Republican Utopianism

Peggy Noonan and I both feel a little worried that Bush II is embarking the US on a too-ambitious program of excessive involvement in foreign affairs. I especially liked her phrasing:

Ending tyranny in the world? Well that's an ambition, and if you're going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing.

Now David Reiff agrees, writing about the possible downsides if any of our efforts to "export freedom" should fail:

But if it goes wrong, as I desperately fear that it will, perhaps John Quincy Adams's words in his Independence Day speech of 1821 will resonate once more. "Once enlisting under other banners, were they even the banners of foreign independence, [America] would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumes the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force."

I agree.