2008: Now It’s Obama’s Foreign Policy Soul

Much has been made throughout the campaign about the supposed battle for John McCain’s foreign policy soul.  Is he a realist at heart, or a staunch neoconservative?  Dave Weigel asks a similar question for Reason, but focuses instead on Barack Obama’s foreign policy.  Obama, in Weigel’s analysis, is not the “progressive realist” that many believe him to be, but rather a rigid, committed liberal interventionist.  Weigel warns that wide-ranging interventionism of the liberal variety can cause equally destructive blowback to what we’ve seen from the Bush administration’s experiments with neoconservatism.

In an unrelated post looking at where we stand in Iraq and where the two candidates might take us, Andrew Sullivan comes to the exact conclusion that Weigel rejects: that Obama’s foreign policy (at least with regard to Iraq) would combine moral considerations with the “dexterity and pragmatism” that might characterize a progressive realist philosophy.