Walter Russell Mead’s blog at the American Interest has been unfailingly fascinating. His most recent post on history’s peace-loving enablers of genocide is his best to date. Here’s but a fraction:

The American peace and disarmament movement almost destroyed human freedom.  The peace movement gave intellectual and moral respectability to the cause of isolationism: the belief that the United States could safely ignore the unraveling of the world’s fragile economic and political order as British power waned after World War I.  But these idealistic professors, students, preachers and general all-around-good-guys were naive, self-righteous, and smugly sure that arms cause war.

If this doesn’t sound vital, it’s time you stopped watching the BP spill-cam. Mead brings it all around to Barack Obama and Iran, as he should. One of the most astounding things about the current administration is its resistance to history’s lessons, even as history swallows its intentions whole.