I have followed US Politics closely since I was in my teens. There are reasons for this, starting with My Lai, and much reinforced by my perception, at age seventeen, that Richard Nixon was crazy enough to start a nuclear war to create an insane distraction from Watergate. That scared me badly and it was years before I got over it

Anyway, the way I see US politics over my lifetime is that it has been dominated by a kind of unholy succession process: Joe McArthy begat Richard Nixon; Richard Nixon adopted Ronald Reagan (after Reagan’s opportunistic reversal at the 1968 Republican convention); and Reagan begat George W Bush. I don’t mean they are all the same, of course not, but there is lots of continuity between them while, in contrast, the other strands in US politics have each been represented by one-off presidencies, disconnected from each other. Some of the ‘others’ have been competent (Eisenhower, Clinton, Bush Senior) while some have not (Johnson and Carter) but none have left successors who could follow up the capable things they did. In contrast the McArthy succession, from the point at which Nixon broke through to the presidency, haven’t been interested in competence. I am not always sure what they are interested in – ideology sometimes but not always (think of Reagan’s budget deficits) but I suspect they have been held together as much by personal vanity and loyalty to each other and their collective style of doing business, as anything else.

Unfortunately that means I can get things wrong. In this case Reagan incompetently boosted Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda but Bush senior and Bill Clinton successfully reversed those policies, damaged Saddam’s imperialist ambitions and drove Al Qaeda out of Somalia. All very good. I don’t mean their policies were one hundred percent successful, but they were rational and reasonably well planned. However, then comes my mistake; mine and, I think, Tony Blair’s; which is that when Bush junior seemed to adopt his father’s policies for Iraq and Clinton’s for Al Qaeda, that somehow the momentum of events – pre-existing plans, a collection of competent analysts, etc. would make things work. It was always worrying, but I was reassured when Tony Blair publicly supported Bush because I thought (and I think he thought) that UK involvement might constrain Bush’s worst excesses. However, even though I think that constraint has had some good effects, it hasn’t been enough. My mistake, now and throughout my adult life, has been to underestimate just how much colourful, imaginative work the McArthy tendency in US politics can bring to incompetence; just how far they will go to turn good policies into disasters; and just how far the malice and conceit which seems to motivate them can turn us, who ought to be natural allies for the US, into fearful, dismayed, depressed opponents.

There you go. This is a long post, for which I apologise. In short, Anne Applebaum is right to say that potential US allies are put off by US incompetence, but to add that if you keep voting for these monsters, and if you don’t organise a coherent opposition instead of one-off counter-campaigns, it is going to keep happening.

Well, I'm not entirely sure what your thesis is, there, but I think your "successor" idea works in a curious way, here.

Blair is something of a Clinton acolyte; he is very much the UK counterpart to Clinton, politically.

And I have to wonder what this Slate discussion would be had our leader in the U.S. Blair's gift for speaking. Not a few liberals here have been known to remark "Gee, when Blair talks about it, it makes a lot more sense!"

Conservatives, here, are quick to point out that the Clintons, Gore, and other prominent democrats essentially supported regime change in Iraq; it's well-documented. I believe one can chalk up a lot of opposition to Bush simply to who he is--a syntactically-challenged prep schooler given to cowboy rhetoric-- and not necessarily what he stands for. In other words, if the perception were changed, would the international relations follow?

I'm not entirely sure that the study of history done by Anarch has been as in-depth asit should have been. He imputes far too much long-term influence to McCarthy, and for some reason, leaves out one of the presidents, J.F. Kennedy. It is interesting to note that Kennedy and Nixon were, at least in their early days in Congress together, very much on the same page on many issues.

The analysis of Reagan's presidency is way too simple, and relies on diluted conventional wisdom far too much. He should also note that, for years, Eisenhower was considered to be a pretty bad president, quite out of touch. It is only recently that there has beena revised look at his presidency, and how subtle many of his moves were.

He also needs to be careful about adivising us on voting for presidents. There was a much-publicized letter-writing campaign from British people to US voters, imploring them to vote for John Kerry. The letters, by a large, had the tone of an Oxford don writing to his retarded nephew, and probably did far more damage to Kerry's chances than provided any help.

Nicely put; thanks for that. May I, Oxford Don-ish (though I ain’t), add a few bits and see what you think?

I don’t think Joe McCarthy has much direct influence – that’s the thing about a succession process, it mutates from where it starts. But McCarthyism is part of US self-perception (sometimes nostalgic, sometimes fearful) and part of the perception of informed outsiders. I am inclined to think Bush junior and some of his supporters are nostalgic for Joe in the same way as that fool (whose name I forget) who was drummed out of the Brownies for expressing nostalgia for Strom Thurmond’s segregationist policies a few years ago. And I certainly think young Bush’s style is an intelligible mutation of Joe’s.

I deliberately left out Kennedy because his time in office was too short. I think he would have been highly effective, but I know reasonable people who think differently. As for the things Kennedy and Nixon agreed about, I have mostly tried to avoid saying whether I approve of the policies people have pursued (though it probably shows); I am very much with ‘Hellzapoppin’ when he suggests competence makes all the difference to whether a policy is popular or not. Here’s a contentious thought on those lines: Kennedy’s close engagement with Vietnam seems to have begun in 1963. The way I interpret what he did is that he wanted to oust the CIA from the dominance they held over Vietnam since 1955, so he could get a grip on what was happening. I wonder what he would have done if he had lived, and if he could have managed a short, successful war. If he could then the Vietnam war, with exactly the same purposes as those of Johnson and Nixon, might now be seen as a success.

I am not that keen on Eisenhower – my dad despises him and was a conscientious objector to the Korean war; but, despite McArthur, the balance of success and failure for Korea and the Philippines campaigns seems to me better than for Vietnam or Reagan’s murderous rampage through Central America – in either reapolitik or moral terms.

I am not advising anybody on who to vote for (except maybe that if they don’t belive in evolution you might be better pissing on them than voting at all), but I do think there is a lot of public appeal in being seen as belonging to a continuing tradition. That’s what Hitchens keeps trying for in this magazine, except that he keeps trying to sell Paine, Jefferson, Hamilton and Lincoln, when he might be better off with Woodie Guthrie and Dashiel Hammet.