IF WE SHIFT THE EMPHASES JUST SLIGHTLY HERE WE'LL FIND AN INSIGHT:

How to Make a Liberal Foreign Policy: The question of how to use American military power still threatens to split the liberal movement. (Matthew Yglesias, August 12, 2010, American Prospect)

Much of the controversy over the past two decades has centered on the concept of "humanitarian intervention." This was exemplified by 1990s arguments over military intervention in Haiti, Rwanda, and Bosnia and ultimately by the 1999 U.S.-led NATO bombing campaign that forced Serbia to concede Kosovo's de facto independence. In world-historical terms, this war will go down as extremely trivial, but it was a key moment politically. It led, in particular, to the development of a (purportedly) new "liberal hawk" approach to world affairs in which American power would be unleashed to do good all around the world.

In retrospect, there was nothing new about this vision. In its fundamentals, it is identical to the conservative view (albeit at times with different points of rhetorical emphasis) in terms of positing American military primacy and freedom from institutional restraint as key planks of foreign policy. Sensible liberals were able to see the humanitarian ventures of the 1990s as perhaps-praiseworthy things done at a particular time and place without redefining their entire worldview around the idea of serial humanitarian wars. But many intellectuals and political leaders of the Democratic Party ended up following the liberal-hawk line right into the disaster in Iraq.

Post-Iraq soul searching combined with the emergence of a presidential candidate untainted by support for the invasion has bolstered the development of a clearer idea of the liberal goal in international affairs, what the Obama National Security Strategy calls "a rules-based international system that can advance our own interests by serving mutual interests." Several years earlier, the Princeton Project on National Security came up with the more elegant "A World of Liberty Under Law." The idea in either case is that instead of struggling fruitlessly for perpetual dominance of the anarchic international realm, America liberals should strive to tame it by helping build a set of rules and institutions that can accommodate the legitimate interests of all nations.

Rather than try to dominate the anarchical regions and bring good to these parts of the world, the proposed project would seek to tame America and keep us from intervening against anti-democratic governments. It's passing curious that Mr. Yglesias's "liberal foreign policy" is based on accommodating illiberal regimes.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 12, 2010 7:44 PM