Dafna Linzer has an interesting puff piece in Sunday's WaPo, arguing that the new clutch of 30 somethings advising Bu$hCo have different horizons from their predecessors.

They headed off to college as the Berlin Wall was coming down, were inspired by globalization and came of age with international terrorism. Freed from a constant nuclear standoff as a dominant fact of international life, members of Generation X no longer fear war or upheaval in the global status quo. Understand them -- and where they came from -- and suddenly President Bush's Middle East forays, grand democratic experiments and go-it-alone strategies take on a different look.

What Linzer is saying is that these youngsters feel they are able to establish their own bragging rights as the new imperialists because there is no countervailing force powerful enough to gainsay America’s military and economic power.

I can well remember some of John Kennedy's "best and brightest" eagerly and wisely explaining how American success in Viet Nam would be quite different from the failed French attempts to regain power in Cochin China and after WWII. The French were "discredited" as an imperial power because of their defeat in the war.

Rising Asian peoples, freed by the Allies after the defeat of Japan ached for the freedom and democracy so earnestly espoused by Americans eager to return home after victory. But what they most wanted was immediate entrée into the 20th century.

The French attempted to reassert their imperial hegemony over their pre-war possessions and failed, due to the stigma of military loss and faulty international policy choices. Their military failure in Indochina had two causes: the success of nationalist forces as anti-Japanese resisters filling the power vacuum and their weak and delayed military return to Indochina, accompanied by a “business as usual” attitude about colonial rule. The French returned with the attitude of continuing to milk their peasants, and they failed.

After WWII the British, financially drained and psychologically exhausted after 6 years of savage warfare, wisely chose to begin a slow, measured pace of divestiture of Empire. This unpalatable course was forced upon them by circumstances, including a wartime emergency Armed Forces clamoring to return to their homes and civilian employment. The British international policy regarding their colonies was to implement a strong and stable bureaucracy shored up by a pro-UK educational system, carefully preparing their colonies for independence. History has shown this policy was wiser, although the partition of British India failed through intervention of nationalist Muslim desires, rather than through British failure.

Look how well the American strategy to replace the French in Indochina worked out. That was all about democracy and freedom, and stopping Communism, not about raw materials and international markets.

That's because nearly a dozen thirtysomething aides, breastfed on "Sesame Street" and babysat by "The Brady Bunch," are now shaping those strategies in unexpected ways as senior advisers at the National Security Council, the White House's powerful inner chamber of foreign policy aides with routine access to Bush. This small group of conservative Gen Xers -- members of an age cohort once all but written off as stand-for-nothing underachievers -- is the first set of American policymakers truly at home in a unipolar world.

This is just madness. The unipolar world Linzer speaks of is a purely military one. There is no countervailing force to American arms. Yet. But it will arise within a few years, and the specter of multiple military threats will be far more frightening than the USSR.

In the 21st century world we are blundering our way through
proliferation of nuclear arms remains a great danger, magnified by the multiplying of nuke owners. Things were frightening enough when the Nuclear Club had 5 members. Then China and Israel “got milk,” soon followed by Pakistan and India. Now we have North Korea with nukes. The proliferation continues, and each new nuclear state increases the risk.

Linzer babbles on, claiming that Sesame Street and the Brady Bunch have somehow prepared these children to guide the US through a world in which we are no longer the strongest military power. Besides the growing nuclear threat, our land forces are no longer the most powerful. While we have excellent force multipliers through advanced technologies, our sole experience in this realm of Imperial military hegemony has been thrown against a third-rate country, and it has plainly failed. How would we manage to fight China, with its own nukes, an Army that outnumbers us by 4 to 1, and a rapidly technologizing Navy and Air Force? Currently our plans imply fighting the Chinese in their theater, and that will probably remain the case for some years to come.

The immediate argument by the “new-thinkers” would be “But China doesn’t have aircraft carriers, and their Air Force is still smaller than ours.” It’s growing, and it’s coming.

The Chinese have created a small, high-tech force within the Peoples Liberation Army. It’s designed for swift, highly mobile, high-tech “shock and awe, and it’s built to take on Taiwan first. Advanced fighters, a blue-water Navy, and mechanized forces modeled after the US Army could give them the edge. Interdiction by the US Navy would be the primary obstacle, but China is planning to overcome that. We’d have a long logistical tail to supply Naval and Air Force units defending Taiwan, and tails are notoriously vulnerable.

Think about this:

China has taken painful but successful steps to create a "defense industrial base," or weapons-building capability. The PLA has improved its factory quality control and its ability to adapt foreign technology. It is bringing an indigenous small-wing F-10 fighter off the production line, and it is moving rapidly toward a "blue water" Navy with ships built in China. Indeed, the past three years have yielded the impressive fruits of a modernization campaign started in the late 1990s: A nuclear attack submarine, the 093, launches in months; presumably it will be capable one day of firing satellite-guided cruise missiles that can blast a cruiser or carrier. China now has more accurate ICBMS, a host of land- and sea-based cruise missiles, and about 400 Su-27 and Su-30 Russian fighter jets it didn't have before.

Have the 30-something whiz kids in Linzer’s article thought about fighting a military equal? Not according to this article. They’re still thinking about shocking and awing the towelheads in the oil countries. That’s land China (and her economic ally Japan) needs in the future to fuel its booming economy.

Their adulthood has never included a fellow superpower or the need to reach accommodation with an enemy -- a Cold War concept none of the NSC's Gen-X crowd can get their heads around. Instead, their history begins with Sept. 11, 2001. It is the measuring stick they use when discussing their generation's challenge and the sole lens through which they envision the future. "We all built careers in the post-Cold War world," said Meghan O'Sullivan, who at 36 is the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan. "You have to think about what are the defining features of the age we live in. For me, that's American primacy, globalization, terrorism and WMD, which is why we do what we do. This wasn't applicable during the Cold War."

Primacy, like military power, whether tangible through projection, or intangible through merely existing, stems from economic power, and America has voluntarily offshored much of its power of production, sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit. We don’t make our stuff, we buy it from other countries. And one of the primary factories we buy from is China. China currently holds about 20% of our national debt. This is one of the frightening facts of globalization. Our economy weakens when we become a debtor nation. Someone else holds our purse strings, ad they can close them.

Terrorism is a threat, in a sense. Yet, it’s been a threat since the 70s. Ask the Germans about the Baader-Meinhof gang. Ask the French about the OAS, and the pied-noirs of Algeria, who subverted 15% of the French Army. It was solved politically, and judicially, not by warfare.

The Vietnam war was waning just as O'Sullivan was becoming cognizant of the world, a kid in suburban Boston. Today, she is charged with guiding President Bush's strategy on Iraq after already having served as a senior adviser in Baghdad shaping the interim Iraqi government.

And she’s done so well in Iraq. Obviously she’s on the fast track to being the next Condoleeza Rice.