Hilzoy, how old are you? Or, more specifically, how good is your memory?

The US used to have something called the State Department before it was destroyed by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. The US used to intercede in the world both to solidify and maintain states, as well as to bring low those they disagreed with. The US continuously tried to maintain or ameliorate the international balance in favor of the US.

Whether you agreed with it or not -- and I most particularly disagree with a lot of it -- the US used to have a complex relationship with the rest of the world, treating each relationship on an individual level within an overall plan to persuade the world that the US was a force of good. Particularly when compared to that evil Eastern European ideology. To some extent that forgave the evil the US did in the name of a wider good.

Without that evil counterforce, the bad that the US does is shown in isolation and seen as the negative force that it is.

So if we could have some clearer thinking looking further down the road than tomorrow, all the better.

And about time.

Goodness, is this fabulous to read!

The shift, which would come partly out of the military's huge budget, would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states. (...)

"This is not an experiment, but a pragmatic solution to a long-acknowledged problem," Denis McDonough, a senior Obama foreign policy adviser, said in an interview on Sunday.

Anyone who had read up on it knew that when 9/11 happened, it was an inevitability that the U.S. would suffer some sort of attack at some point - Chalmers Johnson's "blowback". When you bully and abuse other societies and regions for decades, you make a LOT of enemies.

In fact, Osama bin Laden - remember him? - after 9/11 told us to our faces that the reason we were targeted was because of three things. One was our support of Israel in its genocidal treatment of the Palestinians. One was our sanctions against Iraq, which had killed hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq, due to lack of medicines. (Why in the hell were medicines proscribed by the sanctions in the first place?) The third was our military presence in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 war. He said if we would stop doing those things, we would all be safe. he famously asked, "Why do you think we didn't attack Sweden?" or something to that effect.

Well, Bush quietly removed the troops from S.A. If it was a Dem President who did that the rightwingnuts would have had a field day, harping on the President letting terrorists dictate American actions - making us look like cowards. And the sanctions ended - kind of - but were replaced by our occupation - NOT a move in the right direction. Our support of Israel does not seem to have changed; their genocidal policies continue.

The core idea here is that when you bully people, when you kill people, when you undercut their rights to self-determination and choose instead to support oligarchs and despots, you make enemies.

PEACE COMES THROUGH NOT MAKING ENEMIES, not from a bigger, badder military.

THIS is what I applaud.

Yes, let us make friends around the world. Bush was not the only President who bullied other countries. But he made enemies in such a public way that no one could even THINK we were the good guys (except for knee-jerk nationalists who would agree with Bush even on torture).

Yes, let us sit down and work with other countries. The period of "going it alone", especially separate from "old Europe" in 2001 was so brain dead it presaged all the other completely idiotic things BushCo did - and wanted to do.

We will never, ever, ever be safe until we make friends with the other countries of the world. Brazil, for example, has no enemies; they can work with anyone. And they are at peace with the world.

Wouldn't that be a freaking lovely thing to be able to say about the U.S.?

If we had no enemies, how many hundreds of billions would be available to spend on making America's infrastructure, its educational system, its health system, its cities 2, 3, 4 times better? On R&D for any number of industries and technologies?

Why do we have to have enemies?

We don't, of course. We CHOOSE to have enemies. It is good business for the military-industrial complex, the armaments manufacturers, and for certain districts in the U.S. And all that business is at the expense of the rest of us.

Well, f***k them! If we are going to have enemies, let's have those enemies be arms manufacturers whose business has to change to making machines or computers or cell phones - or go out of business.

If we make friends where we now have enemies, how far can our military budget be reduced? And how much of that can be spent instead on making America a better country?

For those who think Russia is going to invade if we don't have the largest military in the history of the world, or that China will move all their surplus people here, give me a break and get real.

99% of the countries in the world have no countries that are their enemies. Why can't we be one of them?

The stress on post-conflict reconstruction in Susan E Rice's own expertise, and in the general Obama approach to foreign and security policy, is very timely, and not only because of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some interesting sites on this include:

http://www.csis.org/isp/pcr/

http://www.iiss.org/conferences/global-strategic-review/global-strategic-review-2008/keynote-address/

and across the pond - http://www.stabilisationunit.gov.uk/

At this time when Keynes is flavor of the month in economic policy, it's interesting to think how far our approach to post-conflict reconstruction has come since, at and after the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, he had to argue against a veangeful 'peace' (on this, see J M Keynes, 'The Economic Consequences of the Peace', 1919, and D Markwell, 'John Maynard Keynes and International Relations', 2006).

Not so fast on Bob Gates/

He may NOT be so much Obama’s guy after all.