■"Spurning America: Liberal elites see the world differently from other Democrats and Americans as a whole," by Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report, 24 October 2005, p. 28.

Interesting Barone piece on the transnational elites separating culturally over time from the rank-and-file patriotic Americans, the former can't understand this Global War on Terrorism while the latter end up waging it.

Barone cites the same sort of analysis from Sam Huntington that I used from Who Are We? in BFA.

It's a challenging article, and Barone makes good points, but you have to ask yourself if this split is not the breakdown between our definitions of national security and international security. These two were made one by the bomb, MAD, and the superpower rivalry with the Sovs: to attack America was to risk blowing up the world, so the concepts of national and international security were made, for all practical purposes, identical.

That identity is shattered by the collapse of the Cold War. Now, Osama kills one million in Chicago and we can't hold anyone hostage with our nukes, so deterrence disappears and the strong linkages between national and international security are severed. The creation of the Dept. of Homeland Security is an expression of that split, and that's why I consider it such a mistake, not just bureaucratically but as a signal of intent to the rest of the world.

So we see transnationalism and patriotism (our version of nationalism, and yeah, there's a huge difference between the two) at odds in the GWOT, with each side calling the other "naÔve" and declaring itself "realistic."

And it's that having to choose sides that I have so much trouble with, so I try to split the difference, especially in Blueprint for Action, and quite naturally, I will be accused of being flippant for doing so, because compromisers and deal-makers are always viewed with suspicion by those who confuse the inability to learn and change their minds with fortitude and character.

And yet the way that connects the two ends of the spectrum, that middle ground, is where all the wiggle room is found, as well as most of the solutions. BFA comes off, in many ways, as one big statement that says all-in-one solution sets don't work, that they never work.

The UN cannot do it all. Nor will Sachs' huge push of aid, nor Bono's debt forgiveness. Nor can SOCOM pull it off on its own, as Kaplan would have you believe. Nor the Marines with the three-block-war. Nor the Army.

Nor the G-8. Nor the International Criminal Court. Nor that prize-winning IAEA.

Not even the all-mighty U.S. Leviathan force that suffered its 2000th casualty recently.

No, just bits and pieces that require a rule set to rule them all, and in its transparency bind them.

The middle way. A blueprint for moving ahead instead of just decrying the present.