God, I wish! Remember the hilarious yammering and caterwauling from that trade union group in Germany at the really big drawdown on bases? Then there was the sound of jaw-dropping when the US actually pulled out of bases in the Philippines, often from the very people who had been calling for it. Both moves were long overdue and smashing those iron rice bowl was a side benefit.

For a start these peace-keeping ventures place a heavy demand on man-power. The US military is now stretched to the limit and needs every man on deck for core tasks.

Taxes will have to be raised to repay the national debt. Who wants to blow money away helping foreigners who repay the kindness with anti-Americanism?

The US’s global system of military bases will have to be substantially retrenched, because of local political hostility if nothing else. About the only place where the US is welcome these days is AUS.

Also, the US finds its sovereignty increasingly compromised by the illegal trade in workers and drugs coming from South AMerica. The political pressure is on to stem that rising tide, using whatever military resources are at the disposal of national authority.

Invade the World is unpopular abroad. Invite the World is unpopular at home. So I see the US military “coming home” big time in the medium term.

Read argued that US foreign policy went through cycles where one or some combination of these types had predominance.

Bush’s foreign policy is a strange mixture of Wilsonian idealist internationalism and Jacksonian realist nationalism. (Krauthammer has dubbed it “democratic realism”).

The Wilsonian dream of promoting liberal democracy in Mesopotamia has turned into a flop. So I see Republicans getting twice shy with that bug.

I dont see the Democrats embracing Wilsonianism anytime soon. At most they will probably push towards embracing some descendant of Kyoto. Not exactly the kind of move to set pulses racing.

Meanwhile the Republicans will move towards their default Hamiltonian position: the use of US power abroad to advance US corporate interests at home. Political value for money.

Liberal internationalism of the Wilsonian kind has had a strong following in the US because of the influence of Yankee Quakers and the like. You could say that the War between the States over slavery was its test run.

Even the formation of the UN was a liberal internationalist idea. It came out of the Four Freedoms cooked up by Churchill (1/2 American) and Rooseveldt. Churchill was quite clear that the UN was bascially the Platonic form of the British Empire.

I dont see the PRC much interested in strategic do-goodism. The communists have done their utmost to extinguish that kind of thinking from the Chinese culture.

But once the PRC catches up to the US it is more doubtful that the superpowers will want to allocate strategic resources for good deeds. They will be more interested in maintaining the edge on their rivals.

I agree with your analysis except for the part about them not giving voters what they want. I would cite Sen. Lieberman as an example.

An independent that supports the war beats a “True Democrat” that wants to withdraw above all else in most statewide votes.

Your beef should be with the average voter.

When was this halcyon period meant to have taken place?

This is one of those things that almost anyone will support in theory, because it is fuzzy enough to mean almost anything. The question is: what does it mean in practice? You could get a large majority in the US to agree to “an appropriate level of abortion restrictions when the fetus is developed enough” but the definitions of “appropriate” and “enough” vary wildly such as to make abortion a rather polarized subject.

That consensus is unravelling. It is not, however, being driven by the US. It is being driven by the declining state of the US in the world. The response of conservatives is to blame the system and claim that if only more violence were used everything would be all right. This is their standard response to every problem, and as usual it is wrong.

I think that there’s an important question as to whether there are enough liberal internationalist-sympathizers left in the general electorate. There’s a paper in the works from Rick Herrmann (an early version is available here) which explores ideology in the American public in relation to foreign policy questions (centered on Iraq). In my understanding the current version of the paper argues that ideological polarization on FP issues has actually solidified, and the results seem to also confirm that liberals continue to be more internationalist than their conservative counterparts. Unfortunately their data is taken from a survey conducted in 2004. Similarly the survey you cite is from 2005. It would be very instructive as to whether the liberal internationalist sentiments of the American electorate have waned since then, because intuitively I would expect that it has. Anyhow, this may be a bit of a non sequitar but I thought the paper was interesting and relevant to this question.

GLENDOWER:
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR:
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

An attempt to defund the Iraq War would be just the beginning of a confrontation between Congress and the Bush adminstration. You can refuse to pass a supplemental appropriation, but how are you going to enforce it? The Bush adminstration will say that Congress is infringing on the president’s powers as commander-in-chief, and take the money from elsewhere, all the while complaining that the troops are being stabbed int eh back.

The Democrats don’t have the votes to impeach Bush and Cheney.Nothing less than that will bring the war to an end before the expiration of buhs’s term.

Let’s inject a bit of reality into this discussion: The US military will never become the enforcement arm of the UN. No US government would risk placing troops in harms way unless the mission could be justified by US interests directly. The mission must be sold to the American public and few Americans are sufficiently enamored of international law and international institutions to fill body bags and incur other war costs solely in support of international law. Of course, it doesn’t look like the people of any other country are willing to take on the responsibility either. Who knows, maybe the Chinese will be different – or not.