David Greenberg: Democrats struggle to shape a post-9/11 foreign policy,
EARLIER THIS MONTH, two contenders for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination stood together to stop what they saw as a dangerous drift in their party's stance on national security. At the National Press Club on May 9, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh summoned Democrats to dig in for ''what will in all likelihood be a generation-long struggle against jihadism and radical, suicidal terror." Former Virginia governor Mark Warner agreed that his partymates had to refute Karl Rove's taunt that they cling to a ''pre-9/11 worldview" by championing their own plans to fight al Qaeda. Though neither man named names, they implicitly chided their party's growing antiwar faction for railing against Bush's record without offering a vision of how to protect America.
The vision Bayh and Warner offered is one being heard increasingly from a host of younger journalists and policy mavens-from newly formed groups like the Truman National Security Project and the Foreign Policy Leadership Council to New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, the author of a much-discussed new manifesto. It's an approach that repudiates the Democrats' post-Vietnam reluctance to use military power. Yet it also views armed force as part of an arsenal of tools-including economic development, robust alliances, and international law and institutions-that the US, as the world's de facto leader, must be ready to employ.
Such a vision would seem quite appealing, especially in a global age when there's no drawbridge for America to pull up. Yet no sooner had reports of Bayh and Warner's remarks appeared than they-and their way of thinking-came under fire from the bloggers and pundits whose influence among party activists they were seeking to curb. Across the Web, the politicians and their ilk were slammed as ''warmongers," ''Vichy Democrats," and ''enablers" of a Republican regime. And such attacks are nothing new. For months the left has been belittling the thinking of the internationalists, scoffing at how many of them backed Bush's invasion of Iraq, with The Nation-the flagship magazine of the antiwar faction-refusing to support any Democratic office-seeker who won't seek a speedy pullout.
Beneath this internecine party warfare lies a fundamental, and possibly debilitating, ideological divide. Liberals, who tend to view terrorism as the chief foreign policy concern, have been trying to revive the philosophy of internationalism-the belief that US intervention abroad can be noble in intent and beneficial in its results. Leftists, on the other hand, viewing the Iraq War as the most urgent problem, more often subscribe to a philosophy that might be called anti-imperialism-the belief that US intervention abroad is typically avaricious in intent and malign in its results.
By the end of his presidency, Bill Clinton had come to be a champion of intervention, and internationalists-such as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton, and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress-still dominated the Democratic party's foreign policy brain trust. But the anti-imperialist activists have conquered the blogosphere and, as the Iraq War drags on and hopes for a satisfying outcome fade, their arguments are winning converts among rank-and-file voters.
Consider: After Sept. 11, most Democrats agreed that defeating al Qaeda should be foreign policy goal No. 1. Now, while most Americans still share that goal, Democrats rate it 10th, according to a Security and Peace Initiative poll last year; withdrawal from Iraq is named first. Another survey, from MIT, showed that doubts about interventionism have spread beyond Iraq: As of November 2005, only 59 percent of the party-versus 94 percent of Republicans-still supported the invasion of Afghanistan.
The Democratic party's rift between liberal internationalists and radical anti-imperialists is, of course, decades old. And Beinart, in his deftly argued new book, ''The Good Fight: How Liberals-and Only Liberals-Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again" (HarperCollins), helpfully grounds the current debate in its oft-forgotten history. A proud internationalist, Beinart persuasively shows that calls by today's liberals for America to actively project its power abroad represent not a betrayal of principle but a return to what liberalism is really all about....
Read entire article at Boston Globe
The vision Bayh and Warner offered is one being heard increasingly from a host of younger journalists and policy mavens-from newly formed groups like the Truman National Security Project and the Foreign Policy Leadership Council to New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, the author of a much-discussed new manifesto. It's an approach that repudiates the Democrats' post-Vietnam reluctance to use military power. Yet it also views armed force as part of an arsenal of tools-including economic development, robust alliances, and international law and institutions-that the US, as the world's de facto leader, must be ready to employ.
Such a vision would seem quite appealing, especially in a global age when there's no drawbridge for America to pull up. Yet no sooner had reports of Bayh and Warner's remarks appeared than they-and their way of thinking-came under fire from the bloggers and pundits whose influence among party activists they were seeking to curb. Across the Web, the politicians and their ilk were slammed as ''warmongers," ''Vichy Democrats," and ''enablers" of a Republican regime. And such attacks are nothing new. For months the left has been belittling the thinking of the internationalists, scoffing at how many of them backed Bush's invasion of Iraq, with The Nation-the flagship magazine of the antiwar faction-refusing to support any Democratic office-seeker who won't seek a speedy pullout.
Beneath this internecine party warfare lies a fundamental, and possibly debilitating, ideological divide. Liberals, who tend to view terrorism as the chief foreign policy concern, have been trying to revive the philosophy of internationalism-the belief that US intervention abroad can be noble in intent and beneficial in its results. Leftists, on the other hand, viewing the Iraq War as the most urgent problem, more often subscribe to a philosophy that might be called anti-imperialism-the belief that US intervention abroad is typically avaricious in intent and malign in its results.
By the end of his presidency, Bill Clinton had come to be a champion of intervention, and internationalists-such as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton, and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress-still dominated the Democratic party's foreign policy brain trust. But the anti-imperialist activists have conquered the blogosphere and, as the Iraq War drags on and hopes for a satisfying outcome fade, their arguments are winning converts among rank-and-file voters.
Consider: After Sept. 11, most Democrats agreed that defeating al Qaeda should be foreign policy goal No. 1. Now, while most Americans still share that goal, Democrats rate it 10th, according to a Security and Peace Initiative poll last year; withdrawal from Iraq is named first. Another survey, from MIT, showed that doubts about interventionism have spread beyond Iraq: As of November 2005, only 59 percent of the party-versus 94 percent of Republicans-still supported the invasion of Afghanistan.
The Democratic party's rift between liberal internationalists and radical anti-imperialists is, of course, decades old. And Beinart, in his deftly argued new book, ''The Good Fight: How Liberals-and Only Liberals-Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again" (HarperCollins), helpfully grounds the current debate in its oft-forgotten history. A proud internationalist, Beinart persuasively shows that calls by today's liberals for America to actively project its power abroad represent not a betrayal of principle but a return to what liberalism is really all about....