First let me thank the hosts here at TPM Café and Matt for inviting me to participate. As an unreconstructed realist, libertarian, and lifelong pessimist, I feel a bit like the proverbial cat among the pigeons, but I'll try my best to add some value to the discussion.

Let me start by praising Matt for having written a thoughtful book about foreign policy that is also a pleasure to read. As an avid reader of Matt's blog, I had wondered if the verve that characterizes his blogging could translate into book form, and I'm pleased to report that it has. Buy a copy, already!

Also, in analyzing the post-9/11 foreign policy debate, Matt gets his diagnosis of What Went Wrong basically correct, and this is an accomplishment to be praised. He's not interested in taking prisoners from either party or any ideology, and while this may keep him outside the innermost sanctums of the Foreign Policy Community, having truth in your possession is a solace all its own.

But enough with the love fest, you're here for the disagreement. So let's get to it.

Matt opens the discussion by taking on the various proposals for a separate "alliance/concert of democracies" that would open the door to more U.S.-led interventions by providing another venue in which to "forum shop"--that is, to do what the United States did in the Kosovo war.

Matt makes sensible points about why the creation of this entity would be a bad idea: the idea behind the proposal is that the new organization would "possess the right to authorize military action in the absence of a U.N. Security Council resolution in circumstances other than individual or collective self-defense," pointing out that it is, at bottom, "a recipe for a new Cold War that would only make it more difficult for the United States to advance its core interests." Thus, Matt argues, flatly disregarding the interests of Russia and China in pursuit of various far-flung interventions would hold more costs than benefits.

But that curiously doesn't join well with Matt's defense of the U.S.-led war in Kosovo. Matt points out in the book that the U.S. did an end-run around the U.N. Security Council, instead electing to shop the proposal over to NATO, which signed off on the mission. Matt elides this rather important problem by arguing that the U.S. objective of "preserving the tighter institutional web of Western Europe and expanding this web eastward" trumped these concerns since "the persistent instability in the Balkans, mostly provoked by Milosevic, was a substantial challenge to this agenda."

Thus we get

Western leaders of the period were, and are, often accused of a selective approach to humanitarianism, acting forcefully in Kosovo, while being less concerned with more serious humanitarian problems in Africa and elsewhere. The charge is essentially accurate but largely misses the point: that Kosovo presented a mixture of humanitarian and interest-based reasons for intervention was precisely what strengthened the case for playing fast and loose with the UN rules, making intervention a reasonable option.

But this is essentially what the concert of democracies people are arguing today. In defending the Kosovo war, Matt declines to deal with the debit side of the ledger, whose cost is growing by the day.