David Brooks: Crisis of Confidence

This blog is in a series of posts from my readings of THE RIGHT WAR? THE CONSERVATIVE DEBATE ON IRAQ. Please contribute your comments. The following is a discussion of Chapter 7, a republished article by the David Brooks, May 8, 2004, New York Times.


David Brooks follows up with another column just a few weeks later that describes a potential "Crisis of Confidence" emerging in the U.S. because of the Iraq war. This almost echoes was James Kurth was getting at a few months earlier, that this war will cripple us from taking other, perhaps more-needed actions.

Brooks: “It’s pretty clear we’re passing through another pivot point in American foreign policy. A year ago, we were the dominant nation in a unipolar world. Today, we’re a shellshocked hegemon. We still face a world of threats, but we’re much less confident about our own power.”

He says that we still have the greatest military force in the world. “We can topple tyrants, but we don’t seem to be very good at administering nations.”

Because of the bloodbath that Iraq has become, it has put us into a situation where we are now less confident about decisions we are making. In fact, he goes further. “We are on the verge of a crisis of confidence … No matter how Iraq turns out, no president in the near future is going to want to send American troops into any global hotspot …"

But he reminds us that "Unfortunately states will still fail … Tyrants will still aid terrorists. Genocide will still occur … What are we going to do then? … If you were one of those people who thought the world was dangerous with an overreaching hyperpower, wait until you get a load of the age of the global power vacuum.”

So, now we are in a predicament. Even though our decision to go to war in Iraq has created a problem when it meant to solve on, Brooks argues that we can’t stoop to the level of inaction. Instead, he says that “the U.S. has to make it clear that it is considering fresh approaches.”

By the end of the column, I feel like Brooks is merely just telling us where we are and giving us a pep talk - perhaps to boost our confidence. “We’ve got to reboot. We’ve got to come up with a global alliance of democracies to embody democratic ideals, harness U.S. military power, and house a permanent nation-building apparatus, filled with people who actually possess expertise on how to do this job.”

So, in conclusion, he still thinks nation-building can be done, if we go about it properly - perhaps with alliances. He also says the U.N. is a failure and we can't depend on an organization that is made up of nations that don't know what democracy is. When will Brooks finally see that perhaps nation-building itself is the problem. Are there really experts on it? Perhaps the British, but I think we can rest assured that those days are over from our friends in the UK. Perhaps for a reason.