We All Agree
Obama is an interventionist. Robert Kagan is delighted. Daniel Larison and I are horrified.
It's not just international do-goodism. To Obama, everything and everyone everywhere is of strategic concern to the United States. "We cannot hope to shape a world where opportunity outweighs danger unless we ensure that every child, everywhere, is taught to build and not to destroy." The "security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people." Realists, call your doctors.
[snip]
Obama never once says that military force should be used only as a last resort. Rather, he insists that "no president should ever hesitate to use force -- unilaterally if necessary," not only "to protect ourselves . . . when we are attacked," but also to protect "our vital interests" when they are "imminently threatened." That's known as preemptive military action. It won't reassure those around the world who worry about letting an American president decide what a "vital interest" is and when it is "imminently threatened." - Robet Kagan
Regrettably, I think Obama's candidacy will reveal that most progressives will turn out to have only been striking a pose against this foreign policy consensus. So long as a Democrat is expanding the managerial state at home, American hegemony abroad is just peachy. Perhaps if the left-liberals do embrace a progressive internationalism it may make room for a larger portion of the right to recover one of their two lost foreign-policy traditions: realism and non-interventionism. It probably just means a stronger interventionist consensus, but a guy can hope - can't he?
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Politics
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