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The indivisibility of policy spheres

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Matthew Yglesias makes a crucial point that isn’t made often enough:

In other words, a second Bush term will not merely continue down the current unsustainable course — it will speed us off the cliff faster than ever.

You might think that our friendly war hawks would care about this, since you obviously can’t conduct a generational struggle if your country goes bankrupt in six years. But, of course, they don’t care about it any more than they wonder why, if success in Iraq is so important, they should keep the gang that lost $9 billion dollars and tried to put an Iranian spy in charge of the country running the show.

This is quite right, and illustrates the problematic position of hawkish liberals of the Roger Simon/Michael Totten variety, who are either Bush supporters or leaners. The argument is that while they have no use for Bush’s domestic policy, they like his foreign policy, and the latter is more important. The problem is, of course, is that his domestic policies will make his alleged foreign policy goals completely unachievable. The idea that we’ll be able to engage in all kinds of military adventurism while not only maintaining large number of troops in Iraq but facing eye-popping deficits is just laughably implausible. While one can draw an analytic distinction between foreign policy and domestic policy, they are in practice intertwined in all kinds of ways. You can’t just vote for Bush’s foreign policies, and the nature of his domestic policy makes large-scale military operations during the next four years impossible.

As Yglesias notes, that Bush is as manifestly unserious about foreign policy as domestic policy couldn’t be more clear. That some people continue to buy his foreign policy bromides–“he knows there’s a war on!”–as if they mean anything is genuinely pathetic.

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