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Fareed Zakaria rightly notes that while everyone has been beating up on Barack Obama for proposing talks with Chávez and Ahmadinejad, John McCain has quietly espoused some genuine crackpot ideas about foreign policy. Especially wrongheaded is his idea to create a "League of Democracies," which would only antagonize Russia and China, two great powers whose cooperation the United States needs on a host of regional and global issues. (Paul Saunders ably dispatched a similar plan mooted by McCain advisor Robert Kagan and Obama advisor Ivo Daalder last August, but some bad ideas just won't die.)

Still, it's hard to get too worked up about it, since it ain't going to happen. As Reason's Matt Welch put it:

After eight years of a cranky, go-it-alone White House that won re-election in part by bashing limp-wristed Euro-weenies, the chances of another interventionist Republican winning enough good faith among grumbly allies to create a brand spanking new America-defined Club of Winners are something approaching zero.

McCain's other big idea -- excluding Russia from the G8, while formally including India and Brazil but not China -- is more plausible but equally self-defeating.

I can think of many reasons why Russia doesn't really belong in the G8. Its economy is heavily dependent on energy and its political system is trending autocratic, to name just two. Including the Russians was a stretch in the first place. On the other hand, almost everything in the chair's summary from last year's G8 summit in Heiligendamm concerned things that the West wants from Russia (and especially China): "a smooth adjustment of global imbalances," "open and more favorable investment conditions," intellectual property protection, agreement to negotiate a successor to Kyoto, greater transparency, fighting corruption, responsible behavior in Africa, and so on. Excluding them seems so self-evidently silly that I sincerely doubt McCain would go through with it were he elected.

Yesterday, we published several reader reactions to "Think Again: Peace Corps," a new FP Web exclusive written by former Cameroon country director Robert L. Strauss.

Today, Howard Williams, a former Peace Corps volunteer and fellow former country director "with over 20 years experience as a development professional in 15 countries," writes in to say he is "dismayed" by the article:

Among the straw men are "The Peace Corps is a Diplomatic Weapon." Peace Corps is a diplomatic asset, demonstrating the goodwill and basic decency of Americans that, taken with the work of USAID, other U.S. Agencies, and their PVO and NGO partners, show we care about more than ourselves and that a sense of service to others is a basic American characteristic.

Equally flawed is the assertion that volunteers are not sent to where they are needed and that whole countries can be "graduated," no longer benefiting sufficiently from volunteers' service. Anyone who works or travels in the field, outside the capital with its agency offices and well-appointed hotels, knows that access to resources and experience managing them is uneven and that there are populations within most countries that can benefit from volunteers' assistance.

For example, many developing countries, Cameroon no doubt included, find great difficulty recruiting qualified teachers to serve in rural and remote sites. Peace Corps volunteer teachers will go there and show up at their classes regularly and well prepared –- something that local teachers often find challenging, given the other economic, social, and health demands they face each day. Students can count on PCVs to be there, in class, helping them learn.

Some countries with a greater overall resource base, like Romania, can benefit from American volunteers by their demonstrated sense of civic duty, resourcefulness, collegial approach to their work, and public transparency, traits that were not well rewarded under the former Soviet system. If a country director knowingly sent volunteers to assignments that were not needed, not useful, or not workable or that did not sufficiently engage the volunteers, as he claims, then he would have failed in his job as director. Complaints on that score are much akin to a ship's captain blaming the Navy for bad weather and rocks.

Denigrating generalizations about local people liking anyone attempting to speak their language and participate in local traditions, or that volunteers do not sufficiently demonstrate their commitment to service, are not supported by facts but by a condescending articulation about the nature of people, including the very volunteers he pledged to support.

Finally, the assertion that Peace Corps has an obligation to justify itself on a "development" yardstick, in comparison with other agencies, completely misses the point of what Peace Corps is. There simply is no such thing as a perfect "development" program. We used to tell volunteers, "Each aid agency has strengths and limitations and each has a unique role to play in development. Some have more money, some have national programs, and Peace Corps has people. You cannot judge one by comparing its limitations to the strengths of another -- and vice versa." I hope we will not lose sight of Peace Corps' unique contribution to local development, goodwill abroad, and Americans' understanding of the world in pursuit of making it look more "professional." If you ask any villager who they can count on to be there each day for them, you'll find that Peace Corps rates very well indeed.

Were you a Peace Corps volunteer or do you otherwise have strong thoughts on this topic? Read the article and comment below or send us your comments by e-mail. Requests for confidentiality will be strictly honored.

Note: This post is part of our online salon, UN Peacekeeping: Challenges and Opportunities for the Next Administration, co-hosted with UN Dispatch.

I agree with Mark that the gap between the Security Council's mandates and what is achievable on the ground has often been startling. In part, this is just hope prevailing over good sense. But it also reflects a deeper reality: When the Security Council authorizes a mission, it may actually be less concerned with the situation on the ground than it is with the political effect of the action at home or vis-à-vis other Council states. This points to an important political role that peacekeeping missions can play: providing political cover for the Great Powers. Historically, peacekeeping evolved in this way and, in a sense, little has changed. The early observer missions to Palestine and then the larger Suez mission in 1956 were explicitly designed to help major powers out of tight spots. Having small states provide troops made sure that the peacekeeping forces didn't themselves become triggers for great power conflict. Obviously, there have been exceptions to the rule that peacekeeping contributors should be small states and "middle powers." (The British have contributed large numbers of troops to several missions, including Cyprus and Bosnia.)

It's important to keep this context in mind, however. In the larger geopolitical game, peacekeeping forces have been buffers between the major powers. Bill Durch suggests that the major powers -- or at least more developed states -- should start providing manpower for the missions. I think he may be right. But we should acknowledge that this would be a significant conceptual shift and that it might involve political complications. The danger of great power conflagration is much reduced, though it will obviously be prudent to keep certain great powers out of certain regions. China has shown increased interest in peacekeeping, and there was grumbling by human rights activists about the participation of Chinese personnel (mainly engineers) in Sudan. The great powers have troops, but they also bring some heavy political baggage.

Anthony Cordesman; Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Yesterday, I attended the Jane's U.S. Defense Conference, an annual gathering bringing together American and European defense industry representatives with national-security officials. The theme of this year's conference was "the outlook for policy and defense business under the next presidency," an appropriate enough subject for the day of the Pennsylvania primary.

There was an overwhelming sense at the conference that despite billions more dollars in defense spending, the United States is not adequately preparing for the threats of the 21st century, nor is it giving the "warfighters" the resources they need to achieve victory. Major General Charles J. Dunlap of the U.S. Air Force, for instance, worried that an overemphasis on counterinsurgency was leading the U.S. to ignore the possibility of warfare with a "peer country" (read: China). Former Under-Secretary for Defense Acquisition Jacques Gansler argued that protectionism and the prioritization of congressional pork projects were causing the misuse of defense resources, necessitating a law stipulating that "Congress should not be making defense-acqisition decisions." The State Department's Deputy Director of Policy Planning Kori Schake lamented the miniscule size of her own agency's budget relative to defense, saying that every one of State's problems could be "traced back to chronic underfunding."

Oddly enough in a discussion of current national-defense priorities, Iraq and Afghanistan hardly came up until near the end of the day, when the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Anthony Cordesman gave a briefing on both conflicts. Given the weakness of both countries' political institutions, Cordesman feels that the term "counterinsurgency" ought to be abandoned altogether in favor of "armed nation-building." Since Cordesman sees far more progress toward this goal in Iraq, I asked him if troop withdrawal there would increase the likelihood of success in Afghanistan:

If we can move forward in Iraq in ways that seem possible, we may be down to 10 brigrades by 2009. You can't suddenly move those brigades to Afghanistan. They require retraining. They will have to be re-equipped and restructed to fight a different kind of war on different terrain, dealing with a different culture with different values.

I also have to say that while troops are important... far more important are the aid teams and advisory teams... rapid turnover of deployments in a country where personal relationships are even more important than they are in Iraq, the inability to take aid workers out into the field where they are really needed... The problem isn't troop levels and it won't be solved by moving out of Iraq."

It seems ironic that the takeaway message of a national-defense conference was that what we traditionally think of as defense can only do so much. The next president's foreign-policy team will need to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time if it wants to begin to address the problems left over from the current one.

Note: This post is part of our online salon, UN Peacekeeping: Challenges and Opportunities for the Next Administration, co-hosted with UN Dispatch.

Even as we discuss the logistical, manpower, and financial pressures on [the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations], I hope we do not leave aside the question of what precisely the international community is getting for its (admittedly modest) investment in peacekeeping. Is the current crop of missions producing political and humanitarian results? The UN, of course, endured intense soul searching during the 1990s about the efficacy of peacekeeping in the wake of the Bosnia and Rwanda missions. Today's missions are far less scrutinized but I suspect that has more to do with a distracted media than it does an easing of the operational dilemmas facing peacekeepers in the field.

As Bill Durch aptly points out in the paper (pdf), the surge in UN peacekeeping has been neither met by commensurate increases in the number of staff in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), nor by commensurate increases in the funding streams available to DPKO. Is peacekeeping reaching its breaking point? Is there a future for UN peacekeeping? If so, what can be done to boost peacekeeping's capacity to deal with the multitude of challenges it faces?

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Even undeniably "puerile" debates can sometimes cough up interesting tidbits, and, on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton proposed an interesting way to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions: Extend nuclear deterrence to "those countries [in the region] that are willing to go under the security umbrella and forswear their own nuclear [weapons] ambitions." Unfortunately, moderator George Stephanopolous did not ask any follow-up questions, even though Sen. Clinton’s idea certainly merits a closer look.

The concept of a "nuclear umbrella" has been around almost since the Cold War and the nuclear arms race began. At the most basic level, it involves a nuclear- weapons state promising to use its nukes to respond if non-nuclear ally is attacked with nuclear weapons. Cold War strategists hoped that "extending" nuclear deterrence like this would cement important alliances and, crucially, eliminate the need for those countries to develop their own nukes. A nuclear umbrella is thus a tool of both diplomacy and of nonproliferation.

The key question here is credibility. How, for instance, would you convince the Soviets that the United States really would risk New York to defend Paris? During the Cold War, U.S. strategists achieved this credibility in several ways (pdf). First, American troops were deployed heavily in allied territory, placing them in the way of any nuclear attack. Second, U.S. nuclear weapons were often deployed in forward locations and sometimes integrated into allied command structures. Third, the umbrella only got extended to countries with which the United States already had strong alliances.

Unfortunately, even in Gulf regimes that are friendly to America, all of these preconditions are weak or nonexistent (pdf) -- which does not bode well for Sen. Clinton’s proposal. In addition, Iran does not have the ability to project power globally like the Soviet Union did, making any direct threat to U.S. interests unlikely. I should also note that any Iranian nuclear weapon is still a long ways off, and attempting to deter the Iranians is premature at this point.

However, the idea is still worth exploring as a contingency plan, and new ways of establishing credibility and commitment might be possible -- for instance, extending a missile-defense "umbrella," even one that doesn't work very well yet. But although technical measures like these may be part of the solution to U.S. problems in the Middle East, they can't supplant a broader strategy that uses all the diplomatic, political, and economic levers at America's disposal.

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Representative Howard Berman of California has proposed legislation to clear the name of the South Africa's African National Congress (ANC) in the United States government record books. Nelson Mandela, and other former members, need approval to enter the United States as the ANC was once labelled a terrorist organization by both the U.S. and South Africa during apartheid.  The ANC has evolved quite a bit over the years, but did carry out numerous attacks on institutions of South Africa's apartheid regime from the 1960s through the 1980s. The New York Times explains the U.S. stance:

Until recently, State Department officials preferred to grant ANC members waivers for travel to the United States on a case-by-case basis. They feared a more permanent exemption would open the floodgates to similar requests by other former terrorist groups. But that objection apparently now has been wisely dropped."

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice found it an "embarrassing matter" to waive travel restrictions on her South African counterparts, let alone the "great leader" himself.  The bill would update entries on the ruling party's members in U.S. government databases. Just in case you missed the neon sign, Hamas and al Qaeda need not apply.

I think the Wall Street Journal's Jay Solomon is overselling this story of increasing criticism of Sen. Barack Obama's alleged "radical departure from standard U.S. doctrine" regarding negotiating with rogue leaders, but Karim Sadjadpour makes a good point here:

If Obama comes into office in January 2009, I wouldn't advise him" to hold talks with [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad quickly, said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran specialist at Washington's Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who said he is generally supportive of Sen. Obama's agenda. "Only two things can rehabilitate Ahmadinejad politically: bombing Iran or major efforts to engage" him ahead of the vote.

My hope is that Obama doesn't literally mean he will sit across the table from Ahmadinejad, but rather that he won't be afraid to negotiate with Iran and will drop preconditions that only ensure that talks will go nowhere. But it's worth pointing out that the United States has tried in the past to ignore Iran's power dynamics and negotiate with its preferred interlocutors. That approach simply doesn't work, because the hardliners will work to torpedo any deal that doesn't include them. Plus, they've got Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on their side, and he's the big boss. There will be no deal without his approval.

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Critics of Republican presidential nominee John McCain often point to his inconsistent stance on military intervention as a sign that he is not the straight-talking maverick he presents himself to be. An examination of McCain's stances on intervention, however, reveals not mixed signals but a steady transformation of worldview. The young Vietnam vet who once vocally opposed military overreach has become the elder statesman who passionately advocates the need for military action. Here's a look at the stances McCain has taken on some of the major U.S. military operations of the past few decades.

Lebanon

Stance: As a freshman congressman, John McCain broke with President Ronald Reagan and most of his party to oppose invoking the War Powers Act to extend the deployment of U.S. peacekeepers in Lebanon.

Statement: "The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave. We will be trapped by the case we make for having our troops there in the first place." Sept. 29, 1983

Iraq (Operation Desert Storm)

Stance: McCain worried about the prospect of an extended deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq and hoped to limit the U.S. action to a bombing campaign.

Statement: "If you get involved in a major ground war in the Saudi desert, I think support will erode significantly. Nor should it be supported. We cannot even contemplate, in my view, trading American blood for Iraqi blood.'' Aug. 19, 1990

Somalia

Stance: After a failed operation that led to the death of 19 U.S. soldiers, McCain proposed cutting off funding to the U.S. mission in Somalia in order to force the Clinton administration to bring the troops home. He later wrote that he regretted this stance.

Statement: "I'll tell you what can erode our prestige Mr. President. I'll tell you what can erode our viability as a world superpower, and that is if we emesh ourselves in a drawn-out situation, which entails the loss of American lives, more debacles like the one we saw with the failed mission to captured Adid's lieutenants using American forces and that then will be what hurts our prestige." Oct. 14, 1993

Haiti

Stance: Like most congressional leaders at the time, McCain opposed sending U.S. troops to Haiti in 1994 to assist the return of exiled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide back in power.

Statement: "I don't think our vital national security interests are at stake... In Haiti, there is a military government we don't like. But there are other governments around the world that aren't democratic that we don't like. Are we supposed to invade those countries, too?" July 10, 1994

Bosnia

Stance: McCain initially strongly opposed intervention in Bosnia, but after the signing of the Dayton accords in 1995, he changed his stance and cosponsored a resolution supporting the U.S. peacekeeping mission.

Statements: "If we find ourselves involved in a conflict in which American casualties mount, in which there is no end in sight, in which we take sides in a foreign civil war, in which American fighting men and women have great difficulty distinguishing between friend and foe, then I suggest that American support for military involvement would rapidly evaporate." April 23, 1993

"Our troops are going to Bosnia. Congress should do everything in our power to insure that our mission is truly clear, limited and achievable, that it has the greatest chance for success with the least risk to the lives of our young men and women. The resolution that the majority leader and I have offered does not ask senators to support the decision to deploy. It asks that you support the deployment after the decision had been made. It asks you further to condition your support on some important commitments by the President." Dec. 13, 1995

Kosovo

Stance: McCain not only favored the use of force to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, but pressed the Clinton administration to send ground troops into Serbia.

Statement: "If we lose this war, the entire country and the world will suffer the consequences. Yes, the President would leave office with yet another mark against him. But he will not suffer that indignity alone. We will all be less secure. We will all be dishonored.'' May 9, 1999

Afghanistan

Stance: McCain strongly supported the U.S. operation to defeat the Taliban and attempt to capture Osama bin Laden.

Statement: "[W]hat we need to understand is that we may have to put large numbers of troops into Afghanistan for a period of time, not a long period of time, but for a period of time, in order to effectively wipe out these terrorists' nests and track down Mr. bin Laden. In other words, it's going to take a very big effort, and probably casualties will be involved, and it won't be accomplished through air power alone." Dec. 28, 2001

Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom)

Stance: McCain has been among the most vocal supporters of the initial invasion of Iraq and last year's troop surge. His stance on these issues has largely defined his presidential run.

Statement: "Only an obdurate refusal to face unpleasant facts -- in this case, that a tyrant who survives only by the constant use of violence is not going to be coerced into good behavior by nonviolent means -- could allow one to believe that we have rushed to war... Our armed forces will fight for peace in Iraq -- a peace built on more secure foundations than are found today in the Middle East. Even more important, they will fight for the two human conditions of even greater value than peace: liberty and justice. Some of our soldiers will perish in this just cause. May God bless them and may humanity honor their sacrifice." March 12, 2003

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As FP recently explored in the Military Index, the U.S. Army last year had a shortage of 3,000 captains and majors, a number expected to double by 2010. Behind these statistics are folks like 26-year-old Army Capt. Kirkner Bailey of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Mosul, who says:

I have served my time; I've done two tours in Iraq. For the past three years of my life I have either been in Iraq or training to go to Iraq. I just know that there is more to life than this war, and my girlfriend, Shannon, and I are interested in finding out what that is. I can't speak to trends. But 8 of my 10 friends who are captains are leaving the Army."

When people talk about how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are hollowing out of the military, this is what they mean. The trend is particularly scary when you consider that officers like Captain Bailey have tremendous amounts of combat experience and the Army is counting on them to be the next generation of leaders.

Canada's forces in southern Afghanistan are getting a boost from the U.S. Marine Corps:

Roughly 1,100 of the 3,200 U.S. marines due in Afghanistan have already arrived for what's scheduled to be a seven-month tour in the war-ravaged country, where they are expected to buttress badly stretched Canadian resources. "I think everyone has embraced us, the Canadians in particular," Col. Peter Petronzio, the unit's commanding officer, said Monday.

The deployment is a stop-gap to bolster the Canadians, who have been battling insurgents and insisted on help as a condition of extending their deployment. After Germany, Spain, and several other NATO states refused (again) to send troops south, the U.S. offered a Marine unit. For the next seven months, the North Americans will be fighting shoulder to shoulder in the province. Hell, if the Mexicans chip in a brigade, Kandahar could join NAFTA.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick, formerly the number two in the State Department, told Europeans at the Brussels Forum that the next U.S. president is going to piss them off:

Zoellick began his session by challenging European expectations for a new U.S. president. "My major concern is that the tenor of the debate in Europe is raising expectations – regardless of who the next president is – that overlooks a range of interests that I think both parties in the United States would pursue and also some ideologies… they would pursue, and that those heightened expectations will inevitably have to be adjusted," Zoellick said.

U.S. Department of Defense

Newt Gingrich is a big tease. I attended a talk by the former House speaker and FP contributor at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday titled, "What if Reagan Had Not Run and the Soviet Union Still Existed?" Given Gringich's penchant for alternative history, I was anticipating apocalyptic scenarios of President Ted Kennedy ceding Alaska to the Soviets while American schoolchildren were memorizing passages from Das Kapital.

Instead, Gingrich's presentation was largely a discussion of the power of political rehetoric. This month marks the 25th anniversary of two of Reagan's key speeches, the March 8th "Evil Empire" speech and the March 23rd speech announcing the creation of the Strategic Defense Inititiative. Gingrich feels that these two speeches set the stage for the Soviets' collapse:

Here he is, simultaneously in the same month [...] boldly setting out two great principles of dismantling the Soviet empire. First we're going to boldly take it on by delegitimizing its authority because it's evil. And why should something that's evil have authority. Second, we're going to start a race involving science and technology that the Soviet Union cannot possibly win. As a bold set of insights, they're remarkable. The fact that they worked, I would argue, is indisputable. Yet, at the time, they were so radical that almost no one could have accepted them.

Gingrich's larger point was that "none of the people who were wrong in the 1980s have learned anything." He feels that liberal elites in the U.S. media, state department, and academia still favor appeasement and relativism toward America's enemies over Reagan's aggressive moral clarity, which is why they avoid giving Reagan credit for winning the Cold War. I would argue that this isn't as radical an opinion as Gingrich thinks. (Even the dreaded New York Times grudgingly included it in Reagan's obituary.)

But leaving aside the multitude of reasons for the Soviet collapse and the strong evidence that decades of containment weakened the USSR more than Reagan's confrontation, it's clear that the Gipper played a crucial role in hastening events. If anything, Gingrich's analysis actually sells him short. Gingrich focuses only on the bellicose rhetoric of Reagan's first term, not the more conciliatory actions of his second. He doeesn't mention Reagan's many meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, including the 1986 negotiations in Iceland where the U.S. president nearly agreed to abolish his nuclear-missile force. Reagan clearly respected Gorbachev and felt that negotiation with such a rival was not an act of moral compromise. In doing so, he spurned the neoconservatives in his administration who viewed these overtures as tantamount to appeasement.

If aggressiveness and moral clarity were all that it took to defeat tyranny, democracy would have flowered in Cuba decades ago. The real takeaway lesson of Reagan's Soviet strategy is that confrontation only works if combined with constructive engagement. It's a lesson that many of those who idolize him have yet to learn.