Derb, responding to your post the other day: I think what Jay Bryant was getting in that piece is that the War on Terror will be a decades-long ideological struggle like the Cold War, not that the two struggles are identical or that Bush administration is replicating our containment policy against the Soviets. Why would it? Dealing with a rival super-power armed to the teeth with nuclear missiles is different from dealing a free-floating global insurgency and the diseased regimes of the Middle East. Also, you seem to have an understanding of containment as an entirely passive enterprise. Maybe in its detente phase. But Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II were transformationalists. John Lewis Gaddis is especially good on this in his new book, The Cold War. To say of our posture toward the Soviet bloc, “there was no effort to transform those societies” strikes me as just wrong.

Your other points I’ll be probably taking up in my response to critiques of the “to hell with them” hawks piece.