First of all, many thanks to TPMCafe and to all the contributors here for hosting an interesting and important discussion. And thanks, of course, to the incomparable Matt Yglesias for penning a timely and much-needed book. It's refreshing to hear someone admit that it's not "bold new ideas" that are needed, just a reinvigoration of old ideas that have worked remarkably well over six decades.

I agree with much of Matt's analysis about Iraq. The war has been an unparalleled disaster and a forseeable waste of precious U.S. blood and treasure, all for very little gain. Elsewhere in the region, foolish policies have sent U.S. prestige plummeting and made al Qaeda's recruiting quotas a heck of a lot easier to fill.

As bad as it has been, though, it's comforting that the Bush administration hasn't abandoned liberal internationalism across the board.

Take, for example, former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick's masterful 2005 speech (pdf) to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Now the president of the World Bank, Zoellick had this to say about China's rise:

Under Deng Xiaoping, as Mr. Zheng explains, China's leaders reversed course and decided "to embrace globalization rather than detach themselves from it."

Seven U.S. presidents of both parties recognized this strategic shift and worked to integrate China as a full member of the international system. Since 1978, the United States has also encouraged China's economic development through market reforms.

Our policy has succeeded remarkably well: the dragon emerged and joined the world. Today, from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization, from agreements on ozone depletion to pacts on nuclear weapons, China is a player at the table.

Zoellick went on to challenge China to become a "responsible stakeholder" in the international system (a formulation that is essentially untranslatable in Chinese), and the Treasury Department has taken the lead in engaging China in a "strategic dialogue" on economic issues.

I bring this up because it illustrates that, when you get outside the Middle East, there is a lot more consensus about U.S. foreign policy than you might think. Zoellick's speech could easily have been delivered by Joseph Biden; replace Hank Paulson with Bob Rubin and you would get a very similar trade discussion.

There's also an argument implicit in Zoellick's speech that I think is extremely important. China is coming into its own, and adjusting to the incredible shift of global economic might from West to East -- not getting bogged down in backward places like Iraq -- ought to be the top priority of any U.S. administration. The Middle East, as Edward Luttwak has argued, is just a sideshow compared to Asia:

We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts--excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world's population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all.

As the East rises, the liberal internationalist institutions that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson built are growing increasingly creaky, and their legitimacy is now open to question. The key challenge for liberal internationalists going forward, then, is not to get mired in hand-wringing debates about Iraq and Kosovo, but to figure out how to not only put in place the Security Council changes that Matt and David talk about, but to build a new world order that reflects China and India's burgeoning economic clout. We tend to focus too much on security issues here in the commentariat, when the real action is on the economic side. But ultimately, it is incremental economic changes that drive everything else.

My bottom line: To put it in Thomas Friedman's terms (before he became obsessed with Iraq), America needs to focus more on the Lexus world and stop mucking around in the olive-tree world.