What came across most clearly in the State of the Union speech is Bushs belief that the United States IS capable of making and maintaining almost limitless commitments around the world and succeeding brilliantly at all of them. His faith in the ability to fleece taxpayers endlessly was quite explicit – “My budget includes the largest increase in defense spending in two decades, because whIle the price of freedom and security is high, it is never too high: Whatever it costs to defend our country, we will pay.”
Presumably that doesn’t include cutting back on overseas commitments, which would surely reduce our vulnerabilities and the number of people who resent us. The cost of that policy would surely be too high for our foreign policy mandarins to bear, however much it might benefit the American people.
