Chapomatic

Neptunus Lex fell victim to “The Brief” and reports in. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays over at Barnett’s blog.

You know, apropos of nothing I’ve been dying to print out this Barnett post and hand it to a JFCC-IMD guy to see the reaction. I’m just generous that way.

Update: I think Lex hits the same objection I do to part of Barnett’s thinking. I don’t think Barnett gets the power of ideals in the same way that others do. Lex says:

Compared to the society they broke away from and their own antecedents, both the pilgrims and the Founders were radical revolutionaries indeed. The path Barnett takes here walks deliberately away from the “American exceptionalism/shining city on a hill” model of foreign policy and illuminates the pathway to empire. We can and ought to be able to do better than building a military to defend our merchants who pay taxes to support our military in the 21st century. This is where he begins to lose me.

Just so (Gordon Wood’s book The Radicalism of the American Revolution is a good argument for this position), and this lack of focus on the potential power of ideals makes me suspect some of Barnett’s conclusions.

Oh, and exporting security is like any other competitive advantage, which means that others notice and adapt over time to minimize it.

The other thing that has struck me this month is the order-of-magnitude difference between the number of expeditionary DoD people and of everyone else in government. Even given the nature of American charity (much, much more in terms of people and money comes from private citizens than it does from their taxes), it seems that there aren’t that many State guys on the ground out there.