Customer Reviews

Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency

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3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Pat Buchanan takes aim at Bush/Cheney and the neoconservatives, and he has them dead to rights. The so-called "preemptive doctrine" is really PREVENTIVE -- Iraq did not pose an imminent threat, so the invasion and occupation was aggressive, not defensive. It could only be justified as action to prevent a threat sometime in the future -- the "Minority Report" doctrine. This is obviously an incredibly dangerous doctrine which can just as easily be used by anyone who wants to attack the U.S. The open-ended counterinsurgency war has made the U.S. LESS secure, not more secure. Buchanan draws on the policy of the Founding Fathers of avoiding entangling alliances to bolster his opposition. He makes the same point as "Anonymous" ("Imperial Hubris") in saying that it is childish for Bush to say the Islamic radicals "hate our freedom" -- obviously they hate our policies of supporting corrupt oil regimes, blindly backing Israel, and stationing troops on sacred Saudi soil, among others.

Buchanan also makes an important point that China, the rising power, has to be central to U.S. policy, as the U.S. is the declining power. Neither "terrorism", which is a tactic, not an enemy, nor Islamic fundamentalism, has the capacity to threaten U.S. vital interests in the way an ascendant China will have in the years to come. As Zbigniew Brzezinski has pointed out (see his "The Choice" and my review), the Bush/Cheney administration's "war on terrorism" propaganda is simplistic and hysterical.

Beyond that, Buchanan the socially conservative Catholic tacks on the predictable call for a White Straight Christian Nation, discussing Mexican immigration at some length. I don't support this in the slightest, but as his main focus is a well-argued, forceful critique of the Bush Doctrine and the invasion of Iraq, I'm only docking Pat one star. See sociologist Doug Massey's "Beyond Smoke and Mirrors" for an excellent analysis of our dysfunctional immigration policy vis a vis Mexico and how to fix it.

Pat Buchanan is true to the old conservative position of isolationism, the traditional Republican position from before the so-called "Cold War." I respect him for it, and I wish more Republicans today would adopt such a position instead of the wrong-headed quasi-Wilsonian crusade of the neoconservatives who vainly imagine they can use military force to make the "whole world one big American town" in the words of the Randy Newman song.

Why did Osma attack? "He hates our freedoms" was the laughable explanation. For those of you who want a REAL reasons Pat Buchanan, offers it. Along with a convincing arguement that we are playing into Bin Laden's hands.

What's even more shocking is that are 'neoconservitives" are just as radical as Bin Laden. Buchanan doesn't need to name call, he simply quotes neocons like Michael "creative destruction" Leedon -
and reveals their radical agenda.

The idea that you can bring freedom at gunpoint is not only unworkable, but far from conservtive - it is a notion that has more in common with Trotsky and the Sans coultte than Edmund Burke.

Buchanan's book offers a strong arguement that not only are we not winning this 'war' but we are actually strenthening our enemies and ignoring our real problems.

Buchanan predictions have repeatedly been confirmed....his book is a closest thing we have to a crystal ball on these matters.

The author delves deeply into the negative changes in both the USA & the Republican party brought about by the neo-cons. He spends the first third of the book ridiculing the present Bush administration willing attitude toward waging war to spread democracy. With the bulk focusing on the Iraq war.

He shows how Richard Pearle & Paul Wolfiwitz convinced president G.Bush to adopt interventionist policies. In ch-3, he gives some historical background on Islam. from their early conflicts with the west to the present. In ch-4, he speaks of the vagueness of the term "war on terror." He feels it is an eternal war that can't truly be won. Chapter-5 was the most fascinating to this reader as he compares the USA's economic & military power to that of China's. In ch-6-8, he bashes the abysmal economic policies of the neo-cons. From out of control government spending, the huge deficits, the outsourcing of our manufacturing base, & the de-valuing of the dollar. If something is not done to reverse these trends he feels we will be in a permanent decline. In ch-9, he detests the craven Congress' surrender to the judicial branch. He feels the latter has become far to powerful in its negative influence on our citizenry.

In ch-10, "The Way Back Home" he concludes with advice on foreign policy, economic policy, immigration, Islam & terror. For both the USA & the Republican party he believes itis crucial that the traditionalist conservative ideological base take back the party from the neo-con wing of the party. Unlike his previous book "Death Of The West," he has plenty of statistics to back up his claims. In conclusion he feels it will take at least a decade to repair the damage done by the Bush administration. Lets
all hope it can be fixed faster than that?

This book is a perfectly timed-bomb for the 2004 Republican National Convention, set to explode under the seats of the "neo-conservative" Rasputins which Mr. Buchanan sees as having hijacked the party of Lincoln, directing us into our current Mesopotamian predicament. If he can succeed in blowing some fresh air into the political debate in this country (all but stifled by the "mainstream" establishment media), then this book will have been a worthwhile endeavor. He will most certainly sustain a ruthless counter-attack by the demagogues, but I am sure he is prepared for that. Personally I am more swayed by facts than slurs or emotion, but I fear others are not necessarily so inclined.

Mr. Buchanan is truly a throwback to the old ways of the Grand Old Party: in addition to supporting non-interventionism (in his case isolationism is probably not too strong a word) he is socially conservative and a big government protectionist to boot. Hence his otherwise wonderful discussion of a truly Jeffersonian and libertarian foreign policy is marred by a tirade against Mexicans and a simplistic longing for a return to the Anglo-dominated American life of the 1950s.

Be that as it may, in these times one must be willing to look for the good in all things and Mr. Buchanan provides that in spades with his critique of the Bush administration and its radical turn towards Wilsonianism, the curse of the 20th century. Hopefully enough people will be influenced by this line of thinking so that the "War on Terror" wanes into an historical hiccup (like the War of 1812), and not a calamity-inducing catastrophe (like the Great War).

Anyone who has survived being as vilified as Buchanan has in recent years from all over the political spectrum is worth taking a long look at. How can someone who is equally despised by Maureen Dowd and David Frum still maintain his place as a major opinion maker?

The answer is to be found in his writing. Buchanan's prose is the simplest and cleanest of any major political writer's today, possibly excepting Thomas Sowell's. Buchanan is a pleasure to read, even when one disagrees with some of his ideas. He is straightforward without being dull, witty without being cute.

The central thesis of his latest work is a familiar one: that the Republican Party has been hijacked by ideologues whose views do not represent those of the average American, especially those of the average American conservative or Republican. This accusation has been tirelessly denied by those that Buchanan and his allies derisively call "neoconservatives," but it has never been convincingly refuted, which is why Buchanan and his "paleocon" views continue to enjoy wide popularity in the face of often savage criticism.

One example suffices to illustrate the point: free trade. Most Americans are concerned about the outsourcing of well-paying domestic jobs and about the ever-widening trade gap. The current Republican Party position on these issues is to cavalierly dismiss the concerns of the great majority of Americans, including its own members, and to insist that unrestricted free trade is the only conceivable policy.

Buchanan's critics are relentless in trying to show that his protectionist impulses are economically unsound. However, as Buchanan shows, they are missing the point entirely. His criticism is that a political party which supposedly represents 100 million members has taken as economic policy a position that most of those members are flat-out opposed to. Even if free trade is indeed the Holy Grail that the Cato Institute would have us believe, this does not relieve the Republican Party of its duty to consult its constituency.

In short, Buchanan claims convincingly the Republicans are guilty of the same elitist arrogance that has plagued the Democrat Party over the past quarter century, causing that once-dominant party to lose its forty year stranglehold on the House and allowing the Republican Party, which trailed it in membership by a 3-2 ratio in 1980, to virtually catch up to it in party affiliation. The unpopular messages the Democrats have been trying to sell - that they know better than you do what should be done with your money; that their desires on taxation, spending, immigration, and trade should trump those of 90% of their constituents; and that the voter owes the party more allegiance than the party owes the voter - are being echoed by the Republicans.

Buchanan is often called an alarmist, with some justification. His alarmism is also often justified, too. Paradoxically, however, Buchanan's realistically negative views of the present can lead to some rather positive expectations for the future. On the USA's massive trade gap with China, for instance, Buchanan points out the imbalance cannot stand forever and that time actually favors the USA being able to attain a measure of balance in the relationship.

Buchanan realizes that as bad as the situation currently is, with the USA importing 30 times as much from China as China imports from the USA, the USA decidedly has the whip hand in the relationship. China needs them far more than they need China. Textbook free traders, meanwhile, would be forced to conclude that each country needs each other equally, since they start from the false premise that each country benefits equally from China being allowed to export their goods into the USA with no restrictions while China itself is rigorously protectionist about not allowing significant American imports into China.

Buchanan's anti-war writings have also been misrepresented by his detractors. Again, they typically fail to engage his actual arguments. Buchanan never claimed that an Iraq war was unwinnable, although he did raise the possibility of the USA going into Iraq with no clear exit strategy. His main anti-war claim was always that America SHOULD NOT be engaged in the process of nation-building; not that the USA COULD NOT achieve a degree of military success in Iraq.

Even if Buchanan had indeed been the voice of doom that his critics now claim he was (and in fact he was never as negative about the prospects of a successful intervention in Iraq as many other paleocons were and as Buchanan is now misrepresented as having been), that would still not invalidate his main point: that the USA has no business searching for monsters abroad to destroy, in the memorable words of John Quincy Adams which Buchanan is fond of quoting.

Buchanan provides an excellent history of those who have formed the neoconservative movement (such as Irving Kristol), showing that despite their partial conversion to conservative goals, their preferred methods of action remain firmly rooted in their radical leftist pasts.

Again, none of this is to say that there is no place in the political firmament for the neocons, simply that the neocons cannot have their cake and eat it too. If they wish to sweepingly redefine what the Republican Party has stood for since Lincoln's time, they are welcome to try. What they by definition cannot do is call their revolution conservative.

Patrick J. Buchanan is a long-time conservative pundit and activist who is alarmed at how the neoconservatives have raided the post-Reagan Republican Party. The neocons, he warns, are taking the GOP and the country down a hazardous road. In the name of waging "war on terror" they are spearheading a utopian, open-ended, and downright unconservative policy of overthrowing Arab Muslim governments (regardless of which one actually had a hand in 9/11) and (cough, cough) "democratizing" them from the top-down.

Buchanan is especially good at debunking the "moral clarity" so near and dear to neocon hearts: "In this most Christianized of countries [the U.S.], premarital sex, homosexual unions and abortions are considered normal and moral by our cultural elites [including the more hypocritical neocons]. Islamic societies reject them as immoral. Who does President Bush believe is right?...In a war against 'evil-doers,' on whose side is Beijing?...In World War 2 we were allied with Stalin...in the Cold War with the Shah and General Pinochet. America triumphed by putting 'moral clarity' on the shelf....Were we acting immorally?" Excellent questions all.

So far as it goes, Buchanan's critique contains some serious bite and plenty of truth. However, he is mistaken to dump the blame entirely in the laps of the neocons. There is a second equally important culprit: the religious right.

The reason the GOP has changed so much since the late '80s is because its two newest and loudest constituent groups, the neocons and the religious right, are not traditional Republican constituencies at all. Rather, they are the direct descendents of the two most extreme wings of the New Deal Democrat coalition: the Marxists and Trotskyists of the Old Left (today's neocons) and the segregationist Democrats of the Old South (today's religious right; Pat Robertson's father, Senator A. Willis Robertson of Virginia, was a Dixiecrat segregationist). Both groups were alienated by the rise of the New Left, Black Power and the militant anti-war movement in and around the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early '70s. Both groups eventually discarded the New Deal "class war" and embraced the "culture war" instead. Both rallied to Ronald Reagan's banner in 1980. They have slowly but steadily consolidated their grip on the GOP ever since.

At the elite level, Buchanan's neoconservative enemies from the Northeast provided the theories and brainpower, such as they were, for the Iraq War. However, it was Buchanan's friends (or former friends?) among the evangelical Protestants in the so-called "red states" in the South who provided the votes and the grassroots fervor. You can't discuss one without the other, and neither one could succeed without the other.

Buchanan also understates how much neoconservatism has evolved. The neoconservatism of 1980-84 was not the same as the neoconservatism of 2000-04. What happened? The neocons who began on the far left (Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz) slid over to the far right and played footsie with Jerry Falwell. By the end of George H.W. Bush's administration in 1992, their children or successors (William Kristol, Richard Perle) won over key members of the Republican establishment (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld). The rest, as they say, is history.

Meanwhile, the neocons who began as centrist Democrats (Samuel Huntington, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan) more or less remained centrist Democrats. When neoconservatism drifted too far to the right, they melted away and maintained a safe distance from the Republicans. That's why neoconservatism seems so extreme today. Buchanan acknowledges how Huntington has drawn fire from younger neocons such as David Brooks, but he mentions this only in passing.

Buchanan is no slouch as a culture warrior, yet his conservative instincts make him recoil from the $1.5 billion "pro-marriage initiative" unveiled by the Bush White House in 2004. The idea was that you, dear taxpayer, must subsidize marriage counseling with sectarian religious overtones. However, let us remember that this was a sop to the religious right, not to the neocons. Most liberals would oppose such meddling on separation-of-church-and-state grounds, but Buchanan's opposition derives from questions surrounding the original intent of the Founders: "Where in the Constitution is the federal government empowered to take money from U.S. citizens to teach other citizens how to have 'healthy marriages'?...Where LBJ funded poverty groups to build a power base in the cities independent of mayors, George W. Bush plans to fund God's pork for 'faith-based' groups to enable Republicans to get a foot in the church door by making the pastor dependent on federal dollars."

Maybe we shouldn't be surprised. Like the neocons, the religious right retains its New Deal DNA. They have no problem with $400 billion budget deficits and Big Government -- so long as Big Government promotes THEIR agenda. Dick Cheney said so himself: "Budget deficits don't matter."

Buchanan roasts the Bush Republicans for embracing "the free-trade faith preached by the party of Wilson and FDR" and "the free-trade policies of JFK and LBJ." Huh? The Roosevelt/Truman and Kennedy/Johnson Democrats were not free traders by today's standards. After WWII, they merely sought to reduce tariffs among First World countries to help Western Europe recover from the devastation of the war. No more, no less. Even organized labor went along with this limited conception of free trade. You can't compare them to the Bush Republicans or to the corporate-friendly Clinton Democrats of the 1990s, let alone to the 19th century British free traders. FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ and Hubert Humphrey never would have supported free-trade treaties with Third World governments, such as NAFTA. Similarly, Roosevelt supported the immigration restrictions enacted in the 1920s. He would have gagged at today's de facto open-border policy with Mexico and the resulting parade of cheap labor (and perhaps a few terrorists) condoned by George W. Bush and Vicente Fox.

But despite its blind spots and misleading aspects, Buchanan's condemnation of the GOP is essentially accurate. This is not your father's Republican Party. The administration of George W. Bush may be called many things. "Conservative" is not one of them.

As a former Buchanan campaign staffer and an ardent supporter of his candidacies, I am more than familiar with Mr. Buchanan's past books, and "Where the Right Went Wrong" is unquestionably one of Pat's best. A hard-hitting expose of how the Republican Right has been hijacked by "neoconservatives," Pat pulls no punches in naming and holding accountable the people who have taken the Republican Party on a disastrous romp with empire, open borders, free trade, multiculturalism, and moral relativism. Pat's ultimate conclusion: there is no conservative party in Washington D.C.

Pat has really taken a chance with this book. He has essentially disengaged himself from the Establishment by delivering a much-needed body-blow to a one party system masquerading as two parties. Pat is risking his career, and potential money, by not selling out, and we can expect the usual boring, predictable litany of verbal assualts borrowed straight from Lenin's handbook: Anti-Semite, isolationalist, protectionist, etc. But these attempts at character assasination no longer have the power they once did, because it is becoming more and more apparent that many of the things Pat has been saying are true.

By this book from Amazon.Com. It's a must have.

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

The most shocking aspect of this book, in a positive "eye-opening" sense, is that Pat Buchanan seems to be more in touch with what I as a moderate Republican believe, than anyone associated with the current Bush-Cheney Administration. Although he has some extremist views that I do not agree with, notably a desire to set back attempts to achieve racial equality, on balance his focus on avoiding elective wars, on eliminating the deficit, on reducing the size of government, on restoring state rights, and on putting the Supreme Court back in its place, all strike me as more "representative" than the views of the neo-conservatives, whom he attacks with eloquence and force.

There are some gems in the book that most people will enjoy because they are not being discussed. Chief among these is that the 2004 election is about the Supreme Court, and who gets to nominate as many as five new Justices. Fully enjoyable is the author's blistering critique of the Court, and the moral cowardice of the Congress in allowing the Court to take on powers of legislative review never envisioned by the founders. The author's quote of Lincoln is especially compelling on this point.

The author is also compelling in his discussion of the role that a common faith must play in keeping democracy alive. As the US foolishly strives to demand "secular democracy" in Iraq, something of an impossibility, the author is moving and thoughtful in showing that the decline of faith (and of the family) has harmed US democracy and its prospects.

Over-all the book is a litany of ills associated with an extremist Republican party run amok, funding Chinese weapons development at the same time that it exports jobs, funds the debt of loser nations while running up our own debt, etc. The author provides several lists of poor policy decisions that provide food for thought. Most troubling is the degree to which the USA is hostage to others for 72% of its medicines, 70% of its computer equipment, etc.

This is one of the few books I have encountered that covers both economic issues--the author is blistering on how "free" trade is not free, with fullsome detail on how we need *fair* trade--and national security issues. The author clearly understands that we are not winning the war on terrorism, only minor battles, and--in a phrase that especially moved me--that you cannot defeat a faith without a faith of your own. "To defeat a faith you need a faith." I would refer the readers to Doug Johnston's Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik as well as Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.

Over-all, this book caused me to reflect on the reality that the two so-called "mainstream" political parties are no longer representative of America. Pat Buchanan is right--the moderate Republican Party with conservative values that I thought I was a member of has been hijacked and corrupted. At the same time, the same can be said for the Democratic Party, whose traditional values are now more ably represented by Ralph Nader. In brief, Americans are in limbo, lacking collective associations that truly represent their needs and concerns, and America is in need of a realignment of its grass-roots political organizations.

Super book, essential reading for anyone concerned about why the 2004 election is not a choice at all, only a pretense.

Estranged moderate Republican that I am, I grow more and more respectful of Patrick Buchanan. He saw this all coming. Little did we know.

Other books that add weight to his message:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (Plus)
Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart

I don't know why I picked up this book while browsing in the local book store. I am no fan of Pat Buchanan, or the policies of Ronald Reagan while he was president. Perhaps it was the title. But pick it up I did, and the more I read, the more I was surprised. Me, agreeing with Pat Buchanan?

Not on everything, but more than I would have thought. He exposes the foreign policy of the Bush administration for what it is...American Imperialism. Is it in this country's best interest to interfere in the affairs of other countries because we simply don't agree with them? Is it necessary for Iraq and other middle east countries to adopt our form of government, or be labeled as enemies? Is the only way for our country to feel safe is for us to have all the bombs?

Nothing less than a complete change of foreign policy is needed, according to the author, or we will continue to fight wars as in Iraq. We will continue to lose jobs overseas in the name of so-called free trade.

This is a book for everyone that is concerned with the direction our country has taken. Whether conservative, liberal, progressive, the issues in this book are issues we can all rally around. The Bush administration and the neo-conservatives must go, so says Pat Buchanan. And this is one progressive that agrees with him.

Highly recommended!

You know we live in politically polarized times when Patrick Buchanan writes a book that appeals to both conservatives and liberals. Who would have thought such a thing possible? Ten years ago it was impossible. Buchanan was the boogeyman, the old, scary paleoconservative that liberals and leftists alike loved to hold up to universal revulsion. His campaigns for the presidency elicited nothing but scorn from the political "mainstream." His service to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan served as proof positive to the crackpots that this was a man we could--and should--never trust. Some went so far as to tar Buchanan with the "anti-Semite" brush because he dared to question our government's inflexible support for Israel. They also tossed in the label "racist" for good measure, not because he was one but because his conservatism practically demanded the charge. Well, Patrick Buchanan dealt with these scurrilous labels and continued to appear as the token conservative on the left-leaning network news shows. And he continued to write books warning America of the dangers we face from the big spenders, the morally bankrupt, and the religion haters. "Where the Right Went Wrong" is Patrick Buchanan's magnum opus, a book that convincingly argues that the current (as of this writing) Bush regime is as far from conservative as possible.

"Where the Right Went Wrong" is the first Buchanan book I read, and I am impressed. This guy is cogent, smart as a whip, and seems unwilling to sell out his core values. The author put pen to paper because the last four years of the Bush administration have left him feeling decidedly unenthusiastic. Why? The president spends more money than a liberal. The president refuses to confront leftist challenges to the culture. The president used the September 11th attacks to involve us in a destructive and expensive war overseas for no other reason than to fulfill an ideology formulated by his neoconservative advisors. The president has accelerated the outflow of American manufacturing jobs to third world nations under the auspices of NAFTA. The president refuses to stem the tide of illegal immigration across the Mexican border, thus contributing to higher crime rates, an increase in expensive entitlement programs, and a decrease in wages. Then there is the ongoing fiasco in Iraq, an expensive quagmire that squanders American blood and treasure in a fruitless quest to democratize the Middle East.

Buchanan spends a significant portion of his book discussing the neoconservatives in the current administration. We all know their names: Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle are the most important figures, but there are others. The author contends that these neoconservative elements converted Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush to their way of thinking, a way of thinking that endorses imperial campaigns around the globe in the name of spreading democracy. Buchanan defines neoconservatives as former left wing kooks who "converted" to conservatism back in the 1970s and 1980s. They aren't conservatives at all, argues the book, because they support massive government spending on social programs and refuse to fight for traditional values. Even worse, neoconservatives forged an interventionist, unilateral foreign policy that will require us to send our military anywhere in the world at any time in the name of protecting or establishing democracy. No serious threat need exist for us to attack another nation. Buchanan rightly says this new policy is an adaptation of the Brezhnev Doctrine that allowed the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan in order to install a communist regime. And we know what happened to the Soviet Union, don't we?

"Where the Right Went Wrong" is much, much more than an analysis of the neoconservative nuts in the White House. Buchanan identifies two distinct strands of Islam battling for supremacy in the Middle East. In a chapter on Islamic history, the author claims that a secular Islam exemplified by men like Kemal Ataturk and a militant faction subscribing to the methods of the late Ayatollah Khomeini will decide which direction the Arab world will go in the future. We risk upsetting this contest when we invade their countries, kill their people, support their pro-western regimes, and attempt to impose democracy. Buchanan follows up with a detailed look at the development of terrorism, going all the way back to Czarist Russia to look at how this form of violence emerged. Repeatedly, the book shows how terrorism beat powerful states that overreacted by using reckless force. States that responded cautiously and with the confidence of its citizens often turned aside terrorist threats. Guess how we responded after September 11th? Actually, you shouldn't have to guess. Subsequent chapters deal with China, the economy, the loss of congressional power, and that merry band of lunatics sometimes referred to as the American judiciary.

I did spot one problem in Buchanan's analysis of American foreign policy. He continually hammers on how the neoconservative philosophy replaces the old policy of containment that worked so well during the Cold War. Problem is, the conservative response to the implementation of this policy in the late 1940s was vicious, sustained, and loud. Even "Mr. Conservative" himself, Robert Taft, excoriated containment as yet another example of the government involving our country in dangerous foreign entanglements. History proved that containment played a large role in bringing down the Soviet bear, but will the neoconservative plan fare as well? I doubt it. Buchanan concludes his book with the requisite list of things we should do to roll back the damage, and even discretely endorses voting for Bush for the sake of returning sanity to the Supreme Court. Personally, I think we're in deep trouble. Great powers never willingly back down from threats because to do so compromises their great power status. Sadly, the lessons spelled out here will fall on deaf ears.