A foreign policy that recognizes sensible limits

The Cheney-Bush foreign policy was a disaster

Michael Lind looks at the direction such a policy would take in No more "wars of choice" Salon 01/22/09.

He's very much on the right track when he writes, "While we have to defend ourselves against genuine threats, we need a prolonged period without any more 'wars of choice' and with fewer other optional and costly interventions abroad, in order to concentrate on reconstruction at home."

And he points out this will mean departing from both Cheneyist-neoconservative unilateralism and militarism, on the one hand, and refraining from undertaking "humanitarian" wars:

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the 1980s, he sought a truce in the Cold War, a breathing spell that would provide time for reformers to engage in "perestroika," or "restructuring," of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the Bush administration's hyperactive militarism and manic overextension, the U.S. needs a similar breathing spell in foreign policy that will permit concentration on rebuilding, not just reviving, the U.S. economy and its social contract. The Soviet Union proved to be unreformable and collapsed. But an American perestroika has the chance to result in a modernized, stronger American economy and society - if a period of relative calm in foreign affairs allows resources and attention to be given to domestic reform.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party's foreign policy mandarins are ill-prepared for peace. Many centrist Democrats have spent so much time in the last few decades trying to prove that Democrats can be as hawkish as Republicans that they have become hard to distinguish from bellicose neoconservatives. A number of liberal hawks joined the Weekly Standard neocons in supporting the Iraq war. To make matters worse, many "humanitarian hawks" have spent a generation arguing that the U.S. should fight more wars, not fewer, intervening in countries like Sudan in the name of human rights or a "responsibility to protect." Worst of all, the fashionable idea among centrist Democratic foreign policy intellectuals has been the concept of a "concert of democracies," which would marginalize China and Russia. No wonder that John McCain and the neocons love the concert-of-democracies idea.

And he addresses a genuine concern: is the Democratic Party up to the kind of foreign policy changes we need?

I think there is a historic opportunity for a new American internationalism in the [Franklin] Roosevelt tradition that is not neoconservatism lite and that would buy time for U.S. domestic reform. But that opportunity will be missed if Democrats cannot unbend from a defensive crouch and they continue to tremble in fear at the thought of what their enemies might scrawl about them on the alley wall.

Tags: michael lind, us foreign policy