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Foreign policy realignment?

Fareed Zakaria makes some good points today, arguing that the the Bush administration’s foreign policy, and in particular his “ideology of regime change — armed Wilsonianism” contributed to the Republican electoral defeat: Something similar has happened in foreign policy. The electorate has seemed to sense that there is a new world out there and that […]

Fareed Zakaria makes some good points today, arguing that the the Bush administration’s foreign policy, and in particular his “ideology of regime change — armed Wilsonianism” contributed to the Republican electoral defeat:

Something similar has happened in foreign policy. The electorate has
seemed to sense that there is a new world out there and that the nostrums
presented by McCain in his campaign are irrelevant to it. As with
economics, these feelings developed after watching the ideas in action.
Bush embraced a series of radical policy stances — many of them long
espoused by neoconservatives — especially during his first term.
But the vigorous unilateralism openly advocated by the administration is
recognized by most Americans to have weakened the country’s influence
abroad. Its excessive reliance on military force has yielded few results
worth the costs.

But Zakaria also suggests that the Iraq War was not a major issue in the election campaign. I don’t buy that. It’s true that the economy ranked higher than Iraq among the concerns of the voters. Nevertheless, the same polls also suggest that two-third of the voters strongly or somewhat disapprove of the war in Iraq. You don’t have to be a pollster to figure out that those who supported that war ended-up voting for McCain. And that’s the guy who lost the election. Final polls also found that those who thought the decision to go to war in Iraq was wrong backed Obama by better than 5 to 1; those who thought it right supported McCain by a nearly identical margin. Logic tells me that opposition to the war did play a role in the outcome of vote.

Moreover, opinion polls also reflect declining public support for U.S. global interventionism. In short, there is clearly no enthusiasm for new global crusades, which means that the general public would welcome a more realist foreign policy approach by the Obama Administration.

Whicn brings me to the current debate over the fate of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. If Obama resists the pressure from the liberal imperialists in his camp, he and the Democrats clearly have an opportunity to achieve an electoral realignment when it comes to foreign policy, especially if the Republicans continue to espouse the same old neoconservative ideas. And such a realignment could also take place among the “elites” if the liberals and not the conservatives would be identified with foreign policy realism.

In any case, according to Steve Clemons it seems that our old friends from the PNAC are back in business. I wonder why…

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