From Where Should We Lead? Posted by David Shorr

Oh, how the right wing blogosphere is crowing over Ryan Lizza's New Yorker piece on Obama foreign policy. All their charges of fecklessness fully confrmed -- confessed even! But before we get too excited, let's take a breath and look at what all the shouting is about. As I see it, the question on the table is the following: how can the United States get others to go along with what we want?

From my reading of the commentary this week, the right wing's better idea is the same idea they're always pushing. US policy needs to be firmer, more resolute, uncompromising, unwavering, resolute, and insistent. More like we really mean it.

I certainly understand that standing pat on American power and righteousness is a more gratifying stance. America is powerful and mainly in the right (though when we get it wrong, we really get it wrong). But that's beside the point. I don't make foreign policy judgments on the basis of how good it makes me feel about America. My basic belief in the country is plenty solid and doesn't need to be buttressed by beating our chest internationally.

For all their crowing, the hard liners are arguing a flimsy if not delusional premise: that the United States can bend others to our will just by being resolute. Exactly how will that work? How many places will we engage militarily? How many sets of sanctions will we impose? Will we need international support? Will any resistance be stirred up, if we cast humility aside in favor of pigheadedness? Do these questions ring any bells?

I note that Les Gelb is even more exasperated this week than I am. Gelb's Daily Beast column lambastes Republican critics as well as the media for a constant flow of knee-jerk diatribe that isn't being challeged to present plausible alternatives. He even draws a parallel with birtherism. I don't think we can lump these foreign policy critiques into that reprehensible category, but looking at Donald Trump's role in the debate is instructive. It's safe to say that most of the conservative commentators have devoted much more thought to foreign policy than Trump. Even so, Trump's statements about putting an end to OPEC's "fun" with high oil prices or getting a better deal from the Chinese seem to be just a cruder version of far-right foreign policy -- their approach in pure-Id form. You be the judge, more similar or dissimilar?

On one side of this debate is the idea that American leadership is a matter of ignoring the concerns and misgivings of others. For the US to accommodate concerns or step back and let other nations take the lead is a show of weakness. Mistrust toward the United States must be denied rather than defused, and international goodwill is a luxury.

Ultimately that will be a losing argument. Despite what the right wing says, suspicions about America's intentions and leadership are not a matter of self-doubt but of international political reality. It's something to be recognized and softened, rather than bulldozed through. Most Americans understand the need to convert international resistance into support. They realize the importance of getting the world's help, rather than sitting on a high horse of our own self-satisfaction. As it's often said, there's no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit. Besides, for Republicans to win this argument, they have to airbrush the history of Bush-Cheney foreign policy into a glowing success. Think they can do that?

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I've just discovered this site. I'm trying to be brief, but ... I've been very depressed since Obama became president. I think of myself as a Progressive, so when I see a foreign policy think-tank adopting the moniker, I'm leery. Pretty good food for thought in the articles I've read so far. However, if you're not discussing torture and aggressive war, two crimes the Obama admin. is giving de facto pardons for (along with two cases of presidential election fraud, the federal attorney firings, K. Rove's violations of the Hatch Act, 9-11 perhaps, e.g.) I think you've missed the gorilla in the room. The U.S. is the world's greatest hypocrite. We can't gloss over that reality until we uphold the laws against our own leaders.
Additionally, should foreign policy professionals, politicians and bureaucrats endeavor to "win the hearts and minds", i.e. brainwash, of foreigners so that multinational corporations can then exploit their people and resources? Is that Progressive?

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