FUNNY THING ABOUT A COMPASS...:

Valued-based foreign policy (Anne-Marie Slaughter, May 17, 2007, International Herald Tribune)

American foreign policy has lost its compass. Voters across the United States, increasingly opposed to the war in Iraq and increasingly certain that the country as a whole is going in the wrong direction, are uncertain about the role that America should play in the world.

Some argue not only for pulling out of Iraq but for pulling back more generally, concentrating on America's broken health care and educational systems rather than on building democracy half a world a way.

Others would forsake a values-based foreign policy altogether and return to Kissingerian realism, in which the nature of a particular foreign government is far less important than its power and its ability to help further U.S. national interests. History tells us, however, that neither of these approaches has much staying power with the American public.

Isolationism is a nonstarter in a 21st century world of intense economic and security interdependence. And it is the backlash against Kissingerian realism - against the very idea that U.S. foreign policy would not be guided in some way by American values - that fed the neoconservative movement in the first place.

...no matter how the needle wobbles it always ends up pointing in the same direction, just like our foreign policy always eventually settles in Crusade mode.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 18, 2007 12:35 PM