Read George Washington's Farewell Address. Read John Quincy Adams' 'Monsters to Destroy' speech. They encapsulate my foreign policy views. If that's 'leftist', well, whatever...
Since my wife and I are stay-at-home types on New Years Eve, I had a few minutes to check into these. Maybe too few.
John Qunicy Adams, in the Monsters to Destroy speech, effectively endorses all previous US foreign policy. Maybe this was just being politic. However, if sincere, he was endorsing the Tripolian Wars, in which we combatted piracy by going after, with our military, the North African state sponsors of this criminality. Imagine if instead of enslaving a few Americans on ships at sea, the Islamic pirates had been landing at New York, killing hundreds of American civilians, and then gone on to Washington DC and killed dozens of our soldiers. And imagine that the motive was political, as in 2001, rather than, as in 1801, criminal. Do you really see Washington or John Quincy Adams hesitating to go after Arab nations who trained the pirates and, for example, posted up three story tall Death to America signs in downtown Teheran? Now, it is true that the Federalists wouldn't have tried to turn Islamic states into republics. But they would certainly have agreed with President Bush on the need for a war against terror and pursued it with extreme vigor. And I think they would have found President Bush's plan to occupy for a few years and then turn over power to locals about right.