Desperately Seeking: A Progressive Foreign Policy

In many ways, the modern progressive movement was founded on foreign policy. After nearly two decades in the wilderness during the era of the Democratic Leadership Council, liberals found their voice — and relevance — again in the early days of the Iraq War. Plucking Howard Dean’s candidacy from obscurity in 2004, progressives mounted their first serious assault in years on the conventional thought hegemony by challenging the neoconservative foreign policy vision. Many of today’s icons of the progressive movement — MoveOn, Democracy for America, Daily Kos — arguably originate from this fight. Today’s progressives were molded in the fire of foreign, not domestic, policy.

Oh, how far we have traveled.

Today, progressives have become at best, reactive, and at worst, absent, from serious, meaningful foreign policy debates. Part of this retrenchment is understandable given that with a Democrat in the White House, progressives are always going to be in the shadow of the Commander-in-Chief when it comes to articulating views on international events. But much of the blame for progressives’ retreat is due to simple rubber-necking. The debate within the Republican Party between the John McCain interventionists and the Rand Paul isolationists has come to pass as the beginning and end of foreign policy discussion outside of the Administration.