Jim Antle replies to my earlier post, and it seems as if we are talking past each other.  My objection was not to the claim that Obama’s positions were nearly identical on most foreign policy questions, but to the idea that he was therefore debating “on Republican terms.”  What makes support for anti-Russian NATO expansion or opposition to Iran’s nuclear program more characteristically Republican when both are thoroughly bipartisan endeavors?  Starting in the mid-’90s, after a brief respite following the end of the Cold War, it has been Republicans who have practiced me-tooism in their hostility to Russia.  The Democrats can lay claim to being the authors of most of the lousy policies that have soured U.S.-Russian relations over the last two decades; Republicans have been imitating them in staking out anti-Russian positions.  While the “brand” of the Democrats may seem to be George McGovern to many conservatives, that hasn’t really been operative for almost twenty years.  To see how far the Democrats have moved away from McGovern, one need only look at the electoral success of a Kucinich in the presidential primaries. 

In postwar America, foreign policy has been debated on the terms of an activist, internationalist consensus that spans both parties.  The one postwar election where a major party nominee seriously challenged that consensus was in 1972, and it has never happened since.  Technically the GOP stood for “rollback” in the ’50s, but fortunately they were just kidding and there was still a strong constituency in the GOP that questioned the need for alliances and deployments overseas.  Starting around 1964 and increasingly through the 1970s and 1980s, the GOP adopted the rhetoric of more aggressive or ‘forward’ policy than the Democrats, but in practice it was Republican administrations that practiced detente and negotiated some of the largest disarmament treaties and the proponents of “containment” who kept getting us into unnecessary foreign wars in Asia.  If there was a bipartisan consensus on anticommunist containment for much of the Cold War, there seems to be even more of one now on maintaining a very active, forward American presence in Europe, various parts of Asia and Latin America.  What differences that do exist are a matter of emphasis and process, not substance.       

Jim writes:

The Democrats never developed a clear response to Republican arguments that the surge was an unambiguous success, they never crafted a coherent alternative in dealing with Iran, and they don’t even have a language to talk about anti-terrorism efforts besides shouting “Afghanistan,”  which was relevant in 2001-03 but is much less so now.

It seems to me that the Democratic response to those arguments has been fairly clear: they don’t think the “surge” was an unambiguous success, because they hold, not that unreasonably, that its results are mixed or at least fall short of the plan’s stated goals.  Whether or not one finds that response persuasive seems to depend a lot on how one conceives of the goals of the “surge.”  They haven’t crafted a coherent alternative in dealing with Iran because they share the same goals as Republicans when it comes to Iran, and there is no coherent policy towards Iran in the first place.  They don’t need a language to talk about antiterrorism, because they simply endorse the administration’s formulation of the “war on terror” and merely want to shift where to locate the “central front.” 

The main point in all of this is that it is not unthinkable that a Democratic nominee holds virtually identical positions on a range of issues as his opponent does, since this is a function of being part of the consensus about America’s role in the world.  What is remarkable is that, to the extent that Obama is willing to deny the wisdom of the Iraq war from its inception, he represents the most significant break with that consensus of any Democratic nominee in the post-Cold War era.  I find that break to be far too small, but I am hard to please.  Compared with the last election, which was the comparison Jim was making, Obama represents the greatest divergence from the consensus we have seen in the last two decades.  I think this holds true whether we are talking about the presidential election in ’04 or the midterms, since the national Democratic leadership in ’06 did not run on a coherent antiwar, pro-withdrawal platform–much to the dismay of antiwar Americans everywhere–but allowed House and Senate candidates to adopt whichever position would best suit their constituencies.  The Democrats got their majority, but were then saddled with dozens of members who would not support withdrawal; the Democrats could not even manage party unity in resisting the introduction of additional forces in ’07.   

To the extent that Obama really is running on a platform of ending the Iraq war (and I think he is, which is different from saying that he will actually end it), that is a significant departure from the stances of national Democratic leaders in ’06 and of the Kerry/Edwards campaign, both of which hoped to capitalize on discontent with Bush’s mismanagement without making firm commitments to get out.  For the non-interventionist voter, Obama’s move is not nearly enough, but it is worth recognizing that Obama has come at least partly out of the defensive crouch on this particular issue, which is far more than can be said for any major Democratic figure since Dean’s candidacy fizzled so quickly four years ago.  It is not how Obama is the same as McCain, but how he is different that is the interesting thing about Friday night’s debate. Post-Cold War Democratic nominees have usually felt the need to mimic Republican tropes of “toughness” and “resolve” in order to be taken seriously, and Obama simply doesn’t feel compelled to do that when it comes to Iraq.  That represents a real change, even if it is not nearly enough of a change.

Jim also says:

On foreign policy, Barack Obama wants to be John McCain without making anybody mad.

But this isn’t really true.  To the extent that Obama wants to reduce the number of soldiers in Iraq and end the war, he is flatly denying a desire to “be John McCain,” for whom both of these things are absolutely unacceptable and who has identified himself completely with the cause of escalation in Iraq.  Obama also doesn’t seem to care whether he makes other people mad (viz. Pakistan).  The distinctive thing about Obama, which is also a very worrisome thing, is that he adopts interventionist positions out of his own support for an expansive American role in the world that is not defined by imitating Republican definitions of national security issues.  On most things he accepts the consensus and is very comfortable with it, but it is because he is comfortable in his own support for American use of force that he feels free to oppose certain instances of using force that he thinks are detrimental to U.S. power.  So, once again, supporting an activist or hegemonic role in the world is not debating on McCain’s terms; one might as well say that McCain is debating on Obama’s terms.