Can anyone seriously doubt that a man who spent 5-1/2 years being tortured by the Viet Cong hates war? But one can simultaneously hate war and think it preferable to allowing despots to gain nuclear weapons.

I’m not sure undermining the United Nations, which has been virtually useless at preventing wars or enforcing its own Security Council mandates, is necessarily inconsistent with hating war. Regardless, McCain isn’t seeking to undermine it but rather augment it with a “League of Democracies,” which he has described as a “SEATO-type” ad hoc coalition of states with similar values. Indeed, pressed by this author on the question, he specifically said that he did not envision this as a military alliance ala NATO. Whose existence, oddly enough, hasn’t undermined the UN.

Nor has McCain advocated “new cold wars with Russia and China.” Rather, his critics, like Fareed Zakaria, have posited that as a likely outcome of the League of Democracies.

In the heart of the most ardent internationalist there now grows the feeling that it might just be good for Europe or South Korea to defend itself -- and for once take the flak that concrete action, not armchair moralizing, invites. Americans of every persuasion are beginning to think that a reduction in our global profile might be both profitable for ourselves and also good medicine for our friends -- like when 30-something-year-old children are finally asked to move out of the house and make their own car payments.

Still, the new isolationists and protectionists do not answer how the Westernized world would deal with China without American leadership and power. Who would contain lunatic regimes rising in South America, or Islamic terrorism, or petro-rich Middle Eastern autocracies seeking the bomb? What would be the global consequences of curtailing the lucrative, wide-open American market for India, China, and other emerging powers?

But then isolationism and protectionism never do evoke such long-term worries. They have always followed short-term outbursts of emotion that may feel good in the here and now but are sorely regretted later.

Ma Ying-jeou's victory in Taiwan's presidential election Saturday promises to usher in a period of relative calm in the island's turbulent relations with mainland China. Mr. Ma's Kuomintang Party is determined to end the bold and provocative policies that President Chen Shui-bian has pursued toward Beijing over the past eight years. Beijing and Washington will both be relieved to have a government committed to preserving the status quo in the Taiwan Strait rather than pushing the envelope on a transition from de facto to de jure independence.

Richard Nixon is the best parallel I can think of from the last century. Nixon adopted or proposed a host of liberal initiatives -- affirmative action, wage/price controls, even a guaranteed annual income. He did so, I believe, out of indifference. Nixon's goal with respect to domestic policy was to remain sufficiently viable politically to conduct American foreign policy.

There's some of this in McCain. Foreign and national security affairs are his passion, and he cares little about social issues. However, he is hardly indifferent about matters such as government spending, immigration, and clean government. Motivation and interest aside, a McCain presidency would likely resemble Nixon's in that he would combine hard-line foreign policy with some centrist or liberal domestic policies. But because McCain is far more principled, he surely would be more resistant to a broad liberal agenda than Nixon was.

When I confronted Stiglitz about ignoring the potential benefits of the Iraq war during a 2006 BBC debate, he countered that the paper is merely the first in a conversation, hinting that assessing benefits is more difficult. Yet his paper makes no such hedges, concluding bluntly, “Expenditures on the Iraq war have no benefits [for America].”

Elsewhere, Stiglitz and Bilmes claim that the only clear beneficiaries of the war are “oil companies” and “certain defense contractors.” No mention of the Kurds or the Shiites. No mention of the widespread winds of change in Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This is willful ignorance, not the “cool, hard analysis of the kind for which economics has long earned a reputation” that the authors pretend.