It's an interesting era in American foreign policy. Conservatives, long critical of liberal multilateralism, have finally had their time in the sun. Unfortunately, nobody was wearing sunscreen. The Iraq War has shown that unilateral nation building falls flat; Abu Ghraib has disgraced American principles of justice; and pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol has merely set us back years in tackling climate change. Perhaps it's unfair to mention that attempts to halt the nuclear amibitions of Iran and North Korea (remember them?) have gone nowhere.
But Peter Beinhart writes in the New York Times that "for all their practical failures, conservatives have at least told a coherent political story, with deep historical roots, about what keeps America safe and what makes it great."
Beinhart summarizes the conservative foreign policy as supreme confidence in American principles: "In a one-superpower world, [conservatives] argued, America no longer had to tailor its foreign policy to the wishes of others...[the] willingness to indulge governments that would not bend fully to American principles and American wishes was yet another sign that Americans did not truly believe in the righteousness of their cause."
Obviously, the belief that America can lead a benevolent empire has proven false, a promise fallen into the shadow of enormous hubris. But does America have an alternative vision?
Beinhart continues, "Liberals, by contrast, have offered adjectives drawn from focus groups and policy proposals linked by no larger theme...these disparate, worthy proposals are not grounded in an account of the world America faces, or the sources of American strength." In other words - no.
It wasn't always so. The post-World War II Marshall Plan was the pinnacle of liberal foreign policy, as was Cold War containment of Communists and the avoidance of nuclear war. So where are the liberals?
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