The Weekly Standard is brilliant:

Overhauling the structure of our international relations is almost as important as overhauling the structure of our overseas base network; indeed, the two are intrinsically linked. More than a temporary coalition of the willing, the Bush administration now needs to develop enduring alliances and organizations for the global war on terror that it can pass on to its successors, be they Democratic or Republican. In short, it needs a coalition of the committed.

This argument should not be confused with John Kerry's nostalgia for an international system that never existed--one in which power is somehow parceled out on an equal basis between Washington and select capitals of yesterday's great powers. There's no walking away from the fact of American hegemony. The question, rather, is how best to institutionalize, legitimize, and thus deepen it. What Harry Truman did for the Cold War, George W. Bush needs to do for the war on terror.

That's exactly right. We need to implement what John Kerry was actually proposing on the campaign trail—which should not be confused with an idiotic caricature of what John Kerry was proposing on the campaign trail.

Let's all play this game. I'll start: The government should act as a reinsurance market that can pool risk on a nationwide scale. It should offer to subsidize, for instance, all catastrophic costs over $75,000, thus allowing private insurance companies to engage in cost competition without adversely selecting the healthiest members of the population. In short, we need to fix health care. This argument, by the way, should not be confused with John Kerry's nostalgia for putting doctors and private insurers in a Soviet-style gulag.