Obama: more of the same

Here's a link to the piece I did for this last Sunday's Register, on Obama's foreign policy team and his apparent philosophy on U.S. foreign relations. I conclude that he is a standard-issue liberal interventionist, convinced, as were the Clintonite retreads he's picked, that the U.S. is the indispensable nation that must run the world -- though he might pick different places to intervene than GWB has. During the Clinton era it almost became the case that liberals preferred intervention in countries that had little or no relation to U.S. core national interests, viewing ostensibly "disinterested" or " humanitarian" intervention as somehow more noble or moral. Obama's main thetroical commitment is to escalating the war in Afghanistan, which may be less winnable than Iraq. Not much of a change I can believe in. And the left is getting restive.

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."

No new foreign policy

Here's a link to my most recent column for Antiwar.com, written before the election, in which I doubted whether the next president, whoever he might be, would have a more modest foreign policy than we have now. I hold to the idea. If anything, Barack was more militant than McCain on doing raids inside Pakistan with or without the Pakistani government's permission or foreknowledge, and on ramping up the war in Afghanistan, the graveyard of several empires. It's time for a new foreign policy of strategic disengagement, but it doesn't look as if we'll get it anytime spoon. You're invited to nag me about progress on the book I'm writing on the subject. I haven't been as diligent as I might be.

Not so different

Here's a link to the column I wrote last week for Antiwar.com, comparing and contrasting the three remaining possible candidates for president on the Iraq war and foreign policy. I concluded that even though their rhetoric is rather different, when you get to likely policies they aren't all that different. Obama will face the fact that even a prompt withdrawal will take more than a year just to get all the people and equipment out, and might face a situation that makes him want to delay withdrawal a while. McCain, obviously more militaristic, will face the prospect of the military being thoroughly "hollowed-out" if he stays in Iraq much longer. Likewise Hillary.

The striking thing is that when it comes to what the political scientists call Grand Strategy there's not more than a dime's worth of difference among them. They all believe the U.S. should play a grandiose role in the world at large. Even Barack does, though he calculated that Iraq was a mistake at the outset, which was not all that tough to do.