Buchanan is right, but from the wrong perspective. The US never relented, so there was never an opportunity, because it was never on the table. The US likes its empire and expanded it as much as possible into the so-called power vacuum.
While Buchanan and the liberals moan about lost opportunities, there are much more interesting things afoot, that should seriously give the US power elite pause---let's hope a deep chill.
Go to Juan Cole's blog page and read the English translation of the accord signed between Russia and Iran this week. It's the first piece of good news I've read in a long, long time. Remember this was signed and celebrated a week after Putin gave Condi Rice and Robert Gates a stinging rebuke.
The two events together, tells me that the US will not bomb Iran, will not engage in anything but bad language. It means that Russia and China will block any US move to more UN sanctions.
What is happening here is the re-assertion of Russian self-interest in its foriegn policy with the world---particularly the middle east and or the Moslim world. And most important of all, there is almost no Russian self-interest in maintaining anything but formal dipolmatic relations with the US. In other words the US has made itself more or less irrelevant to Russian interest.
Now start adding up the losses engineered by the Bushite bombastic war hawkes of the right. Lost Russia, lost most of Europe, lost whatever under the table Arab or Moslim friends we had, lost Latin America, and that leaves us with maybe China and a few rotten small time regimes in far Pacific rim. Nada.
I am not sure the US power elite and its Washington croonies quite realize what all these losses mean. It means if the empire ever needs allies in the world again for some economic or political reason---it is not going to get them. That is a seriously weakened empire. It also seems in my mind to foreclose any further development of the US neoliberal economic power expansion. Maybe the rest of the world has been turned into enemies, but there are no friends out there now, at all. Pretty soon, even the petty depots we seem to cultivate well wish they didn't know us.
CG