Jesse Walker: 'The Superpower Should Retire'

As Barack Obama announces that he's sending up to 300 military advisors to Iraq, his neoconservative critics are pushing for a deeper intervention. One of those critics—Robert Kagan—has been the talk of D.C. lately, thanks to his New Republic feature "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire." Kagan's article is deeply wrong, Jesse Walker writes, but it is wrong in an informative way: This really is how a lot of America's foreign policy elite sees the world.