get out of the DPRK is worse than the situation they had when they came into office and decided the Agreed Framework was no good so they could just feel free to screw it up (Fred Kaplan’s 2004 article on this fiasco is an eternal must-read). Still, making the deal was the right thing to do, albeit in a too-little, too-late kind of way. It’s got Michael Hirsch asking why we can’t apply the same tactics to Iran.

Chris Hayes tries to take liberal hawks down a peg: “If the Hitchens and Cohen’s and Bermans of the world are so concerned with liberating the oppressed through American force, how come the long-suffering Burmese don’t make the cut?” The trouble with these hypocrisy arguments is that you never know who’s going to take you up on it. Hitchens was gearing up for conflict with China just the other day.

I’ve had more time now to look through Wesley Clark’s book, A Time to Lead. Mostly, it’s a fairly well-written memoir (well ghost-written by Tom Carhart, I suppose) of Clark’s interesting career over the decades. As you get closer to the end and Clark achieves positions of greater responsibility, it shades elegantly into more-and-more engagement with policy issues. One thing it does well is engage in the worthy process of trying to rediscover and reclaim what it was the Clinton administration’s foreign policy record was all about. I worry sometimes that some veterans of that administration seem to have adopted a pretty limited perspective on their own work — something like “Kosovo was good, so we must make sure the UN doesn’t stop us from doing good stuff in the future” but Clark doesn’t do that.

Instead, he takes a solid look at key 1990s-vintage documents like the National Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement, its military companion piece about flexible engagement, and Joint Vision 2010 and nicely sums up the point:

What we had done in practice was justify the idea that a robust military was essential in peacetime. We cpould use these military assets to build relationships, supplement or empower diplomacy, and head off impending conflict as well as to simply go to war. It was a much more actve form of deterrence than we had had before, and some were calling it peacetime engagement or preventive diplomacy.

This gets in the neighborhood of something that’s often been lost in discussions over the past few years, namely that sound leadership of a major power isn’t just about winning wars or supporting the “right” ones, but also about things like avoiding wars and creating circumstances where big dramatic blowups don’t take place. It’s hard for political leaders to get credit for disasters avoided, but that’s really the most important thing to do.

Roger Cohen:

Not least, as America bumped down to earth, “liberal” lost the mantle of political insult most foul. Its place was taken by the pervasive, glib “neocon.”

What’s a neocon? A liberal “mugged by reality,” Irving Kristol said. The reality in question, back then, was communism-as-evil, the centrality of military force, the indispensability of the American idea and much else. But that’s ancient history. The neocons are the guys who gave us the Iraq war.

They’re the guys who, in the words of leftist commentator and blogger Matthew Yglesias, “believe that America should coercively dominate the world through military force” and “believe in a dogmatic form of American exceptionalism” and “favor the creation of a U.S.-dominated ‘universal empire.’ ”

But the term, in these Walt-Mearsheimered days, often denotes more than that. Neocon, for many, has become shorthand for neocon-Zionist conspiracy, whatever that may be, although probably involving some combination of plans to exploit Iraqi oil, bomb Iran and apply U.S. power to Israel’s benefit.

I’m not sure if I’m meant to be included within the scope of those nameless Jew-haters who appear to be criticizing an ideological movement of the American right while actually criticizing a shadowy Zionist conspiracy, but if you’re interested in the post from which Cohen drew those quotations, it’s here and you’ll see that neither Israel nor Zionism actually comes up. Rather, I was attempting a close reading of Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol’s 1996 essay “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” and trying to tease out the implications of its vision of “benevolent hegemony.”

Scott Shane, David Johnston, and James Risen for The New York Times make this one of those days where I regret reading my key blogs before my morning newspaper by reporting a big story “Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations”

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

You’d like to think they’ll feel ashamed, but I really doubt it.

Gershom Gorenberg notes the tension between Bill Clinton’s stance on Jerusalem and Hillary Clinton’s embrace of silly agitprop.

Now, of course, I don’t think anyone really believes that she takes a different view of this question. The problem, though, is that while she thinks pandering in this kind of way to hardliner sentiment will help her get elected, it will also make it quite a bit harder to govern if she ever wants to get involved in peace process matters. This kind of rhetoric makes a difference.