Obama's foreign policy: not enough change.

"Several decades after Vietnam, in the aftermath of a century filled to overflowing with evidence pointing to the limited utility of armed force and the dangers inherent in relying excessively on military power, the American people have persuaded themselves that their best prospect for safety and salvation lies with the sword. Told that despite all of their past martial exertions, treasure expended, and lives sacrificed, the world they inhabit is today more dangerous than ever and that they must redouble those exertions, they dutifully assent. Much as dumping raw sewage into American lakes and streams was once deemed unremarkable, so today 'global power projection'--a phrase whose sharp edges we have worn down through casual use, but which implies military activism without apparent limit--has become standard practice, a normal condition, one to which no plausible alternatives seem to exist. All of this Americans have come to take for granted: it's who we are and what we do.

"Such a definition of normalcy cries out for a close and critical reexamination. Surely, the surprises, disappointments, painful losses, and woeful, even shameful failures of the Iraq War make clear the need to rethink the fundamentals of U.S. military policy. Yet a meaningful reexamination will require first a change of consciousness, seeing war and America's relationship to war in a fundamentally different way."

-Andrew Bacevich. The New American Militarism. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.

I've tried to convince several of my friends that neither presidential candidate is offering such a reexamination, though we need it more than ever. The obnoxious hatchet/scalpel trope from the debates transfers directly from spending cuts to "global power projection": McCain wants to chop away at global problems with shows of strength, Obama wants to cut them up with more diplomacy (albeit quite aggressively in Afghanistan). But nobody is questioning the need for the operation.

Obama has praised Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell. It's a good book, and it makes a strong case that genocide is often horrific enough to justify military interventions (to speak plainly: invasions). I would emphasize only that the United States should err on the side of the most cautious assessment of its capacity for positive action, while making the most of its ability to bring global attention to atrocities through diplomatic condemnations, &c.

But if this interventionist inclination is coupled with an aggressive stance on Pakistan and Afghanistan, we'll just be back in Bill Clinton territory (although I sincerely hope Obama as President would not fling bombs and missiles about the globe with such reckless abandon). Which is to say: this is technically change, insofar as it is different from the Bush administration, but it's not really new.

As I continue to think through the Price-Lawson race, it seems more and more important to me that Congress-persons question not only a now-unpopular war, but the whole direction of U.S. foreign policy.

How do other voters feel about militarism? Check out this back-and-forth between John Schwenkler and James Poulos on Culture11.