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In Part 1, I took on the problem of defining what a progressive foreign policy might look like in terms of military policy and responding to the ongoing threat of terrorism. In this diary, I want to take on the broader issue of defining what a comprehensive progressive foreign policy might look like. Fortunately, I don't have to do that, though. I can not only crib the contents of the policy from others, I can crib the logic that explains the contents as well--from a 2001 paper by George Lakoff, "The Mind and The World: Changing the Very Idea of American Foreign Policy" (PDF) which I've written about before here.
In the paper, Lakoff starts off by observing that since the end of the Cold War, a broad range of international issues have emerged that don't don't fit into the traditional "foreign policy" framework, and could appear to be nothing more than a laundry list of unrelated issues--things like global warming, women's rights, global public health, etc. However, he goes on to argue that there is a very natural framework that encompases them all: the framework of moral norms. These are all issues that involve how a community of nations ought to conduct itself. Furthermore, Lakoff argues, the moral norms framework produces a better global neighborhood or environment than the traditional self-interest framework that foreign policy has traditionally used, the same way that an ordinary neighborhood is a better place to live when the people there treat each other according to a shared set of norms, rather than only looking out for their own self-interest.
The idea of operating within a framework of moral norms was present throughout Obama's Cairo speech, and indeed has long been a part of America's foreign policy outlook, though it has rarely been clearly articulated as such. Individual norms have been invoked often enough, but all too often there's been an ulterior motive, which only serves to build suspicion. But when a wide range of normative statements are made, as Obama did in his Cairo speech, there is a clear implication that something very different is afoot. Whether or not that comes to pass depends on many different things, not the least of which is developing a more broadly shared understanding of just what that means.
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