This is yet another postelection analysis of the partisan forces that nearly toppled a conservative wartime president. Don't worry, though. This one's not about the liberal platoons led by Joe Lockhart, Michael Moore or Janeane Garofalo, but rather the conservative camps whose internecine squabbling threatened the president's victory.
In Camp 1, conservative realists, such as Brent Scowcroft, attacked President Bush's policies for splitting the NATO alliance and chasing after democratic rainbows in the barren sands of the Middle East.
In Camp 2, conservative internationalists -- the notorious neocons -- including Charles Krauthammer and Francis Fukuyama, quarreled about the urgency of the terrorist threat and the need for international approval.
In Camp 3, conservative nationalists, such as Pat Buchanan, deplored the Cold War reflex to defend feckless allies and called for homeland and missile defenses to defeat terrorism.
Foreign policy wars among conservatives are not new. In the 1970s, neocon Ronald Reagan blasted realists such as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for preserving rather than defeating the former Soviet Union. But peace among conservatives is possible -- so long as all camps recognize the contributions each makes to their common cause.
All conservatives believe that threats arise from disparities in power, especially when that power is wielded by countries that do not support freedom in their own societies. To protect freedom in countries where it exists, therefore, a global balance of power is necessary. Without it diplomacy and moral example are, in the words of Frederick the Great, "like music without instruments."
That doesn't mean legitimacy flows from force. It flows from freedom -- and international institutions are too often compromised, if not dominated, by countries that are less than free at best, tyrannies at worst -- institutions such as the U.N. Security Council, where Russia and China have veto power.
It is not weapons of mass destruction per se that threaten the U.S., but the nature of the societies or groups that seek such weapons. Britain has nuclear weapons and no one is concerned. But fundamentalist societies and groups that reject Western freedom pose a threat that, although not specific and imminent -- like the Cold War threat -- is global and immanent. No tanks and artillery bristle at the border of Central Europe, capable of striking within the hour. Instead terrorist cells lurk throughout the fabric of global society, capable of striking in any spot at any hour. The new threat offers less warning time than the intercontinental missiles that defined the Cold War.
