In recent months, Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy has been talking up the need to fashion a distinctive progressive foreign policy. He explained the need for this back in May, offered a broad outline of his views with two of his Democratic colleagues in a recent Foreign Affairs article, and talked more about this with Vox’s Zack Beauchamp this week. There are some interesting ideas in both articles, but especially in the Foreign Affairs article they were buried under an avalanche of cliches.

Despite the obvious desire on Murphy’s part to get out of the Democratic “defensive crouch” on foreign policy, he and his colleagues felt obliged to endorse false claims about the dangers the U.S. faces when they start by saying that the U.S. “faces unprecedented challenges abroad.” That’s untrue, and it concedes so much to the hawks in the debate from the beginning that it almost cancels out the rest of the argument. Even though Murphy has stated that the U.S. needs a “new humility to our foreign policy, with less emphasis on short- term influencers like military intervention and aid,” he has been a leading proponent of sending arms to Ukraine. Murphy and his colleagues emphasize the importance of multilateral support for military intervention, but this misses that there have been ill-conceived, disastrous wars with multilateral backing and in some cases even with U.N. approval (e.g., the Libyan war). It may be preferable to have multilateral support, but this skips over the more important question of whether these wars are necessary at all.

That brings us to the larger problem with the progressive foreign policy vision sketched out by Murphy and his colleagues. They say that “we believe that when military action is deemed necessary for reasons other than self-defense, it should serve as a shaping mechanism for local political solutions,” but the raises the question: why is military action ever “deemed necessary” when it is not for self-defense? The senators go on to say that “[m]ilitary interventions should focus on creating space for local political solutions to the underlying problems for unrest,” but it is often the case that these interventions are a substitute for trying to find a political solution to a conflict, or they may be an attempt to prevent a political solution that is disadvantageous to the intervening governments’ favored side. Instead of facilitating a political compromise between a regime and its opponents, foreign military intervention usually hardens the positions of both sides, intensifies the conflict, and makes a resolution to the conflict harder to achieve. We are seeing that happening in Yemen right now.

Murphy’s project is also heavily weighed down by the partisan need to defend Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy record mostly isn’t compatible with what Murphy is promoting. That forces Murphy into offering contorted defenses of Clinton that undermine everything else he’s trying to do. Here is Murphy on Clinton and her vote for the Iraq war from the Vox interview:

Very clearly, Secretary Clinton understands the mistakes of the Iraq war. She admits that she made a mistake in voting for it, and is determined to use her presidency as a way to learn those lessons. She’s learned them in a very personal way, which arguably will make her more committed to this new vision of American foreign policy abroad than someone who hadn’t made those mistakes themselves.

I don’t really expect Murphy to denounce the prohibitive favorite for his party’s nomination, but he shouldn’t be covering for her bad foreign policy judgment. There is every reason to doubt that Clinton really understands the mistakes of the Iraq war. The Libyan war is proof that she hasn’t absorbed most of its most important lessons. Murphy doesn’t directly address her role in the Libyan war except to say that he disagreed with her about it, but that just highlights the contradiction between what Clinton thinks “smart power” means in practice and what Murphy wants it to mean. Saying that Clinton will be more committed to “this new vision” because of her past blunders would seem to be the definition of wishful thinking.

Murphy is on the right track in some of what he is saying on foreign policy, but there are still quite a few contradictions and flaws that need to be fixed before his progressive foreign policy can be a coherent alternative.