Towards Liberal Foreign Policy Strategy

I have just finished reading Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads:Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy. In it, he goes through the history of neoconservativism, explains why the movement failed when its members became the foreign policy elites, and lays out his vision for a US foreign policy strategy, taking the idealism of neoconservative and filtering it through a realistic vision of international institutions; that is, promoting democracy abroad, but using several different multilateral organizations as appropriate, rather than through unilateral action. He argues that the concept of a "benevolent hegemon" is fatally flawed, as shown through the mistakes made in the Iraq War, and that the US must use other tools to promote democracy abroad. Rather than focusing on military might, Fukuyama argues that the United States needs to build legitimate NGOs to downplay its dominance and mitigate any backlash against American power.

Fukuyama's book, along with Fareed Zakaria's Post American World, lay out a relatively coherent framework for a liberal foreign policy. I don't think either book gets talked about as much as they should, especially in liberal circles. There hasn't been a coherent foreign policy strategy from Democrats since Truman's policy of containment. Since then, particularly since Vietnam, Democrats have had foreign policy goals, but not a defined strategy. It is something that I would like to see Obama articulate more. This, I think, has been the major problem with the US since the end of the Cold War. There wasn't a sense of how the US should use its role as the only superpower. We waded through for ten years under Bush I and Clinton, and then experimented in neoconservativism and unilateralism under Bush II, which obviously didn't work for us. Democrats need to better articulate what we believe our goals for foreign policy should be and the best way to achieve these goals. This echos what Ezra Klein said yesterday about Democrats needing to spend less time thinking about good economic policies for the military and a little more time about war policy and a coherent liberal foreign policy.