The Washington Times

The essential question in crowded presidential fields is always this: What are you really running for? To hone your political skills and make connections for a future, serious bid for the nomination? To establish your vote-getting credibility sufficiently strongly to warrant serious consideration for the veep slot? Or, in fact, with the hope and plausible expectation of winning the nomination that year and taking your shot at the White House? 

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The Washington Times

The House vote opposing the surge in Iraq drew 17 Republicans, far fewer than Democrats hoped, so the scenario of a collapse in congressional support for the war effort forcing President Bush’s hand has been averted for now. What we have is largely a partisan divide, and while the Democratic position is the majority position, in the absence of a far more dramatic fall-off in Republican support, Mr. Bush will be able to hold on long enough to see whether Gen. David Petraeus can produce results on the ground.

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The Washington Times 

MUNICH. — The annual meeting of defense and foreign-policy eminences here is usually devoted to a fair amount of carping from one side of the Atlantic to the other. It’s the place NATO allies go to bicker among themselves. This year, however, was different, producing a rare moment of trans-Atlantic unity, brought to you, bizarrely, by none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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What the world needs now. 

View this article at The Weekly Standard

For years now, the political science literature has been exploring the phenomenon of the “democratic peace,” according to which, to state it in its bluntest form, democracies do not go to war with one another. It’s not that democracies are pacifist by nature. Democratic countries, acting alone or in concert, do go to war with nondemocratic countries from time to time, for example the United States and others against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and NATO against former Yugoslavia over the attempted ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.

Moreover, the record of peace among democracies is not without its asterisks. As the neorealist scholar Kenneth N. Waltz has noted, Germany on the eve of the First World War was, by the standards of the day, “democratic.” German “militarism” in the late 19th century was not an authoritarian imposition on the German people but something they and their elected representatives supported–as indeed going to war in 1914 was popular in Britain as well. Reclassifying a country as “nondemocratic” because it has chosen to make war on a democracy is a temptation to which the “democratic peace” thesis may give rise.

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The Washington Times

Opposition to the Iraq war has understandably led to a more generally anti-interventionist climate in Washington. There has long been such a strain in American public opinion: Walter Russell Mead identified it as the Jeffersonian strain, more interested in cultivating the American garden than in going abroad to slay dragons.

A bumper sticker I saw over the weekend captures the spirit: “I’m already against the next war.” Of course, it’s unlikely that the experience in Iraq is what led the car’s owner to that conclusion. It was almost certainly a pre-existing conviction. The opposition to the Iraq war has, however, inflated this sentiment.

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