Gideon Rachman notes that the American Empire fad of 2002-2003 now seems well behind us but he’s got some worries:

Some worry that a world without a dominant “imperial” power will be more dangerous. Who will ensure order? Who will keep the shipping lanes open and set the rules for the global financial system? The idea that all these things will be peacefully settled at the United Nations does not seem realistic.

I think it’s worth trying to draw a few distinctions here. Most of all, the idea of the United States acting in an “imperial” manner, shouldn’t be conflated with the United States acting through military force. The United States can engage in imperial, but non-military conduct. We could, for example, do our best to strangle the the economy of Cuba unless it adopts a form of government we approve of and return the property of the previous dictatorship’s elite. But we can also act in a way that’s military, but not imperial; stationing troops in West Germany to deter a Soviet invasion. Or we might act in response to acts of direct aggression perpetrated against the United States, as when the Taliban was working hand-in-glove with al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda was blowing up America’s largest office towers and so we worked to help anti-Taliban Afghans overthrow the Taliban government.

Similarly, the idea of things being settled at the United Nations isn’t the same as them being settled peacefully. One thing the United Nations can do is authorize the use of military force to eliminate a threat to world peace. Another thing the United Nations Charter does is recognize the inherent right of nations to engage in individual or collective self-defense.

The specter of imperialism raises its head pretty specifically when the United States proposes that we ought to be able to launch unilateral military strikes against countries that aren’t attacking anyone else. Since the United States obviously doesn’t endorse a general right of countries to engage in that sort of war-fighting (if India, say, decided to take advantage of political problems in Pakistan to invade or if Syria mounted a preventive attack on Israel’s WMD facilities), we’re envisioning not a world of American leadership, but a world of American domination. And that’s what’s not working for us.

It’s worth being clear about this, because I think the general trajectory Rachman’s argument takes is basically right. America will soon be experiencing a period of war-weariness where there’ll be a general desire to “do less” in the world. But if one defines the alternative to the Bush/Cheney brand of imperial domination purely in terms of “doing less” then inevitably the time will come once again when it seems necessary and appropriate to “do something” and, indeed, it often is a good idea to do something. But America playing an active role in the world doesn’t mean America seeking to dominate the world, and avoiding a quest for domination doesn’t mean eschewing the use of military force in all circumstances — it means working through legitimate institutional mechanisms.

By most accounts I’ve heard, Vladimir Putin and his cronies would have no problem retaining power in Russia even without this kind of banning of protests and arresting of protestors, but I guess the idea is to frighten people.

I suppose I agree with what he’s saying, and I certainly understand the logic of using former military officers as spokespeople on national security issues, but I’m really not sure General Ricardo Sanchez is the best front man for an Iraq-related PR drive. I’m just trying to think of what I’d be writing if the Republicans were putting this guy out front and center to be their spokesman. I think what Spencer Ackerman said back in October still applies.

It looks as if we’re failing in Afghanistan as well. Apparently, the terms of debate are essentially the same as those in Iraq. On the one hand, are people who say you only achieve “success” when you achieve your goals, whereas on the other hand are people who think something else:

This judgment reflects sharp differences between U.S. military and intelligence officials on where the Afghan war is headed. Intelligence analysts acknowledge the battlefield victories, but they highlight the Taliban’s unchallenged expansion into new territory, an increase in opium poppy cultivation and the weakness of the government of President Hamid Karzai as signs that the war effort is deteriorating.

The contrasting views echo repeated internal disagreements over the Iraq war: While the military finds success in a virtually unbroken line of tactical achievements, intelligence officials worry about a looming strategic failure.

Not to belabor the point, but if the “tactical achievements” are leading to “strategic failure” then there’s a need to rethink the tactics not just pound the table.

As the pressure builds on war critics to “acknowledge” the progress that’s been made in Iraq, I imagine we’ll see a few more reports like this one from The New York Times:

With American military successes outpacing political gains in Iraq, the Bush administration has lowered its expectation of quickly achieving major steps toward unifying the country, including passage of a long-stymied plan to share oil revenues and holding regional elections.

It’s worth noting how fundamentally illogical the idea of “military successes outpacing political gains” is. The military is a branch of the American government. The government is run by politicians and political appointees. They frame objectives and policies designed to achieve those objectives. Subsidiary branches of the government then either do or don’t made progress toward achieving those objectives. The stated goals of invading Iraq were to eliminate its nuclear weapons program, which failed because there was no such program, and to turn it into a shining beacon of democracy to inspire reformers throughout the region, which also failed since Iraq has instead become a scare story autocrats use to keep elites and middle class types unified behind the regime.

After several years of failure, a new military initiative was announced — the “surge” — and it’s goal was to create an improvement in the security situation in Baghdad which (it was hypothesized) was the necessary precondition for a political resolution to Iraq’s fundamental conflicts. The surge was tried, and American casualties went up and violence stayed at the same level and then violence declined and then US casualties decline and then it turned out that the surge had failed and the political situation was the same as it had been at the beginning.

And yet despite this failure, there are lots of happy faces in Washington. Why? Well it’s not because despite the lack of “political progress” we’ve seen plenty of “military progress.” Rather, it’s because the “surge” helped achieve plenty of political objectives, just not the stated ones of the mission. It has, for example, caused Democratic Party elected officials to grow more timid in their rhetoric, which makes Republicans happy and also signals good news for Democratic Party hawks in their struggles with Democratic Party doves. What’s more, insofar as one of the primary unstated political goals of the war has simply been to create a never-ending American military presence in Iraq, the “surge” has generated substantial progress toward that goal.

The American political system seems to operate as if spending on defense-related ventures doesn’t come at a real cost. Propose a new domestic spending initiative, and people want to hear about your offsets. If you don’t have offsets, you need new taxes. And you can’t raise taxes. If you want to cut taxes, you can probably get away with it, but you’ll face at least some political resistance. Defense spending, though, doesn’t count — it’s completely shielded from scrutiny and we think nothing of tossing $10 billion here and $10 billion there until the end of time. Thus, if some gambit succeeds in making American casualty rates decline, something like Democrat Shawn Brimley’s proposal that the next president “consider plateauing at a certain level at some future point in order to continue counter-terrorism and/or an advising mission” becomes much more viable.

In late 2005 and throughout 2006, it looked like we had a situation where the American mission in Iraq was going to become untenable. In early 2007, we were promised a “surge” whose purpose was to make the American mission in Iraq unnecessary. It was going to create a security environment conducive to the creation of a political settlement, thus allowing for the withdrawal of American troops. It didn’t happen. And it’s not clear that anyone ever believed it would happen. Instead, it’s created a situation where it now once again looks — as it did in 2003 and 2004 — that we might be able to stay in Iraq forever. And, of course, if you don’t consider financial costs to be costs, and don’t consider small numbers of casualties to be costs, and don’t believe in opportunity costs, and try not to worry to much about the risk of war with Iran, and don’t mind the lack of benefits except to the egos of the war’s supporters, then this looks like a pretty smart policy.

And, though I think its advocates are underestimating the odds that even their goalpost-shifting will fail, I’ll concede at least that it very much might work.