Over the past several months, I have been trying to lay out a broad and consistent argument about American foreign and defense policy. In the process of doing so, I have found myself allied with a number of very thoughtful people, with whom I have nonetheless quite significant disagreements. Just for the record, I thought it would be useful to lay out those disagreements and the logic of my position.

First, I have argued for a strategy that would reduce our footprint on the ground in the Middle East as well as hiding our fingerprints on their societies. The footprints and fingerprints approach is fundamentally about reducing hostility to the United States in the Muslim world because I believe that we have been too willing in the past to allow particularly Arab leaders to redirect domestic frustrations onto us. The result is that we get blamed for many, many things that we are not responsible for. And while some consider that the price we have to pay for global leadership, I think this response is both too defeatist about our inherent standing in the world as well as too sanguine about the consequences of being hated and/or feared.

Second, I have tried to take a couple of whacks at what remains the most powerful underpinning of forward posture in the Muslim world — namely the presumed necessity of pursuing the counter-terrorism mission. I have argued that military occupation has little counter-terrorism value. And that we are overcommitted relative to the stakes in Afghanistan.

Finally, I have tried to get people thinking seriously about the implications of the new defense budget as announced earlier this month by Secretary of Defense Gates. As I argued in a HuffPo post:

Despite electoral outcomes that seemed a rebuke to the neoconservative foreign policy agenda of the Bush Administration, President Obama working with Secretary Gates has chosen to embrace a military posture and as a consequence likely a foreign policy orientation that is designed not to reverse the Bush Administration, but rather to implement Bush’s policies more effectively.

….

Obama’s apparent diagnosis of Bush’s foreign policy is not that it was wrongheaded — imperialistic and unachievable — but rather that it was implemented incompetently. Now with better public diplomacy and a retooled military, the policy of remaking the world in our own image — at the point of a gun if necessary — can proceed apace.

In the course of making these arguments, I have been dispirited in a way by the difficulty of getting much traction due to a combination of (a) the dominance of the COIN consensus in policy circles, and (b) the over-emphasis on specific programs in defense analytic circles, and (c) the general resistance to bucking the conventional wisdom on counter-terrorism issues. Nonetheless, there are folks doing wonderful, thoughtful work, including, among others:

Andrew Bacevich whose recent Boston Globe op-ed challenges the policy “consensus has centered on what we might call the Sacred Trinity of global power projection, global military presence, and global activism – the concrete expression of what politicians commonly refer to as “American global leadership.”"

John Mueller, whose Foreign Affairs article on Afghanistan closely parallel’s my own views.

Chris Preble, whose new book, challenges much of the same consensus that has Bacevich worked up.

I should also note the really detailed and thoughtful blogging of the folks at Newshoggers, particularly Steve Hynd’s posts:

• The New American Century Has Not Been Cancelled
• Escalation Advocates Can’t Agree On Real Af/Pak Mission
• The Obama/Gates War Budget

There are certainly many others I could mention, but I’ll leave it at that for now.

What is interesting, though, as I read the work of these other writers is that I suspect my motivation is somewhat different from theirs. Or rather, my ultimate agenda is different.

The reason I am so concerned about our apparent desire to enbrace decades-long occupations of foreign countries is not that I am pacifist or an isolationist in any sense. Nor do I particularly have any doubts that the United States is, on the whole, a force for good in the world (except when Dick Cheney is near the levers of power). Nor am I opposed to the use of force when interests dictate it. Indeed, I think that the United States ought to maintain a robust power-projection capability that would allow us to engage in regime change against adversarial regimes.

It is precisely my desire to keep open this option for military force that drives my recommendations. Simply put, we won’t be able to use force when we need to if the assumption is that any significant use of force some requires us to engage in a decade long occupation and open-ended commitment to nation building. We need to be able to have the disciplined capacity to whack our enemies without then surrendering our autonomy to their ability to construct stable, democratic regimes.

The decision, for instance, that we want to eliminate a potential threat from someone like Saddam Hussein should not have to hinge on whether we think Shiite/Sunni/Kurd reconciliation is possible.

From my perspective, if you want to be able to use military force, you need to be able to disengage once your goals are accomplished. And that can’t happen if you implicitly assume that nation-building and long-term occupation are the necessary correlary of a strategy of regime change.

So, in a weird sense, I am a foreign policy hawk arguing for peace.