Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Unrealistic expectations

Belmont club:

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It's hard to say which expectation is more unrealistic: the American hope that Europe will reverse decades of military atrophy or the European idea that America will share command with a Continent that can project only two battalion's worth of troops. Thomas Barnett of the Naval War College in his article The Pentagon's New Map believes that most future terrorist threats will spring from "areas of disconnectness" -- chaotic parts of the Third World, the very places where Europe's forces cannot or refuse to go. Meanwhile, the US has been moving its forces steadily south and east, into Central and SouthWest Asia as well as the Middle East. Perhaps more tellingly, US forces are being restructured from divisional-sized building blocks to independent commands can centered around brigades. The breakup of the old triangular divisions (each division traditionally consists of three brigades) into notional units containing four smaller brigades each will increase the number of usable units by a third. This is in part based on the perception that US units have become so powerful in conventional warfare that they can safely be used in smaller packages. But it also arises from the need to use the Army in more places throughout the troubled and chaotic world....

The mission has left Europe: US forces which were designed to fulfill a NATO role -- destroy Russian tank armies crossing the inner German border -- are being re-engineered for intervention in "areas of disconnectness" where European NATO members cannot or will not go in large numbers. Thus, while Europe will continue to remain important, the value of Israel and Turkey, by virtue of their proximity and engagement with the terrorist foe, will rise relative to traditional Western European allies like Belgium, France and Germany....

The crux of the problem, of course, is that the immediate post-World War 2 world and its associated institutions has faded into history. Yet many politicians, perhaps misled by their own youthful memories, continue to act and behave on subconscious assumptions half a century old. The accusation that President Bush was guilty of willful dereliction by not making the United Nations, France and Germany equal partners in the War on Terror is rooted in an inflated conception of their actual importance. Whatever these prestige these hoary old names may conjure, in practical terms their cooperation is probably less vital than that of Pakistan or Israel....

Some have derided the US coalition against terror, comprised of nontraditional names like Korea, Japan, Singapore, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Kazakhstan as a kind of pickup team fielded by a desperate America only because it couldn't get first-string Germany, France and Belgium to play. But this is unjust; it is not a temporary condition but a harbinger of a new state of the world. It's not that NATO has gotten smaller, just that the world has gotten bigger.

John Kerry needs to comprehend this analysis.