Speaking of Stephen Walt, he wrote an interesting article on his blog a couple
of days ago, - indirectly related to the topic -asking why, during a severe
economic downturn, the US "foreign policy ambitions and international
commitments -- in other words, the number of costly items on the foreign
policy agenda -- seems not to have been affected at all".

After mentioning the usual explanations (American Exceptionalism, "The
hegemonic stability theory", etc), he suggests an additional factor:

"In short, what I'm suggesting here is that America's role in the world today is
shaped by two imbalances of power, not just one. The first is the gap between
U.S. capabilities and everyone else's (...). The second imbalance is between
organized interests whose core mission is constantly pushing the U.S.
government to do more and in more places, and the far-weaker groups who
think we might be better off showing a bit more restraint."

Interestingly, in the long list of institutions and groups promoting activism in
the world, he gives the Council on Foreign Relations a prominent place. And
among the few promoting "a bit more restraint", he also mentions the New
America Foundation:

"By contrast, there are at most a handful of institutions whose core mission is
to get the United States to take a slightly smaller role on the world stage.
There is the CATO Institute (where Preble works) and maybe a few people at
the Center for American Progress and the New America Foundation. And there
are plenty of peace groups out there with an anti-interventionist agenda. But
these groups are hardly a match for the array of forces on the other side. And
apart from Steve Chapman at the Chicago Tribune, I can’t think of a major
mainstream columnist or media commentator who is a consistent voice for a
more restrained foreign policy."

"The result, as you may have noticed, has not been all the salutary. Instead of
stabilizing the key strategic areas of the world -- something we used to be
pretty good at -- in recent years the United States has been an actively
destabilizing force."

The rest of his post is here:

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/12/imbalance_of_power

His assumption is flawed. We never wanted Iran or Iraq be stable, Syria either for that much.

They're on the wrong side of the MIC complex's paradigm and it's where we need to continue a security sector's need to for bad guys we can build and support nanny states against.

Brzez ever teach you guys anything? Most of our South Central Asia policy is just a larger, less direct, version of our Southeact Asia policy that failed for several decades before we decicded to promote failure(Condi, etc.) to bring us this point.

We did support brutality in South America all through that time. It bridged us those two eras. So who is the Noriega of today? Where's our Noriega and Marco to stage this stuff from? In outsourcing our jobs did we cut out the middle man as well?

Well we've put a ton of it through the Marshall Islands. Barack ever fix that for labor or is he still letting the venture capitalists use slavery and sweatshops to sew expensive player jerseys for sports leagues there?

Didn't think it was about change, did you?

Instead of going small with it we've pushed it through in big terms on the top level. Who needs a bananna republic when we can have Chinese democracy? They've almost learned how to pick their leaders for them well as we do.

Who are we kidding, they do a far better job of it. That's why Nixon admired them so much. Normalization wasn't about them changing, it was about us changing, and boy have we.

News to the GOP. We cans top racing to the bottom, you've already got us there.