I basically agree with DymaxionWorldJohn's argument that there was never a moment where the United States had any real "primacy" (at least militarily) in the international scene.  Yes, after the Cold War, the United States was in a position of absolute military supremacy relative to the rest of the world.  But looking at the 1990s, it's not terribly clear to me that the United States was much successful at using military force to attain its foreign policy goals (the only metric that really matters).

This actually is a good time to expand on something I've been thinking about lately.  I recently finished Andrew Bacevich's "The Limits of Power," and he spends a lot of time emphasizing that it was a belief in absolute American primacy which drove the Bush Administration to pursue wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Indeed, Bacevich takes care to note that for many folks in the Bush Administration, Iraq was only the beginning; neoconservatives in the administration intended to use Iraq as a starting point to transform the Middle East through the application of American military power.  That is, frankly, a pretty terrifying prospect.  Imagine if Iraq was successful; there is a very real chance that we would have been embroiled in conflicts across the Middle East, from Damasacus to Tehran.  Instead, the fact of our failure in Iraq - our inability, as the world's sole superpower, to pacify a relatively marginal "third-world" nation - has prompted us to at least on a very small scale reevaluate the efficacy of American power.

To borrow from Matt Yglesias, we can't continue stumbling from failure to failure, if only for the simple fact that it will diminish American power to the point of near-worthlessness.  If Iraq forces us to reevaluate our use of military force, to make us more cautious about using said strength, to aim for attainable foreign policy goals (this does not include "establishing democracy"), and most importantly, to rid of us of this belief in absolute American primacy.  Then I think that it's worth considering the idea that our failure Iraq was - in a very broad sense - a good thing for the United States.

cross-posted at my blog