But, if the jig is really up, you could just as easily make the case that it dates back to what Mr Kitson considers that golden age "less than a decade ago" - ie, America's holiday from history, when the wise old foreign-policy stability fetishists had nary a word to say about resurgent Islam, freelance nuclearization, and the demographic decline of the west which makes traditional great-power clubs like the G7 about as relevant to the future as dinner theatre in Florida.It's obviously quite false to say that the 1990s-vintage foreign policy establishment had nothing to say about nuclear proliferation. But note that the "demographic decline of the west" is paired here quite simply with "resurgent Islam" -- not Islamism or Islamic radicalism or any other kind of qualified version of the worry. The thing we should have been worrying about is simply a resurgence of Islam. I'll count it as a damn good thing that the country wasn't run by people whose idea of the key foreign policy issue of our time was finding a way to get Christians to outbreed the Muslim hordes.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/05/read-closely/42388/
