Obama worse than Bush -- on foreign affairs?

Here's an arresting piece by the Cato Institute's Ted Carpenter suggesting that when it comes to foreign policy, Obama might just well turn out to be worse than Bush. Of course he is far from having fleshed out his foreign policy views and the mainstream media have hardly pressed him on the subject. But Ted notes that he shows no signs of challenging the establishment consensus that the U.S. should intervene widely in conflicts around the world, whether any core (or even peripheral) interest of the U.S. is at stake or not. In fact, during the Clinton administration a number of liberal scholars came close to developing the position that it was somehow more noble or desirable for the U.S. to put blood and treasure at risk precisely in places where no U.S. interest was at stake or even implicated. More humanitarian that way, doncha know.

As Ted puts it, "It will not be an improvement if an Obama administration withdraws troops from Iraq only to launch new interventions in such strategically and economically irrelevant snakepits as Darfur or Burma."