Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the antiwar Tory every neocon loves to hate, had a fun little review of Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation in the Times on Sunday. Minor shades of History Boys cleverness:
One more throwaway nugget is the fact that from the 1860s to the 1880s, Chile had a larger navy than the United States; in his next volume Kagan will perhaps remind us that in 1939, the Belgian Army was larger than the American Army. Here too is the contradiction in his story. Much of what he says is true. And yet, in his desire to parade his thesis, he sometimes forgets the great historical insight of Marx (Groucho, not Karl): the reverse is also true.
Decades before "Manifest Destiny" became a euphemism for American imperialism, the Louisana Purchase, which doubled the size of the nation, was supported by every republican radical from Thomas Paine to the deal's executive negotiator, Thomas Jefferson. Why? Because the prospect of the United States resembling a thin-sliced, North American Chile, and thus enscribed in its capacity for industrial and martial expansion, was unenticing. A pan-continental country meant an accompanying army. In the era of military "overstretch," it's worth considering what wars American might have involved itself in had it also annexed Canada.