Our big conference on terrorism — Terrorism Security and America’s Purpose — starts today at 9 a.m. and will be live on C-Span for those who care to watch.
We will also have live, real-time web-casting at the conference website, www.AmericasPurpose.org.
My colleague and friend, Michael Lind, has the perfect lead editorial in the Financial Times today to focus our attentions this morning asking the question of whether America is now at a point of strategic overreach:
Samuel Huntington has called it the Lippmann Gap, echoing the American journalist Walter Lippmann in 1943: “Foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power.”
The historian Paul Kennedy has another name for it: “Imperial overextension”. Whatever you call this dangerous disease, the symptoms are clear in the US.
In early 2001, shortly after President George W. Bush was inaugurated and before 9/11, the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned of the three most devastating disasters that could strike the US: a terrorist attack on New York City, a hurricane flooding New Orleans and a San Francisco earthquake. The Bush administration was focused on its priority: Iraq.
More later.
— Steve Clemons
