To Disquiet On The Western Front

The Munich Security Conference creeps me out every year; I find it anachronistic and vaguely threatening, and also mainly an opportunity self-righteously to offer arms and military technology to governments that 1. are marginally more morally corrupt and far less trustworthy than ours, 2. should be spending that money on worthier causes. As a resident of Germany I feel accordingly embarrassed.

But this speech from John McCain — he appears, I will say, far more in his element there than in the dispiriting environment of American punditry — brings a whisper of fresh life into perhaps an old-fashioned idea that through a restrained, diplomatically enhanced militarism we can mitigate wars rather than proliferate wars.