Enter Edmund Burke

Andrew Sullivan makes the case for why the neoconservative efforts to inflate the tragedy in Georgia into a new cold war stand outside the realm of traditional conservative thought.

Again, Russia should be condemned for its aggression. But this Russia--oligarchic, oil-glutted, trying to recover some international face after the historic stupidity of having bought into communism--is not the Soviet Union. We have serious business to transact with the Russians. The most important is the reduction of nuclear arms forces, an effort left to lapse by the Bush Administration over the past eight years, as the Nunn-Lugar process was short-funded. It seems to me that a candidate who sees the Russians as mortal enemies, who wants to shut them out of the G8 and concoct a "League of Democracies" to oppose them, isn't going to have much success getting them to disarm. (Of course, the moment when we could pay the Russians to relinquish their arsenal--the core of the Nunn-Lugar process--may have passed, another remarkable Bush carelessness.)

It also seems important that we disaggregate the immediate moment from the grander picture. The reaction of the Bush Administration, including the dispatch of Navy ships bearing humanitarian supplies, seems right to me. But the extrapolation of this momentary Russian aggression into a grand theory of revanchism--Ukraine's next!--is the knee-jerk reaction of ideologues and needs to be opposed, clearly.

No doubt, this is a level of detail too complicated for a presidential campaign. Obama and McCain have no significant differences about what to do today in Georgia. But they have starkly differing visions about what to do tomorrow. Obama, a foreign policy realist, shrinks from grand theories. McCain, a belligerent idealist, dives right in. As Andrew Sullivan writes, we've had enough of a foreign policy driven by dramatic statements--Pre-emption! The Axis of Evil!--and grander theories (God Wants Freedom!) over the past eight years. It's time to think before we emote overseas. It's time to repair the damage back home...and conserve our military resources for the moment that U.S. interests are threatened in fact, as opposed to in theory.

Update: Matt Yglesias sees it pretty much the same way.