David Brooks, oh how you are a dying breed: the rational, thoughtful conservative who holds true to his core values while having the humility to actually grant the other guy a point.
He also may have a man-crush on the president. Which is why it’s perhaps not so surprising that Brooks’ most recent column follows up on a point I made a few days ago: that Barack Obama’s foreign policy is grounded in thoroughly progressive values. Here’s an excerpt:
In 2002, Obama spoke against the Iraq war, but from the vantage point of a cold war liberal. He said he was not against war per se, just this one, and he was booed by the crowd. In 2007, he spoke about the way Niebuhr formed his thinking: “I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.”
His speeches at West Point and Oslo this year are pitch-perfect explications of the liberal internationalist approach. Other Democrats talk tough in a secular way, but Obama’s speeches were thoroughly theological. He talked about the “core struggle of human nature” between love and evil.
More than usual, he talked about the high ideals of the human rights activists and America’s history as a vehicle for democracy, prosperity and human rights. He talked about America’s “strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct.” Most of all, he talked about the paradox at the core of cold war liberalism, of the need to balance “two seemingly irreconcilable truths” — that war is both folly and necessary.
Brooks used the term “liberal internationalism” to describe Obama’s approach, something not dissimilar from what we at PPI prefer to call “progressive internationalism.” Here’s what PPI said back in 2003:
Progressive internationalism stresses the responsibilities that come with our enormous power: to use force with restraint but not to hesitate to use it when necessary, to show what the Declaration of Independence called “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” to exercise leadership primarily through persuasion rather than coercion, to reduce human suffering where we can, and to create alliances and international institutions committed to upholding a decent world order.
The Obama administration has taken a lot of heat for being “too realist” in its approach to foreign policy. Certainly there’s evidence to support that claim: Brooks says the White House “misjudged the emotional moment when Iranians were marching in Tehran.” And there was the uncomfortable incident when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sidestepped the issue of human rights in China because they “couldn’t interfere with the global economic crisis” (which she recently tried to rectify in a speech at Georgetown). True enough, at least for now.
However, when books are written on the Obama administration’s foreign policy, I’d bet the prevailing narrative will be that of an administration that sought to identify and resolve discrete national security challenges while guided by keen attention to America’s values. Closing Guantanamo is perhaps the best example thus far.
