Is Progressive Foreign Policy Dead on Arrival? ( Lefties disappointed?)

t will be some time before we know the full extent of Obama's ambitions on domestic policy, but progressives are sure to feature prominently in any debate over health care, energy, banking, etc. In the realm of foreign policy, however, progressives seem already to have been marginalized, or dismissed entirely.

None of this is surprising. Obama never seemed to take progressives very seriously on foreign policy. Throughout the campaign he signaled his respect for the foreign policy of Bush 41, and his advisers tended to split between realists like Richard Danzig and liberal internationalists like Samantha Power. In the one instance that Obama did genuinely excite progressives -- his call to sit down with the leaders of rogue states for direct and unconditional negotiations -- there was no formal roll out or set-piece speech announcing the policy. Instead, even supporters of the idea acknowledged that his arrival at the position had been 'accidental,' and Obama backpedaled over the course of the campaign.

What is clear is that the split between realists and neoconservatives has been resolved, for the time being, in favor of the realists, whose titular leader, Colin Powell, .......

Oh, dear me, we are in quite a terminology game here, and it's fairly clear that certain of them are standing on their heads. The three-way split is between "progressives," "neocons," and "realists," and in no case is the policy embraced by these respective groups representative of the term itself.

With "neocon" we have a term nearly as devoid of semantic content by now as a verbal utterance can be. The aggressive, unilateral (another such term, but let it pass for now) policies most neocons are accused of espousing is anything but conservative in any sense. They are, to be perfectly accurate, "progressive."

As to the "progressives" it is considerably more difficult to find significant differences between their aims and those of the "realists," which leads the critical reader to suspect that this hair is being split by adherents of one or the other set of precepts. The desired result, to be sure, seems somewhat opposed - in the case of the progressives it is to subordinate the country's foreign policy to the approval of international institutions in an effort to make amends for past errors by supporting those of America's enemies whose intentions are most to alter American society in favor of progressive aims, including such holy grails as redistribution of wealth on an international level and the subordination of the Constitution to international law (whose practitioners are, needless to say, neither elected nor accountable to any but their own utopian fantasies). These were always doomed to disappointment; their program is self-destructive and contains internal contradictions that will force it quickly to implode in any case.

Which brings us to the "realists," a term broad and vague enough to cover such neo-Metternichs as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger. Anthony Lake? Colin Powell? Anyone using such a term to describe that continuum is either satisfied that words needn't have precise meanings or unacquainted with the policies advanced by that disparate group. What little is common is a rather unjustified faith in the efficacy of international diplomacy and a recognition (possibly the only "realistic" thing about it) that the efforts of international diplomacy have been nearly uniformly bereft of any substantive result to date.

And so the reins are passed, more or less, from one group of murky intent to another informed by yet another. If students of foreign policy are confused by this terminological goulash they are to be forgiven. In terms of actual policy, however, the upshot is not encouraging. About the only thing everyone agrees upon is that the worst possible policy reflects that of Iraq, which is, in practice, about the only one in the recent past actually to have produced results beneficial both to its people and to that of the world at large. That, one supposes, is to be avoided at all cost.

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