The Vision Of Obamney

If Iraq-weary voters are looking for someone who will call on America to “come home,” they won’t find that candidate here. ~Fred Hiatt

Quite.  Hiatt is talking about Romney and Obama, but he might just as easily be talking about most of the other major contenders.  This is Hiatt’s point–in spite of the Bush debacle, interventionism goes marching on in slightly differen, but substantially similar ways.  McGovernites and non-interventionists can look somewhere else.  On this, Hiatt is right.  It may be a redundant, even uninteresting point, since it has been obvious to anyone who is paying attention that Obama’s foreign policy is blood-curdlingly aggressive and activist.  (This foreign policy receives the stamp of approval from Kagan, Peretz and The Washington Post.)  The appropriate thing to say about Hiatt’s column is that he is coming very late to the subject and isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know.   

Obama does not reject in principle the “leadership” role that hegemonists insist that we have, but he criticises execution.  Romney does not reject the paranoid, “existential threat” style of Bush’s foreign policy (neither, in fact, does Obama, whose vision is in some ways even more paranoiac), but also complains about competence and execution.  They agree more often than they disagree, and as George Ajjan pointed out earlier this week both of them offer absolutely dreadful and amateurish foreign policy outlines. 

As I mentionedyesterday, both of these candidates contributed their respective foreign policy position pieces to Foreign Affairs, and Hiatt is only now discovering that these are robustly, obnoxiously internationalist and interventionist.  No kidding. 

Hiatt’s argument is not what Yglesias makes it out to be when he says:

Then he reads Barack Obama’s Foreign Affairs article, sees that Obama is not an isolationist or a pacificist, and concludes that Obama has the same views as Mitt Romney and his views are also “strikingly similar to Bush administration policy.” 

Hiatt doesn’t say that Obama and Romney have all of the same views.  He says that they do share quite a few, and they share even more policy priorities, even though they are going to address those priorities in different ways.  Obviously, they differ significantly on Iraq, and unlike Romney Obama has not shown pervasive ignorance about all things Islamic, and where Romney absurdly conflates Hizbullah, Al-Ikhwan and Al Qaeda Obama does not.  Relative to the laughingstock Romney, Obama seems slightly better, but this isn’t saying much.  Their overarching foreign policy visions are actually very much alike, which from the perspective of this non-interventionist is an assuredly bad sign for the future.