PPI’s Will Marshall is quoted in World Affairs on the need to rebalance U.S. foreign policy:
My wager is that Jackson would have cheered on the Democratic Leadership Council’s Will Marshall, who has called for another rebalancing of US foreign policy. The course correction from the George W. Bush years was necessary, he argues, but the chastened realism of his successor is an over-correction that must be addressed in turn. Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, argues, in true Jacksonian style, that
the administration’s policy of reassurance and strategic humility … has overlooked … the “values dimension” of American power as well as the ideological wellsprings of conflict in today’s networked world.
While noting that Obama’s closure of the half-century national security confidence gap between the Democrats and Republicans is “no mean feat,” Marshall points out that when it really matters—for example, when Iran’s Green Movement was repressed in 2009 and needed support, or when the ideological roots of violent extremism needs articulating and combating—“the president seems to lose his voice.”