Challenging Empire

Fareed Zakaria's weekend news show - GPS - has almost immediately become must-watching. Fareed has a deep love of America while retaining an understanding of how the rest of the world sees this place. And like many, he has increasingly come to see the Manichean mindset of some foreign policy hawks as a serious obstacle to America's long-term interests:

The problem with American foreign policy goes beyond George Bush. It includes a Washington establishment that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement. Other countries can have no legitimate interests of their own. The only way to deal with them is by issuing a series of maximalist demands. This is not foreign policy; it's imperial policy. And it isn't likely to work in today's world.

The flipside to the over-reach of some is the recalibration of the resistance. I was shocked in a way by how many serious people in Washington felt sickened by the Freeman affair and are fighting back against the worldview that gave us the Iraq occupation.