Matt--At the risk of being cheeky, given the earlier discussion, your argument might lead to neo-isolationism. The US needs to maintain forces capable of providing security to its allies, including Japan, Taiwan, and increasingly Vietnam, Singapore, and Thailand. The key to this policy is remaining the strongest military power in Asia. Otherwise, US guarantees will not be credible and US involvement in Asia will be more risky meaning that public support for it will decline and the pressures to draw back will become stronger. Another argument is Taiwan. You seem to disagree with this policy but you are in a minority. The official position is that the US will fight to protect Taiwan against an unprovoked attack. In that circumstance, surely it is prudent to prepare. Your description, by the way, of the Taiwan government's position is greatly exagerated. 

Once more we are seeing a demonstration of the principle that, while there are limits to anyone's competence, there are none at all to ones incompetence. Bush is plumbing new depths of incompetence, depths that could only have been imagined before Bush. Any sane person would have learned from the stupid mistake in labeling Iraq, Iran and N. Korea as axis of evil. But, Bush obviously isn't sane. So, now we will label China as our next enemy to go to war with. Don't be surprised when the Chinese take this threat seriously.

China has long been on the neo-cons' list of targets as the nation most likely to rise to superpower status and therefore threaten American hegemony. The neo-cons are right, of course, about the potential of China to become a new superpower--but getting into an arms race with China doesn't seem to be an attractive prospect. How can we avoid it?

The people blaming Bush for this, or thinking this is somehow "bad policy" are entirely missing the point of it all.  Do you seriously think that a Democratic president (or a Republican president more capable than Bush) would be following a substantially different path than this?  The people talking about the military-industrial complex are closer to the mark, but let's take it a step further.

Here's a thought experiment.  There are two candidates for president.  One calls for a robust military, citing China and whatever else you would like as a serious threat, armed with nothing more than the kind of paranoid fearmongering rhetoric that can be found in, say, any issue of U.S. News & World Report (or New Republic for that matter).  The other candidate proposes modest reductions in military spending, citing all sorts of arguments like Yglesias', that China isn't a threat and won't be for decades, if ever, that acting as if China is an enemy now might make China an enemy tomorrow, and these big ticket items are useless in the current environment, anyway.  Which candidate is going to win votes on national security?  I got news for you: it ain't the one proposing a reduction in military spending.  

This stuff happens because people want it to; people want to live in a country that is militarily dominant, people want to think there are enemies in the world, and their government is working hard to keep them safe.  And the politicians who play to those sentiments are the ones who will win elections: fearmongering coupled with tough talk wins votes.  As long as we can afford the obscene amounts of money we spend on the military, we will continue spending it, because that's what people want.    

Is there no hope, Luigi, for a rational discourse with the American people?

Luigi has a strong point, but weapons systems do get cancelled, sometimes. It's easy to run on a strong, modern military and then canel certain projects. The resistance comes from the industry and the military brass, whose personal careers can be tied to a project.

So keeping money out of Congress helps reduce military spending.

I'm baffled why China should be an enemy. It's just a reflex, I think. If we do the crashingly obvious smart thing and transform our industry and homes away from oil, where is the fight? Gettysburg accepts the premise that we will be fighting at some future time. Even if that were a good bet, and it might be with administrations like the current one, it's easy to be too impressed with those large numbers of standing army.

Russia had gobs of troops and tanks. They weren't worth much in Afghanistan. Large troop levels are needed for controlling territory, so we're having touble in Iraq. They are not needed just to disable another threat. Istead of worrying about China, get friendly. Would you rather have them as enemies?

That said, a weapon that would have certainly scary aspects if employed domestically but is still appealing is robotic insects. This is a serious project, making progress. The possibilities for its use are transforming.

A cloud of butterflies begins infiltrating across the DMZ into North Korea. Each butterfly has a small microwave emitter. The combined numbers can generate a high resolution radar image, or a small number could yield a lower-res image. They would be able to locate all the hidden artillery. They could go on to invest the artillery sites and fly down the barrels, dumping their small load of corrosive or otherwise gunky stuff. Presto, no artillery. In principle, this kind of system could find even small arms and disrupt dispersed militias.

Remember the "bunker-buster"? A bad idea but the robot bugs could sneak in through ventilation and at least provide inspection and targeting info. Once again, they could even do the disabling by being a bug in the wiring, looking for EMF associated with electrical power supplies and blowing all the fuses. Or maybe shorting the fuses and melting down all the wiring.

The scary thought is the robot flying insect that has an onboard DNA sniffer. Targeted killings, anyone? Troublesome people will just keel over, whenever the bugs track them down. You definitely don't want the current "Trust us" White House in that case.

I think you're right, or would be right if the point were to prevent or instigate another cold war, but the reason that it makes sense to think about China now is that there will be considerably more regional instability if the U.S. can't project a credible military presence into East Asia for the forseeable future. 

To the degree that China were able to develop a regional hegemony in the near future, imagine if they had an Asian Monroe Doctrine? At a minimum, a Japan that didn't feel like it had a place under the U.S. umbrella would probably seek to rearm more dramatically; in a world where the DPRK is nuclear, and everybody is still wary of Japanese imperialism, that would be potentially rather bad.  So would a lot of other ways in which latent regional tensions might be enflamed.

One lesson that we might have learned from the last half-century of manufacturing would be to eschew planning for a specific China-like enemy in favor of engineering a military that could, in an emergency, quickly be ramped up and configured to fight a foe, based on our knowledge of the foe in that emergency. That is, rather than making a factory that is tremendously efficient for Caddies, or SUVs, or televisions, make a factory that can make televisions when there's a demand for televisions, and quickly be changed to make digital cameras when there's a demand for those, and then something else, because there will be something else, and there is no way of knowing what.

Similarly, if we admit that we don't know who (if anyone) we will want to invade, er, defend ourselves from in 2025, then we can put our energy into making a military structure that can respond quickly to different situations at different times. We keep saying we are going to do that, but we don't do it. As Matt points out, the language reveals that instead of planning a structure that when necessary can become capable of fighting China if we need to, in time to be useful, we would rather have a military capable of fighting China, and then letting it sit around for twenty years.

Vardibidian, this is a truly fine idea.

The Chinese military, meanwhile, is no match for ours at the moment and isn't going to be one any time in the near future. Their modernization effort is geared at building a mostly obsolete force up to the level of the early-1990s Russian state-of-the-art.

Well, it might have been what the Germans wanted in the 1930's too.  Do we ever get to have a grown up party instead of two that pander to a country of children who want it all pushing the sacrifices on to others and down the road to their children and grandchildren.  We can have wars that we don't need  but we can't have healthcare for children.  This is insane and it will do us in in the end.  I'd rather lose fighting against it than be marching along with the crowd over the cliff.

Is there no hope, Luigi, for a rational discourse with the American people?

It is rational -- from a certain perspective.  It's even "good policy" -- from a certain perspective.  It just isn't really about national security, any more than, say, our foreign aid is about charity.  

Luigi, I fear you are right, but what do you think would happen if some leader had the courage to present Americans with a stark choice: a big military or Social Security and health benefits, but not both? That is the choice we likely will face if current trends continue. I have a feeling Americans would choose the latter over the former.

I agree -- if it comes down to a choice.  But the time when that choice will have to be made is far away, in all probability.  

You may be right, Matt, that the weapons systems come first and the potential enemies come second.  But the the problem goes beyond any particular constituencies for particular weapons systems.  Behind it all is a truly vast military industry with large public and private components, and that industry drives its own expansion.  If the makers of weapons system X have their system cancelled,  then the makers of weapons system Y simply step in and take their seat.  If it is not China that is used as the hypothetical enemy in planning our future wars and strategic initiatives, it will be someone else.  Wherever there is defense money to be made, there is an allied Pentagon procurement specialist working hard to write them into the budget.  For example, there is a burgeoning industry of private mercenaries, so private industry  planners and Pentagon planners (who are the same people) can be counted on to write documents about how the wars of the future will rely more and more on private armies.  There are lots of pigs who compete to feed at the trough, but the trough itself continues to grow.

The chief business of America these days is war - or at least the permanent preparation for war.  Americans everywhere, particularly in the red states and red districts, are up to their eyeballs in military dough and dependency.  But so are the "grand strategic planners" from the blue universities and think tanks.  And no Representative or Senator anywhere who fails to go to bat for the military base or defense contractor in his district can hope to be re-elected.  I don't see any way for this monstrosity to be challenged, absent  the existence of an equally large competing industry to challenge the monopolistic Pentagon behemoth.  And we can bet that any call from the public for shrinking defense will be ridiculed by the strategic class as isolationist and pacifistic.

You might also have noticed that during the Bush administration more and more executive branch operations have been shifted to the Pentagon.  Government functions that once belonged to the State Department, the CIA and even the judicial system have moved to the Department of Defense.  And as our President's court legal scholars have conclusively demonstrated, in wartime (a permanent condition) defense imperatives trump the legislative branch.  Perhaps in the not-to-distant future, the path from Athens to Sparta will be completed, and we won't even need a Congress!

By the way, speaking of wholly owned subsidiaries of the defense industry, have you noticed the striking difference between America Abroad, here at TPM Cafe, and the other departments and divisions of this web operation?  While many of the departments here promote healthy debate between centrists and leftists on the staff, the America Abroad lineup all represent the same narrow segment of establishment Democratic opinion - several minds thinking but a single thought.  If you want to find genuine foreign policy alternatives, you have to look to either the comments or the other departments - you won't find it among the politburo that forms the chief foreign policy organ of TPM Cafe.

Permanent space stations and/or Moon bases would be invulnerable and could intimidate any region of the world.

Nothing could be further from the truth. A space station is an immobile, fixed target, highly vulnerable to many forms of attack, impossible to keep supplied, and absurdly easy to monitor from afar. Placing military bases on the moon would do nothing except bankrupt us. Moving armaments 250,000 miles away in preparation to attack a target 5000 miles away would be total lunacy, surpassed only by moving the armaments to Mars.

Question: do you think it's possible to be a good Democrat and support the war, defend the nsa program, want sanctions on Iran, and be worried about China?

Absolutely Architect.  My criticism of America Abroad is not that there are authors there that support those views, but that there are no authors there that deviate from them.

From one I can tell, America Abroad is something of an official publication arm for the Albright/Holbrooke/Clinton government in exile.   That is certainly one important segment of Democratic party thought, and it deserves a wide hearing.   But there are other important schools of thought in the Democratic party, and they deserve a hearing as well.  Why is it always left to the frustrated amateurs in the comments section to articulate these alternative views?  Like most of the other commentators, I have a full-time job - one completely unrelated to foreign policy - that prevents me from doing all the research I would like, and from carefully formulating my objections in the most powerful way possible.  So why are there no foreign policy professionals or experienced journalists championing my views on America Abroad?  If I were a lone voice in the wilderness, I could understand it.  You can't represent everybody.  But it is quite clear that I am not alone, since my views are not at all dissimilar from those of many of the other commentators on the site, and form the views of Democrats that can be found boiling over all around the internets, in the halls of academia, and almost any place two Democrats sit down to talk.  Yet the America Abroad orthodoxy shuts all these views out of the official lineup.  The commentators are a more diverse group than you portray them as being: leftists, realists, antimilitarists, hawks, libertarians, economic nationalists, fervant zionists, and greens - and they are free to occupy the cheap seats.  But the luxury boxes are all reserved for the high church neoliberals of the Clinton era.

Perhaps one of the reasons for the peculiar dynamic at America Abroad is that the authors are uniquely disdainful of debating the commentators, and form an echo chamber that responds only to itself.  Their disagreements amount to little more than modest demurrals on small points, and are smothered by their self-congratulations.  This aristocratic insulation is very conducive to an attitude of surliness and rebellion among the commentators.

You mentioned the many examples of articles posted by America Abroad authors that generate few comments.  I would say much of that has to do with the fact that those authors can be counted on not to respond to any comments or criticisms, so the commentators have given up.   Mr. Ikenberry comes by every few weeks, and deposits some lengthy essay on Japan, the European Union or grand strategic theory, and then goes off on his own and says not a word.  So why bother?

Juliette Kayyem posted the piece you mentioned claiming that there were only two options for a Democratic response to the wiretapping issue.  I replied and argued that there was a third.  Ms. Kayyem never responded.  Her piece generated 41 comments altogether, by people like Ellen, cscs, Vic Woodell, chuckie, Aisthesis, praktike and Howard.  They were not at all of a uniform nature, as anyone who has read the comments posted by this group would know.  Many different perspectives were offered, but as far as I can see, Ms. Kayyem did not respond to a single one.

Last week there was quite an exchange about the state of Iran's nuclear program here on TPM Cafe, prompted by Paul Kerr's posts on the topic.  Despite the fact that he was besieged by questions and criticisms from many different angles, he did take the time to respond to many of those comments.  Yet that exchange took place in the Special Guests section, not on America Abroad.  Ivo Daalder also recently posted an essay on Iran's nuclear programs.  It prompted quite a debate of Iran hawks and Iran doves, but it is a debate in which Mr. Daalder has yet to participate.  Similarly, he posted recently on the topic of isolationism, which has prompted another very vigorous debate, but has not as yet responded to any criticisms.  In the course of the more recent debate, V Laszlo asked Mr. Daalder a direct question, and formulated it very politely:

I do not mean to pile on, but Mr.Daalder just a few months ago,you were telling us that you saw some positives in the situation in Iraq and before people jumped on the Murtha bandwagon we should let the positives play out and take stock again in several months. I would like to know your current assessment of the situation in Iraq. My reading of it now, as then, is that it is a disaster pure and simple and that there will never be a "good" time to get out so the sooner the better . So what is your take?

Again, no answer from the mysterious oracle Daalder.

Dean Slaughter is very gracious, and willing to contemplate criticisms of her positions.  But by all appearances, the other writers on America Abroad regard themselves as a foreign policy elite, a group of mandarins who rule the Democratic party foreign policy establishment by divine right.  They are in favor of speaking without listening, and discoursing without debate.  One senses that they are so used to having their views approved by the established power structure inside the party, that they are incapable of defending them in open debate against those who deviate from the orthodox conventions to which they are accustomed.

You ask:

Did you ever ask why no senior Democratic foreign policy official from the Clinton era agrees with most of you here? Is it because they are compromised and out of touch or is it because the views here are generally those that can only be held by people with no responsibility.

One might indeed say that it is their "responsibilities" that restrict their freedom of opinion.  But I wouldn't say it is their reponsibilities to the American people, American security or global peace that tie them down. Rather, their responsibilities to the powerful constituencies that comprise the Clinton coalition are the source of the problem.

Although I'm slow to support military spending, I can acknowledge an important point: Lack of defense can invite trouble. Just as locking your house removes an incentive to steal (when it's easy), a convincing deterrent keeps the Chinese honest. Economic competition always has force in the background as guarantor, like domestic competition always has the state (courts and police) in the background.

To this end, superiority is not necessary, merely enough presence to be taken seriously. If another nation has that approach, it should not be taken as a grab for dominance, and sober minds will not panic. A public policy of welcoming commercial competition balances an internal policy of continuing to work on effective force guarantees.

Where I differ with some is that I think the internal work can proceed without public rattling of sabers. It is inviting trouble of a different sort to announce the view of China as enemy. While you would prefer to win market share from your business competitor, he's not your enemy, he's a fellow citizen. Same for China; they also are our companions on the only planet we know of with civilisation.

The problem with the military/industrial complex is that it is 1.) to big and 2.) too inefficient. Thus, we need to buy things we don't need just to keep these companies afloat, the F-22 is just a cooler-looking version of the Medicare Bill, intended to keep aircraft manufactors around.

 My solution would be to nationalize the defense industry (and no, that's not my soluntion to everything) We don't have the advantages gained from competion in the industry because there are so few firms left that can make, say, a fighter aircraft. In the '50s the Navy alone was flying fighters made by, of the top of my head, Grumman, Douglas, Chance Vaught, McDonnel. Now there's basically two competitors.

 It'll still be ineffiicent, run by the Defense Department, and will still have Generals and Admirals clamoring to Congress for new weapons systems. We'll still have Congressman pulling for things to be made in their district. We won't have the money of the defense industry backing it all up anymore, though.

Having a military and military industrial complex geared to our actual needs, as opposed to shareholders needs, might turn out to be important at some time in the future. The destruction of much of this complex's political influence would have a beneficient effect on our democracy.