Reply #27: Will Marshall is a NEOCON regardless of what he calls his group:

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In the introduction to the 2006 book With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty, editor Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), promotes what he calls “progressive internationalism” as opposed to the “conservative unilateralism” of the George W. Bush administration. He argues that the Iraq War is part of a larger strategy for “building a world safe for individual liberty and democracy,” and that the “Bush Republicans have been tough but they have not been smart” in directing the course of the war in Iraq. Part of being smart is “using our strengths,” says Marshall. “Democrats must be committed to preserving America's military predominance, because a strong military undergirds U.S. global leadership.”

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A core member of a neoconservative-like vanguard within the Democratic Party establishment, Marshall has been instrumental in creating organizations that have worked to move the party to the right on everything from foreign to economic policies. With Al From, in 1985 Marshall cofounded the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), an important bastion of center-right Democrats that was once chaired by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT). In 1989, Marshall founded the PPI, a think tank that is affiliated with the DLC. Marshall and From were both staffers for Rep. Gillis Long (D-LA), who was the chairman of the House Democratic Party Caucus in the early 1980s. Marshall served as Long's speechwriter and policy analyst and was also senior editor of the 1984 House Democratic Caucus policy blueprint, “Renewing America's Promise.”

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Marshall was one of 15 analysts who co-wrote the PPI's October 2003 foreign policy blueprint, “Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy.” Using language that closely mirrors that of the neoconservative-led Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the PPI hailed the “tough-minded internationalism” of past Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman. Like PNAC, which in its founding statement warned of grave present dangers confronting America, the PPI strategy declared that, “Today America is threatened once again” and is in need of assertive individuals committed to strong leadership. The authors' observation that, “like the Cold War, the struggle we face today is likely to last not years but decades,” echoes both neoconservative and Bush administration national security assessments. As the “Progressive Internationalism” authors explain, the PPI endorsed the invasion of Iraq “because the previous policy of containment was failing, because Saddam posed a grave danger to America as well as to his own brutalized people, and because his blatant defiance of more than a decade's worth of UN Security Council resolutions was undermining both collective security and international law.”



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