It is, as was famously predicted by Yeats, a widening gyre. And it can safely be predicted that when today's controversies simmer down, and the blogging energy turns to health care or climate change or issues as yet unforeseen, the "foreign-policy community" that reassumes its former ascendancy will likewise be an expanded and enlarged community. The expertise and sophistication of the FPC at its best will always be needed by a country whose natural tendencies are inward-looking and isolationist. And that expertise and sophistication can only be enhanced when today's FPC is reinforced, as surely it will be, by young people who gained their first introduction to foreign affairs when they were inspired by 9/11 to join the military or enter academia or learn a foreign language…or (why not?) start a blog.

David Frum is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and writes a daily column for National Review Online.

¹http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_07_29_archive.html#3650175445070888364

²http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/community_standa...

³http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/08/20/rose/index.html

⁴http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2007/08/how_the_netroo...

In the interest of fair disclosure, I should add here that Gideon Rose's piece includes some indirect criticism of me personally. I did not notice this criticism until after I had finished work on the above article. The criticism did not influence my thinking, and I did not alter the text after reading it.

That said, I might add here that the criticism was tendentious. Rose complained that unnamed persons "expelled" Iraq War dissenters from the conservative movement. He then linked to an article by me in National Review that explicitly welcomed debate over the Iraq War-but that criticized those conservatives whose radical alienation from their country had led them to oppose the entire War on Terror from its very inception after 9/11. One suspects he had not actually read the piece to which he linked-a very bad blogging practice!

⁵http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/08/14/michael-ohanlon-responds-to-the...

⁶http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1630004,00.html