Amitai Etzioni notes with clear-eyed regret that a stable Afghanistan will not be built by some tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of occupying foreign troops. Military force cannot resolve the deep political divisions of tribal Afghanistan. Like so many guerrilla fighters in so many lands, including earlier generations of Afghans, those who resist the foreign forces know that they win by not losing. An overstretched United States must reassess its objectives and scale back its goals from what we would like to do to what we actually can do. This is not an abandonment of Afghan democracy in principle, but it is a rather sobering recognition of the limits of American power and what we might realistically expect the future of Afghanistan to be.

Piki Ish-Shalom is equally clear-eyed and regretful when he notes that Bush administration failures may diminish enthusiasm for democracy-promotion in the future. We should remember that democratization was once the patrimony of liberals. Prior to this administration, it typically was presented as a liberal internationalist value, like human rights, not as an excuse for the naked exercise of national power. But by appropriating democratization and stripping it of its internationalism, neoconservatives (and the liberal hawks who supported them) have indeed damaged it. The hubris and remarkable lack of historical perspective that led the United States into its current situation of overstretch, now risks undermining not just the ability of the US to achieve its goals in the world, but indeed the perceived value of those goals themselves.

The neoconservative impulse was not, in my view, just a good idea gone wrong -- it was a bad idea from the beginning. Its very premise, that the US has the right and the power to invade and recast other nations, was fundamentally wrong. Many Americans can now see what was always obvious to most non-Americans (including most of our friends) - that contempt for international legality is not legitimized by moral certitude, and that aggression wrapped in democratic rhetoric is still aggression. Above all, as we have seen, it does not work. The Bush administration's glut of ambition and shortage of realism has undermined our ability to lead other nations, in too many ways to list. Many analysts of international politics have recognized for years the damage done by the Iraq war to our military, to our alliances, and to our credibility and moral authority. As the financial crisis continues in the weeks and months ahead, the dollar costs to America of two unpaid-for wars will also become increasingly apparent.

In Security First, Etzioni argues that if we want to lead other peoples, we need to rally them to causes that they share -- and that American-style democracy simply does not appeal to many "illiberal moderates" that we need as allies as we confront grave security challenges such as the risk of nuclear terrorism. Leaders must understand that they need followers, and that, ironically, we may be better able to lead others to democracy if we respect that they have other priorities, such as security and development.

Democracy-promotion need not necessarily be a permanent casualty of the Bush administration's failures. A more realistic and patient approach to democratization could be the basis for a more sustainable democracy agenda than the lurches to disaster that were Iraq and Afghanistan. Those who would build democracy must make it part of a long-term project, to be pursued through international consensus-building and hard and patient work, rather than through war. They also must understand and accept that democratization is a complex social phenomenon that typically takes decades, even centuries to develop. It simply cannot happen until most of the politically articulate groups in a society embrace it.

Since we were invited to relate this discussion to the upcoming US election, I would conclude by noting that a more realistic and sustainable democracy agenda will require a frank admission of the bankruptcy of neoconservative thinking. The next US President will need to really believe that freedom is not a regime to be imposed by invading armies, but rather a complex process to be patiently nurtured and encouraged. He must return the democracy agenda to its rightful home as an international, rather than a nationalist project. I imagine that many readers will wonder whether John McCain, who surrounds himself with so many unreformed neoconservatives, is capable of understanding this.