With our nation just having celebrated its birthday, I'd like to make a modest proposal for a project that might occupy us for the next century or so: Taking the regulated, more-social capitalism that created mass prosperity in this nation and Western Europe in the second half of the 20th century and re-creating it on a global scale.
At present, our debate over how best the United States should relate to the rest of the world isn't very fruitful. On one side are the realists who believe that advancing our interests may require abandoning many of the values we espouse. On the other are those who believe our interests are better served when we seek to advance these values, either in tandem with our allies (the liberal viewpoint) or by ourselves and by force (the neoconservative viewpoint)...