05:45 pm
Obama: Liberal Interventionist or Progressive Realist?
David Weigel over at Reason magazine has an interesting and provocative piece up in which he argues that Obama represents a continuation of the liberal interventionist tradition in the Democratic Party — a development that he does not regard as a good thing. Here’s the money quote:
Obama’s advisers don’t pretend that their candidate is moving very far from the legacy of Bill Clinton—a legacy of humanitarian interventionism that provided some of the moral and legal justifications for Iraq. The problems of this decade, in their view, came because the Bush administration looked at unilateral action as a first course of action and multilateralism as a patina, gathering allies after military decisions had already been made. That’s the reverse of what Obama says he wants: multilateralism first and unilateralism as a last resort. . . . Obama has taken what he likes from Clinton’s brain trust and welded it to his own vision of intervention. Plenty of likeminded liberals agreed with Obama about the Iraq war—that it was an aberration, an unusually bad war botched by a Republican president. They may not necessarily share his views about the next war.
I have several concerns with Weigel’s piece. First, he argues that all interventions, humanitarian or otherwise, are wrong. Unlike Weigel, I share the notion held by former Obama advisor Samantha Power (among others) that American military intervention can, if used wisely, help prevent (rather than cause) humanitarian disasters. A unilateral blanket pledge that the United States would no longer intervene in such situations would almost certainly embolden dictators, warlords, and terrorists to commit more rather than fewer atrocities.
Second, expressing a willingness to use American power to advance American interests does not make Obama a liberal interventionist. Were an Obama Administration to work through the United Nations, building consensus for such action, it would represent a significant break from the Bush Administration’s go-it-alone policies. It also would demonstrate a strong streak of pragmatism in the Administration’s approach to foreign policy problems. But even were Obama to act unilaterally, it would not necessarily be unilateralsim. As Weigel himself notes, the Bush Administration essentially acted and then asked for help. An Obama Administration not only would ask for help before acting, but would reserve acting alone as an occasional necessary evil. Just because you don’t want to use a weapon doesn’t mean you eliminate it from your arsenal. And conversely, keeping a weapon in your arsenal doesn’t mean you want to use it.
Last but not least, Weigel’s thesis is predicated on assumptions — such as the capacity of the United States to project its power when and where it wants — that no longer may be true. Given the severity of the current financial crisis, future interventions may prove to be fiscally impossible.
Nonetheless, it’s worth your time to read Weigel’s analysis. When you’re done, come back and share your thoughts here.