Hi Stephen,

here is a copy of my advice (heh heh he I am advising Bush can you believe it??!! and believe me next thing I am going to do is advise Obama, free of charge, unless I've already done it;->) to Bush in 2001:

Mr President,
your honourable aide said "rethink this thing"...
it is easy to say "rethink this thing", yes, but with what Sir?
with weapons?
with a constitution in contradiction full of useless words?
Mr President,
I have been told that people think with words, with sound words. For
years the US invested its resources into the development of all sorts
of weapons and defence gadgetry. She directed her scientific research
programs to develop more and more sophisticated arms and defence
mechanisms. But ignored _words_, check out your expense accounts Mr
President since the first composition of the constitution of the USA,
and see how much spent for its development since then.
Mr President,
since 18th Century all our social and physical scientific theories
have been renewed numerous times, while the Constitution of the USA
stayed the same as if it was the Sacred Book of The God.
Mr President,
The Constitution of the USA is not a or the sacred book of the God,
otherwise by now we would have a huge literature comparing it with the
Sacred Scriptures of the God to secure a sound justification for it.
With regards,
Grand Sen~or

here is the link to this message:
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.turkish/browse_frm/thread/e320cb918db14b15?q=#6eb9005f86ac58df

in short, in those years, what I was trying to tell Bush was "Don't enter Baghdad with such a constitution, you may get shoe-showers";->>

Is the "more may be better" argument for nuclear proliferation completely dead? A world with a nuclear Iran might be a world in which the United States is more reluctant to go on Middle Eastern adventures in the first place. Who cares if Iran gets the bomb, so long as they don't come to dominate the whole Middle East. Just give the Saudi's and the Egyptians the bomb and let the whole thing play itself out. Or maybe nobody takes Waltz seriously after 9/11.

Thank you for answering my question.

Stephen, I would add that great powers are from at least a defensive realist point of view, tasked with system maintenance responsibilities, and under Bush the US has become the world's preeminent revisionist power. Perhaps you're sometime co-author would disagree and argue that what the Bush administration has pursed is a reckless form of revisionism which as you noted has left the US in potentially a weaker position in the future.

"it's hard to give Bush high marks"
You are kidding right?
Bush/Chaney and the war party have essentially sunk this country to its lowest ebb in 100 years, our only hope is that the Chinese do not pull their support of the dollar. Even if that doesn't happen you can say goodbye to the trillion dollar a year foreign policy the war party has wasted on the Pax Americana disaster that they have reigned over. The world will be a much better place for humanity once useful idiots such as Bush realize they are not of some superior culture who should be jamming their ideas of democracy, good government and way of life down the throat of other peoples and cultures. I had hoped that Bush's campaign statements of a humble foreign policy indicated enlightenment, but alas, he was no better than past interventionist dating back to Wilson.

Would it be better if we simply dropped the unctuous righteous tone to a lot of these things and simply said straight out, like Bush I eventually did, that we're up to something for American interest, and that's it?

A lot of the reaction to U.S. action is based around perception, and the perception of how the US tries to bolster its own image. Nobody, for example, expects China to be some big promoter of human rights, or even peace outside of its own country (they sell weapons and give money hand-outs to pretty much anyone including Sudan in Africa).

Of course, then you'd have a lot of domestic constituencies and the Internationalist group screaming their heads off, but if you kept it up for a while, the perception would change.

"Two incompetently prosecuted wars have undermined our deterrent power."

This is the apt tag line applied by the Wall Street Journal to a scathing piece (scathing especially but not exclusively to the Bush administration) by novelist Mark Helprin about the strategic fallout of the last eight years that I think is highly relevant to this discussion.

Here's the link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122965053466920579.html

Helprin, by way of somewhat inscrutable historical example, specifies the singular strategic failure that Bush will stand accused of: the squandering and destruction of the deterrent force of America's conventional military forces. This has come via twin tragedies: the destruction of the force from exhaustion (1), and (2) the spectacle of the failure to achieve strategic aims in two conflicts. The fact that the second of these came about by flawed civilian and high-level uniformed strategic leadership does nothing to mitigate the damage to notional strategic competence as perceived by potential enemies.

This is the true bill of failure for this administration in a realist accounting, at least in the military dimension. The economic catastrophe will of course likely have a greater overall long-term impact on our ability to pursue and protect our interests and, eventually, to project force.

I think Peter Feaver's really on to something. Relations with both Russia and China could have soured much more than they did given several other long-term, structural factors. The relationship with China, in fact, was too close for the comfort of some, including Dr. Mearsheimer. Second, the overzealous NATO/EU expansion - which appears to have sparked Russia's aggressive rhetoric and its involvement in Georgia - was as much a function of European activism as American intentions.

Regarding India, nuclear non-proliferation has hardly taken a beating since the brokering of that agreement (Israel, which seeks similar treatment, has been told a resounding 'no' by the Nuclear Suppliers Group). India, earlier this year, boasted a 66% approval rating of the United States, and a 55% approval rating of Bush as a leader, and has recently signed some big defense deals with the U.S. Sure, India did not join the fight in Iraq - but it waffled over that decision for over a year, when many U.S. allies turned it down flat - and it has repeatedly asked for greater involvement in Afghanistan. And India chose to vote twice against Iran at the IAEA - when China, Russia, and others abstained - a decision that was immensely unpopular in domestic political circles and almost led to the fall of the government in New Delhi. That's hardly mild diplomatic support. Bush's courting of India is widely agreed upon by those who study the region as an unqualified success.

Finally, the U.S.-Japan alliance, while hugely personality-driven in Tokyo, is stronger today than many would have thought imaginable ten or fifteen years ago. And while European publics generally despised Bush, look at the relations he managed to forge with his counterparts in Britain, France and Germany.