Ezra's TAP-mate Mattew Yglesias is writing a book, and good for him. (Where's my book contract, I ask you?!) I think Matthew is probably better-equipped to write a good book about Democratic foreign policy than any other blogger I read, so good luck.
That said, I desperately want to read his book now (many months, I imagine, before it's complete) because this isn't nearly enough:
[Matt's book] advances the argument that the political problem for contemporary progressives has been a failure to convince the American public that the Democratic Party offers a coherent and viable approach to national security policy. It denies that the issue here is that liberals need to "get tough" or some such thing. Rather, the problem has been a failure to advance a principled and coherent alternative to Bush-style hegemonism.
The good news is that such an alternative is fairly readily available in the form of traditional liberal internationalism as has historically, albeit with some missteps, been the lodestar of Democratic thinking throughout the twentieth century. The bad news is that just as it was more necessary than ever to articulate the meaning and utility of this doctrine, a giant portion of the movements leadership... found themselves abandonning it in favor of support for an invasion of Iraq that cannot be reconciled with it.
There are only two problems with this that come to mind. The first is trivial, and essentially amounts to a marketing campaign: Too many Americans, I think, have internalized the belief that 9/11 changed everything. This makes the idea of returning to 20th-century liberal internationalism sound quaint to my ears. But maybe savvy marketing can convince Americans otherwise.
The larger problem is more fundamental, and it really depends on what Matt means be "traditional liberal internationalism". If, by that, he means the impulse to build and contribute to multilateral institutions, collective security agencies like NATO, and working on expanding global trade, then I think Matt's on a solid footing.
The problem is that's not the only part of "traditional liberal internationalism", because at least during the Cold War, all of the above strategies were also part and parcel of the effort to combat Soviet Communism. This worked - very well - against the Soviets in the 20th century. My worry is that the liberal internationalism that Matt is advocating for could too easily be transformed (through no fault of his own) in to a policy of "containment" against China.
Before you think I've taken leave of my senses and totally jumped topics, let me just note that the Pentagon, despite the momentary concentration in Iraq, is still very much in the "contain China" mindset. The most recent example comes from ArmsControlWonk, who notes that - of all the Deputy Assistant Secretaries to be promotes, the Pentagon chose the DASD for Asia-Pacific (China.) As Jeffrey notes, "Oh, sure, sure, you have no exit strategy for Iraq and you are sizing up air defenses around Tehran, but c’mon … real men hate on China."
As we saw with the latest National Security Strategy, even though the Pentagon is abandoning the more hostile language towards China, it is still maintaining the defense priorities that only make sense if your long-term expectation is a Big Fight with China.
More broadly, one of the most interesting non-GWOT aspects of Bush's foreign policy (and to a lesser extent, Clinton's) has been the strategic encirclement of China. One of the best writers on this subject is Gwynne Dyer, who wrote an excellent article for The Walrus magazine a while back. Sadly, it isn't available online, but you can get a feel of his writing from a shorter article cached here.
Dyer overstates it when he says that "Nothing in the Chinese Communist government's behavior over the past 50 years, or in China's cultural traditions over the past several thousand years, suggests that a more powerful China would be territorially expansionist", but nevertheless he's correct to say that nothing - absolutely nothing - in China's recent past makes the kind of "encircle and contain" policy of the Bush Administration necessary.
What does this have to do with Matt's book? Well, two things. First, a return to 20th century liberal international foreign policy, or as the rest of us call it, "sanity", is welcome. But I'm wary that too many Dems think that America will have the same role in the 21st century as it did in the 20th. Liberal internationalism in the 20th century was largely a fighting doctrine to contain the Soviets, and the American foreign policy scene (at the moment, at least) is most definitely geared up for a fight with China.
This is the crucial second point: America needs to find some way to "make room" in the international arena for China, India, Japan, even countries like Brazil, Russia, and maybe Nigeria or South Africa to play larger roles. This is absolutely compatible with "traditional liberal internationalism", but it may not be compatible with "America's national interest" as it has been traditionally defined.
More importantly - for Matt's book, at least - there is no historical example from which American foreign policy thinkers can draw a lesson of how to do this. Well, maybe except one: The change in international leadership between the UK and the US during the mid-20th century. Unfortunately, that change largely was the result of the Luftwaffe bombing a large part of Britain to the ground, and the post-war loss of India. America has precious few colonies to lose, and there's got to be a better way to make room in the international arena than bombing DC, right?
Well, maybe Matt can put a chapter in his book on that subject.
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