Thomas Geoghegan, one of my favorite writers, has a characteristically fresh article comparing Thucydides, a favorite war historian of the NeoCons, to Herodotus, who Geoghegan places more firmly in the liberal tradition. One point:
We're the most blinkered because we don't do what Herodotus did and travel around the world. In the United States, even the "internationalists" among us are really isolationists. Few of us ever really spend much time abroad. In op-eds, the neocons like to portray the right as the internationalist party and the left as isolationist. It's preposterous, of course. Look at their president -- he came to office in 2000 having spent less time abroad than any president since Coolidge.
You can overstate this. A lot of these neocons have traveled -- to confirm their suspicions. They've taken AIPAC junkets and gone to Iran to meet handpicked dissidents (though I fondly remember Ross Douthat's hilarious realization that Michael Ledeen -- "Michael 'the expert on all things Iranian, and how we should overthrow the mullahs in five easy steps, and faster please, on to Isfahan' Ledeen" -- has never been to Iran). But Robert Kagan, say, has certainly been around the world in 80 days, and Lawrence Kagan actually goes to Iraq rather regularly.
What's needed is more international travel early in life, when it's not being conducted with an agenda. It's long seemed to me that the world would benefit if college was three years in residence and one abroad -- and that exchange was matched one-for-one with foreign students. I don't know what the ideological outcomes would be, but the educational benefit would be immense. Every student I know who went abroad counts it as their most formative experience. Not taking a semester out of the country remains my eminent regret. You often hear older neolibs calling for compulsory national service programs. I've little interest in such proposals, but heavily subsidized foreign service programs, or international education exchanges, or language immersions, would certainly attract my support.
