[Undertoad]

Mr. Michael Lind talks about this topic in a current edition of bloggingheads.tv (don't click unless you enjoy watching an hour of nothing but political discussion)

I was so impressed by Lind's thoughts on this that I transcribed a bit:

LIND: I wrote The American Way of Strategy to defend what I think is the mainstream tradition of American internationalism that coalesed in the first half of the 20th Century and, underpins a lot of our strategy up until the end of the cold war.

This is not my theory; this is not M.L.'s theory of the world, this is not some kind of academic theory I'm promoting, I'm trying to excavate an existing tradition that you can trace back to Theodore Roosevelt, to Franklin Roosevelt, to Woodrow Wilson and his advisors, Secy of State Robert Lansing, journalists like Walter Lippman. To sum up, the book explains what Woodrow Wilson meant when he said that the US and its allies must "make the world safe for Democracy". Wilson did not say the US and its allies must make the world Democratic, but safe for Democracy. And I explain what that means.

PINKERTON: That's an interesting point, because in Wilson's 14 Points, the word Democracy doesn't appear. He talks about national self-determination, but not Democracy. So when you say this, what did President Wilson have in mind as you articulate?

LIND: What is a world safe for Democracy? It's one in which the security costs imposed on the United States by the outside world are sufficiently low that the US can afford to have a liberal, Democratic/Republican system with separation of powers, with a civilian economy and so on.

It was the fear, both in WW1 and in WW2 and the years preceding, and also in the late 1940s/50s, that if Germany or the Soviet Union were allowed to become the dominant superpower in the world and to encircle us in the oceans, and in the Western hemisphere, we Americans would give up much of our Liberty and much of our Democracy... voluntarily.

That is, we were in no danger of being conquered by the Germans, and the Russians weren't going to occupy Minnesota or Kansas. What the Wilson administration and the interventionists in WW1, and Franklin Roosevelt and the cold war interventionists feared was -- and they said this explicitly, I quote it in my book -- it's seldom quoted nowadays, but this was the major argument for intervention in the world wars and the cold war. The fear was that the US would have to become a garrison state -- voluntarily.

That is, we would voluntarily cede a lot of our liberty to the government to be secure, we would voluntarily have enormous levels of defense spending in a world in which the dominant superpower were Germany or the Soviet Union.

So when politicians say that we intervened in the World Wars and the Cold War to defend our Liberty at home, I argue they're quite right, but what they need to say is, to defend our Liberty from our own government, which we would reluctantly but voluntarily turn into something of a militariized police state if we had to create a fortress America. And it was in order to avoid creating a fortress America that we nipped this trouble in the bud.

We never allowed Germany to consolidate its would-be Euro empire and its two atempts to conquer Europe. And we never allowed the Soviet Union to intimidate Western Europe and Japan into submission and to divide them from the US.

I think that's something that needs to be explained, because otherwise if you say, "American soldiers have fought and died abroad defending our Liberty", that just seems like cheap rhetoric if you think well, come on, the Kaiser wasn't going to conquer the United States, and the Soviets weren't going to invade California.

And THAT, Mr. Radar, is how WW1, WW2 and the Cold War threatened Liberty, and the real reason they had to be fought.

Similarly, some level of War on Terror has to be fought -- whether it's military, or police/intelligence -- partly because losing a WTC every five years (or whatever) is not an acceptable loss in our economy, but mostly because the country can't stand an ever-increasingly potent Patriot Act every five years.