AVOID FOREIGN ENTANGLEMENTS? In Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Chalmers Johnson suggests that ceasing to do so may be required to keep the United States from going the way of the Roman Republic (not to be confused with the Roman Empire whose decline and fall continues to fascinate critics of the contemporary scene.) His summation is unsparing.

[President] Bush has unleashed a political crisis comparable to the one Julius Caesar posed for the Roman constitution. If the United States has neither the means nor the will to overcome this crisis, then we have entered the last days of the republic.

This Book Review No. 12 suggests an even more messy reality than Mr Johnson contemplates. The "imperial pathology" that he suggests infects the Republic goes beyond the optional war in Iraq, and although the Bush administration comes in for a great deal of criticism, he is unsparing of other administrations' complicity in using the Central Intelligence Agency as a latter-day Praetorian Guard, in negotiating Status of Forces agreements with other countries that allow U.S. troops to behave much like colonial occupiers that transgress local laws freely, and in putting weapons into space. Although his work makes extensive use of critics of U.S. military, and to some extent economic, policies from the left, in places he makes arguments that would appeal to libertarian sensibilities. (The "imperial presidency" is perhaps a sticking point in any attempts at coalition building. A libertarian would object to that concept on general principles. I doubt that the President's critics on the left would object to the same sort of expansion of executive power in the service of national goals more congenial to them.) That tension, however, goes back to the end of the Roman republic as well. Mr Johnson includes an instructive quote from Anthony Everitt's Cicero.

Cicero's weakness as a politician was that his principles rested on a mistaken analysis. He failed to understand the reasons for the crisis that tore apart the Roman Republic. Julius Caesar, with the pitiless insight of genius, understood that the constitution with its endless checks and balances prevented effective government, but like so many of his contemporaries Cicero regarded politics in personal rather than structural terms. For Caesar, the solution lay in a completely new system of government; for Cicero, it lay in finding better men to run the government -- and better laws to keep them in order.

Have we really learned anything in the intervening 2000 years? That's still a dispute between two different types of technocrat within the political class, both bothered by the idea that gridlocked public decision making might be a feature, not a design flaw, with one type being more willing to worship process (a great phrase I heard on the radio over the weekend) and the other type less patient with the notion of compromise.