Jon Chait has a smart column about how U.S. politics isn’t a zero sum enterprise. It’s perfectly possible for conservatives to keep failing to make the government smaller without that meaning that liberals are achieving our goals.
Folks would do well to consider the applicability of this observation to the international realm as well. Lee Smith, for example, takes Hassan Nasrallah’s statement of regret that the recent Israel-Lebanon war as evidence that the CW is wrong and Israel did just fine. Noam Scheiber leans a bit in the direction of embracing that interpretation as well. I suspect the truth is more depressing. War is typically a negative sum endeavor that leaves both sides worse off than they would have been had the war not begun. Think of Iraq — the US seriously damaged our interests by invading, but Saddam Hussein didn’t benefit at all from the war.
It sounds sufficiently dippy that I hesitate to express the view, but the simple fact of the matter is that going to war is rarely a good idea. The benefits of international cooperation — or simple lack of active conflict — are sufficiently large that there are almost always alternatives that would have been more conducive to both sides’ interests.
