Matthew Yglesias: The Accidental Foreign Policy

[babylonsister]

by Matthew Yglesias
The Accidental Foreign Policy


Photo by Michael Czerwonka/EPA/Corbis


For many Democratic insiders, the seemingly endless primary season has become a sore subject; they believe the length of the contest will hurt the party’s chances in November. We’ll have to wait and see if that happens, but it’s worth noting that as the campaign has gone on, it has produced more than just acrimony. It’s produced a meaningful new approach to foreign policy as well—the first substantial alternative to George W. Bush’s policies that has entered the political mainstream since 9/11, and one whose airing should be welcomed not just by Democrats but by all voters.

Barack Obama has always been an independent thinker. He of course opposed the war in Iraq, and he’s built a team of national-security advisers who disproportionately took the same, then-unpopular antiwar view. But as a presidential candidate articulating what he might do in office, his real break with convention may have begun with a gaffe.

For the better part of a generation, top Democratic politicians have followed, with astonishing uniformity, the same set of unwritten rules in their approach to foreign affairs: match GOP “toughness”; tack to the right on major foreign-policy principles; and, above all, avoid taking positions that could be criticized as weak. So at the YouTube debate on July 23, 2007, when Obama was asked whether he would be willing to meet “without precondition … with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea,” the right answer, conventionally speaking, was a qualified “no.” But Obama answered in the affirmative. Initially, even sympathetic observers like The Nation’s David Corn called this statement a “flub” at best. Hillary Clinton, the quintessence of Democratic establishment thinking, had answered that she would use “high-level presidential envoys to test the waters, to feel the way,” before holding direct meetings with heads of state.

Few observers believed that Obama genuinely intended to break new ground with his response—his campaign had never articulated any such policy before, and seemed ill-prepared to defend it on the spot. The Clinton campaign dutifully pressed the attack the next day, calling Obama’s statement “irresponsible and frankly naive.” But then a funny thing happened. Obama’s team did not try to qualify (or, in political parlance, “clarify”) his remark, and no one said he misspoke. Instead, the campaign fought back, with memos to reporters and with a speech by the candidate himself, aimed squarely at the sort of “conventional wisdom” that had, in the words of his then-foreign-policy adviser, Samantha Power, “led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy.”

It was only mid-summer, ages before the Iowa caucuses in campaign time, so it was a good moment to experiment. And it worked: polling suggested that Americans were largely on board with Obama’s position. Soon, on the stump, he was regularly referring to his willingness to meet with foreign leaders, unlike other top presidential candidates.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/yglesias-obama

[angstlessk]

1. very good article...thanks for posting it! n/t

[babylonsister]

2. The things we learn! :) nt