OPINION: "My Advice for Obama," by George McGovern, Wall Street Journal, 1 June 2009.

An old briefing bit of mine going back many years--the starting point of my "transaction strategy" argument. If all we wanted to do was "defend" America directly, that's a $200-300B job--max.

Why we spend twice that amount is because America's defense establishment became about more than just defending America decades ago. Allies were encouraged to outsource their Leviathan demand to us and burden-sharing was largely a joke.

Now, for a lot of structural and debt reasons, we've come to the end of that era; there's just no good reason for the U.S. to hog that function as it pertains to lower-end conflict and stability enhancement (the SysAdmin function, as I call it). There's just too many frontiers undergoing integration at one time. There's no logic in curtailing globalization's advance to this one great resource constraint.

McGovern, good soul that he is (and one helluva bomber pilot in WWII), recognizes the lower-end requirement and suitably begs off any upper-end responsibility, preferring to divert the resources to domestic spending.

My argument, as always, is that there is a logical balancing between caring only for ourselves and caring for the global security environment as a whole.

Why? No one really wants to find out what this world would look like without a clear Leviathan.