Obama’s Foreign Policy
According to Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, Obama is the “conservative” when it comes to foreign policy, and McCain is the “liberal”:
Over the course of the campaign against Hillary Clinton and now McCain, Obama has elaborated more and more the ideas that would undergird his foreign policy as president. What emerges is a world view that is far from that of a typical liberal, much closer to that of a traditional realist. It is interesting to note that, at least in terms of the historical schools of foreign policy, Obama seems to be the cool conservative and McCain the exuberant idealist.
…snip…
Obama rarely speaks in the moralistic tones of the current Bush administration. He doesn’t divide the world into good and evil even when speaking about terrorism. He sees countries and even extremist groups as complex, motivated by power, greed and fear as much as by pure ideology. His interest in diplomacy seems motivated by the sense that one can probe, learn and possibly divide and influence countries and movements precisely because they are not monoliths. When speaking to me about Islamic extremism, for example, he repeatedly emphasized the diversity within the Islamic world, speaking of Arabs, Persians, Africans, Southeast Asians, Shiites and Sunnis, all of whom have their own interests and agendas.
Obama never uses the soaring language of Bush’s freedom agenda, preferring instead to talk about enhancing people’s economic prospects, civil society and—his key word—”dignity.” He rejects Bush’s obsession with elections and political rights, and argues that people’s aspirations are broader and more basic—including food, shelter, jobs. “Once these aspirations are met,” he told The New York Times’s James Traub, “it opens up space for the kind of democratic regimes we want.” This is a view of democratic development that is slow, organic and incremental, usually held by conservatives.
Obama talks admiringly of men like Dean Acheson, George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr, all of whom were imbued with a sense of the limits of idealism and American power to transform the world. “In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative,” wrote Larissa MacFarquhar in her profile of him for The New Yorker. “There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good.”
…snip…
Ironically, the Republicans now seem to be the foreign-policy idealists, labeling countries as either good or evil, refusing to deal with nasty regimes, fixating on spreading democracy throughout the world and refusing to think in more historical and complex ways. “I don’t do nuance,” George W. Bush told many visitors to the White House in the years after 9/11. John McCain has had his differences with Bush, but not on this broad thrust of policy. Indeed it is McCain, the Republican, who has put forward some fanciful plans, arguing that America should establish a “League of Democracies,” expel Russia from the Group of Eight industrialized countries and exclude China from both groups as well.
The whole thing is worth the read. Cross-posted at Lean Left and SayUncle.
[…] The whole thing is worth the read. Cross-posted at Lean Left and TennesseeFree. […]
Both are realists. When you get down to it, they will do the exact same thing.
You think so? You think McCain’s Iraq policy wouldn’t differ substantially from Obama’s? That seems to be a minority viewpoint. Many of the people I know who support McCain hold up Iraq as one of the key reasons for doing so.
Dood. He thinks President Gore would have invaded Iraq.
.
When the rubber hits the road and the rhetoric subsides…. not a dimes worth of difference.
And yes, President Gore would have done something to Iraq, if not an invasion, perhaps more aspirin factory bombings. Democrat politicians tell the kooks one thing, but do another thing once in office.
Frankly, I think you’re nuts here. McCain is a lot more hawkish than Obama, not just in theory, but in practice.
And the only way President Gore takes action against Iraq is if the re-admitted inspectors find something.
That’s why you’re a Democrat Tgirsch, and a liberal. You still believe. Always will.
Let me ask you something though.
Why do liberals take such pride in being called conservative, not only as a foreign policy realist, but they also love to be called, or call themselves, fiscal conservatives? Could it be that this country really is center right? Could it be that the term liberal is unappealing?
Hey, at least I believe in something. Besides the conservative/libertarian credo of “I’ve got mine, screw everyone else.”
Also, I take no pride in being called “conservative,” and have no problem at all being described as “liberal.” Every important advance in the modern history of the country, from women’s suffrage to civil rights to environmental protection, was advocated for by liberals, and opposed by conservatives. That is (or ought to be) a point of pride for liberals and a point of shame for conservatives.
As to the article in question, it simply states (correctly, I believe) that Obama’s stated foreign policy positions are more (traditionally) conservative than McCain’s stated positions. Indeed, the “neoconservative” movement owes a lot more to 1960’s liberalism than to any sort of conservatism. I point all this out not because of any pride in it (neoconservatism is, without a doubt, the most disastrous mindset since the groupthink of the Kennedy administration of which it was largely born); I point it out to debunk claims by some that the two candidates are essentially one-dimensional, or that there’s some sort of easy dichotomy between the two.
Frankly, I think “conservative,” at least according to the modern definition, isn’t a good description of either candidate’s foreign policy. McCain’s is idealistic, while Obama’s is pragmatic. If there’s an easy divide there, that’s it.
Those folks were much different than today’s definition. Words change their meanings, you know. “Liberal” has done a 180.
So today’s “liberals” wouldn’t support civil rights? Environmental protection? Women’s suffrage? The New Deal? The parties may have switched on key issues (prior to the 1960’s, the Democrats were the horrible racists, and the Republicans were the civil rights champions), but “liberals” still support, well, liberalism. Unless you think support for a strong federal government, social safety net programs, etc., could ever have been fairly described as “conservative.” I’d love to see you try to argue that point.
Those things haven’t changed. We are all liberals on those issues. What has changed is the role of government in economics. The New Deal Democrats hijacked the word “liberal”. Before then, it never meant big, big, huge, massive government. You know what I am talking about though. We don’t disagree. I’m sure. You just like to argue for the sake of arguing, I think.
Enlighten us, O wise one. What word, then, should they have used? (And, for what it’s worth, can you point to any evidence that the proponents of the New Deal actually described their policies as “liberal” at the time? Maybe they did, but a quick Google couldn’t find anything of the sort — only modern conservatives labeling those policies as “liberal” after the fact.)
In truth, the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are both very broad, and encompass very wide schools of thought. Even by the standards of 100 or 150 years ago, there was no “gold standard” for what constituted “liberalism.” Any attempt to argue otherwise is just cherry-picking.
It’s also worth noting that the New Deal was largely a response to a massive failure of free-market economics (i.e., a failure of so-called “classical liberalism” on a grand scale). Classical liberalism lost face because it was a failure.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: your blanket statement that “those things haven’t changed” is utter bullshit.
All of those things faced tremendous opposition, principally from conservatives (with the exception of the New Deal, support or opposition to which didn’t seem to be particularly partisan).
Good try. I aint biting.
Of course not! That would require you to look things up and present facts, neither of which you can be bothered with.
No, it would require me to go around and around in circles with you, while you hyperlinked something you call “facts”. I’m leaving and won’t be back for awhile. No time. Believe it or not, I do more things that just sit around on the Internet all day.
Somebody call a Waahhmbulance.
(Seriously, if detailed records of the GDP and BLS statistics aren’t “facts,” then what could be?)