The American Prospect - The Nation's more wonkish, DC-based little sister - hosts a (un)surprisingly insipid debate on the future of American "liberal internationalism". It is kicked off by ex-Prospect scribe and current Atlantic editor Matthew Yglesias, who has just published a new book on the subject called Heads in the Sand.
His argument isn't particularly ground-moving. As American foreign policy teetered from bad to worse under the Bush administration, Democrats utterly failed to articulate clear policy differences or come up with an alternative to the neocon-stamped White House reverie. What's needed now is a return to the "liberal internationalism" of the past, in which American leaders sought to cement a rules-based global order based on multilateralism and consent.
Inspired? No? Well, nor are the chosen debaters. oD author Anne-Marie Slaughter is puzzled that Yglesias doesn't recognise the extent to which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are already signed up to the liberal international cause, making his rallying call look slightly silly. Derek Chollett is cautious to underline the very real limits of global cooperation. And the neo-con pundit David Frum fulminates rather feebly against the premise of the whole debate.
Only David Rieff strikes the nail on the head:
The debate between Democrats like Yglesias and neoconservatives like those who supported the Bush administration and now are drifting back to Sen. McCain is more in the nature of an internationalist family quarrel than a fundamental difference over matters of principle...
To claim that these second-order differences are matters of fundamental principle seems absurd. It is to have so assimilated the ideology of America's manifest destiny and of American exceptionalism ("the cause of the United States is the cause of humanity"; Benjamin Franklin said that, not some wicked neoconservative) that anyone not similarly convinced of America's positive role in the world -- and certainly people like me, who tend to view the United States as one more empire, probably no worse than its British predecessor but no better, either -- can only admire this illustration, in the foreign-policy sphere, of Freud's "narcissism of small differences."
