This Sunday's New York Times magazine will include a long feature on Barack Obama and foreign policy. Reviewing the article, Ezra Klein and Matthew Ygelsias, who both tend more toward the wonkish than a hack-type such as myself, indicate that that it is Obama's team of foreign policy advisors that they find most appealing about Obama as a candidate. Klein writes:
But if I were going to decide on Obama, this is exactly why. Insofar as there's a real hope for a new foreign policy, I think it lies with Obama. That's not to say Edwards' policies on this are bad, but what moves him is, as far as I can tell, economic injustice at home, so I think his foreign policy would be a bit secondary. And Hillary Clinton's policies would, as far as I can tell, be bad, at least as compared to the other two.
And in foreign policy terms, though Clinton certainly counts some war opponents and some younger rank-and-file people, she and her campaign fundamentally represent continuity with that seem set of political and policy elites who were running the show in 2002 and 2003. Obama represents a break from that; a turn toward people who think a different way, who probably aren't as famous but just might know what they're talking about, and perhaps even more important than that to people whose thinking isn't hobbled by an unwillingness to break with past positions.
Personally, I draw almost the exact opposite conclusion, or at least the exact opposite feeling, from the New York Times article in question. It includes a couple of passage that actually send me through the roof. Here is the first one:
In mainstream foreign-policy circles, Barack Obama is seen as the true bearer of this vision. "There are maybe 200 people on the Democratic side who think about foreign policy for a living," as one such figure, himself unaffiliated with a campaign, estimates. "The vast majority have thrown in their lot with Obama." Hillary Clinton's inner circle consists of the senior-most figures from her husband's second term in office - the former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the former national security adviser Sandy Berger and the former United Nations ambassador Richard Holbrooke. But drill down into one of Washington's foreign-policy hives, whether the Carnegie Endowment or the Brookings Institution or Georgetown University, and you're bound to hit Obama supporters. Most of them served in the Clinton administration, too, and thus might be expected to support Hillary Clinton. But many of these younger and generally more liberal figures have decamped to Obama. And they are ardent. As Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council official under President Clinton who now heads up a team advising Obama on nonproliferation issues, puts it, "There's a feeling that this is a guy who's going to help us transform the way America deals with the world." Ex-Clintonites in Obama's inner circle also include the president's former lawyer, Greg Craig, and Richard Danzig, his Navy secretary.
In 1981, Obama arrived at Columbia University, where he majored in international relations. He wrote his senior thesis on the North-South debate on trade then raging as part of the demand for a "new international economic order." But he says that he was never much of a lefty. Obama offers himself as the representative of a new generation, free of the dogmas that still burden the Democratic Party. "The Democrats have been stuck in the arguments of Vietnam," he said to me on the campaign plane, "which means that either you're a Scoop Jackson Democrat or you're a Tom Hayden Democrat and you're suspicious of any military action. And that's just not my framework."
Ugh and ugh. The great foreign policy revolution that we would experience under Obama would apparently be orchestrated by a majority of the professional foreign policy wonks within the Democratic establishment, and in the name of triangulating against the left. This is seriously the best we can hope for in terms of changing foreign policy? A Carnegie Endowment, Brookings Institution, Georgetown University, wonk-fueled opposition to "Tom Hayden Democrats?"
I have to run out the door right now, but I have to say how utterly disempowering and infuriating this situation is. We basically have to choose between one overtly anti-progressive foreign policy establishment elite and another overtly anti-progressive foreign policy elite? Damn, that really sucks. I need to phrase all of this better than I am doing right now, but like I said, I have to run. I'll just say for now that I feel this is in many ways emblematic of the frustrating situation progressives are facing in the 2008 Democratic primary, and that it is difficult to know how to respond.
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