This is an excellent analysis of America's place in the world. These are the first two installments. There is one more to come.

The Way We Live Now

We are witnessing the dissolution of an international system. The core of that system, and its spiritual heart, was the North Atlantic alliance: not just the 1949 defense treaty but a penumbra of understandings and agreements beginning with the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and spreading through the United Nations and its agencies; the Bretton Woods accords and the institutions they spawned; conventions on refugees, human rights, genocide, arms control, war crimes, and much more besides. The merits of this interlocking web of transnational cooperation and engagement went well beyond the goal of containing and ultimately defeating communism. Behind the new ordering of the world lay the memory of thirty calamitous years of war, depression, domestic tyranny, and international anarchy, as those who were present at its creation fully understood. (...)

It is thus a tragedy of historical proportions that America's own leaders are today corroding and dissolving the links that bind the US to its closest allies in the international community. The US is about to make war on Iraq for reasons that remain obscure even to many of its own citizens. The war that they do understand, the war on terrorism, has been unconvincingly rolled into the charge sheet against one Arab tyrant. Washington is abuzz with big projects to redraw the map of the Middle East; meanwhile the true Middle Eastern crisis, in Israel and the Occupied Territories, has been subcontracted to Ariel Sharon. After the war, in Iraq as in Afghanistan, Palestine, and beyond, the US is going to need the help and cooperation (not to mention the checkbooks) of its major European allies; and there will be no lasting victory against Osama bin Laden or anyone else without sustained international collaboration. This is not, you might conclude, the moment for our leaders enthusiastically to set about the destruction of the Western alliance; yet that is what they are now doing. (The enthusiasm is well represented in The War over Iraq by Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol, which I shall discuss below.)
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America and the World

America's foreign policy pundits are afflicted with a Kennan complex. Fifty-six years ago, in July 1947, the American journal Foreign Affairs published an essay entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." The anonymous author—"X"—was George Kennan, then on the policy planning staff at the State Department. Kennan's essay developed the arguments adumbrated in his now-famous "long cable," a confidential telegraphic message sent from the US embassy in Moscow on February 22, 1946, that laid out for Kennan's bosses in Washington the background to Soviet foreign policy and recommended to Western leaders what became known as the strategy of containment. It is hard to exaggerate the influence of Kennan's brief, elegant exposition of the international situation of 1947 and its lessons for US policy: notwithstanding his modest ambitions (and to his later regret) he had written the script for the coming cold war.

Ever since, Kennan's successors in and out of the US foreign policy establishment have been struggling to match his achievement. When the cold war ended, specialists fell upon the occasion. A pattern emerged: first came an ambitious essay-length interpretation of the moment and its meaning; then, a year or two later, a much-hyped book-length extension of that essay; finally, if the author was lucky, a phrase or two that hung for a while in the ether of specialist exchanges—"the End of History," "the Clash of Civilizations" —before evaporating under the pressure of its own pretensions. Unlike Kennan, however, his would-be heirs nurse metatheoretical aspirations, whereas Kennan was building policy recommendations out of close local observation.[1] They don't write as well as he did; and they have scant desire to hide their authorial light under the bushel of anonymity. Not surprisingly, the implicit comparison is consistently unflattering: kissed only by the shadow of Kennan's achievement, his successors—like Portia's suitors— "have but a shadow's bliss."
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