Daydream Believers

Are the folks behind America's national security strategy delusional?

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, March 16, 2006, at 6:43 PM ET

The White House today issued its latest edition of The National Security Strategy of the United States of America—a biennial treatise mandated by Congress—and, reading it over, one can't help but wonder if the authors are going through the bromidic motions or if they mean what they write. If it's the former, cliché and contradiction are in order. If it's the latter, and I suspect that's the case (there's too much impassioned rhetoric for it to have been drafted in someone's sleep), then it marks the latest—and, in some ways, most unnerving—sign that our government is run by delusionary utopians, daydream believers who are marching us into, at worst, disaster and, at best, a boggy muddle.