Eric Alterman Responds
Well, I’m all for history informing contemporary debate, but I fear we liberals have already been condemned to repeat it. Will Marshall’s post sent me back to my old Huey Lewis and Martha and the Muffins albums, back to the days of intraparty fights over Central America, the nuclear freeze, and Jesse Jackson vs. what he (unfairly) called “Democrats for the Leisure Class.”
It’s not as if liberals ever settled the question of just how much saber-rattling is necessary to ensure the trust of the American people regarding issues of national security, but presumably it is a great deal less than it was before approximately 67 percent of the country turned against a war that many liberals felt they had to support, regardless of its merits, to meet exactly these charges.
If the “tough-mindedness” of liberals were the central question facing Obama’s foreign policy, well, … the very notion is a logical non-sequiteur (sp?) because Obama would not be president. He was the more dovish of the two final candidates in the Democratic presidential primary and the more dovish of the two candidates in the general election. Indeed, it was this dovishness vis-à-vis Iraq back when it mattered that powered his candidacy and gave him the daylight he needed to run a credible campaign against Hillary Clinton in the first place. It was her “tough-mindedness” back in 2002 that destroyed her dreams of ever being president.
When the issue was faced during the primaries, Obama staked out the relatively dovish position of being willing to speak to our adversaries without apology. Attacked in typical hawk-dove terms by the Clinton campaign, his campaign offered this, to me, quite refreshing refusal to back down or walk away, but reaffirmed his argument from a position of strength. The “white paper” authored by then adviser Samantha Power read: “American foreign policy is broken. It has been broken by people who supported the Iraq War, opposed talking to our adversaries, failed to finish the job with Al Qaeda, and alienated the world with our belligerence. Yet conventional wisdom holds that people whose experience includes taking these positions are held up as examples of what America needs in times of trouble…. We cannot afford any more of this kind of bankrupt conventional wisdom.”
My point is not to argue on behalf of “dovishness” per se, but on behalf of dealing with things as they are. Iraq and Afghanistan are miserably difficult problems without adding this unnecessary complication to their already fraught and complicated mixes (respectively). What’s more, the most important foreign policy challenges facing the Obama administration do not lend themselves to this kind of dichotomy in the first place. Obviously the global economic crisis is first and foremost in this category as is fashioning a serious world-wide response to the threat of climate catastrophe. Worldwide food shortages, millions of displaced refugees, and festering Israeli-Palestinian problem with the added element of a potential Iranian nuclear threat require a degree of global cooperation that is both historically unprecedented but absolutely crucial to our own well-being and future security.
I am not much on democracy promotion given our record and given how difficult it is to do in the first place, and given how ambivalent I am about the true democratic yearnings of the many millions of people in the Arab world who hate us and would like to overthrow their (relatively) US friendly governments and install ones far less friendly. I would like to see us invest in strengthening the peace and security of the millions–or is it hundreds of millions of people—who lack it. Let us help create the conditions for middle-class life in their nations and a far more stable form of democracy will eventually take root, to say nothing of a much healthier global economy.
One area where I would invest heavily, however, is in the education of women. That strikes me as the single best investment a liberal foreign policy can make, and would naturally lead to fewer babies being born and far better conditions for those who are. I think Hillary Clinton is the perfect person for the job of Secretary of State in this respect. And I note that that dustup about talking to our enemies turned out to be not such a big deal after all, since well, she appears ready to take the job working for the guy who insisted on it.
