I don’t understand who the audience is supposed to be for Henninger’s latest column. Henninger repeats the now standard complaint that Obama is ignoring dissidents in authoritarian states while making (largely superficial) overtures to their governments, and goes on to say:

For the American left, now fused to financial support from domestic labor unions, the world’s dispossessed represent a threat—less costly labor selling goods into the high-cost world.

Active help for democratic oppositions in Venezuela, Syria, Egypt, Iran or even Guinea hardly serves this interest. Today, social justice stops at the water’s edge.

This doesn’t actually represent the current politics of organized labor in this country, nor does it correctly characterize progressive opposition to free trade. Most major labor unions want to bring immigrant laborers into their organizations to bolster their numbers, which is why they have supported various forms of amnesty for many years. To the extent that the unions oppose certain free trade agreements, they often do so because they regard these agreements as being raw deals for “the world’s dispossessed” and because these agreements do not contain sufficient protections for foreign laborers.

Some people in Latin America have done very well thanks to neoliberal policies, but the gains have been very unevenly distributed and concentrated among the wealthiest in these countries. Economic inequality and social stratification, which were already considerable before neoliberalism swept the region, have grown worse as neoliberalism has advanced. The left-populist backlash across Latin America did not come from nowhere, but instead originated out of dissatisfaction with the limited or non-existent benefits that the poor majority was receiving from neoliberal policies. Had “the world’s dispossessed” benefited so greatly from these policies, they would hardly be embracing political movements that denounce those policies and preach nationalization of resources and industries and redistribution of wealth instead.

Progressives and their labor allies know this, and will not be shamed by lectures on social justice from The Wall Street Journal. At the same time, why would business-oriented Republicans be interested in a critique of the administration for its lack of concern for international social justice? Do the business-oriented readers who make up a significant part of WSJ’s readership think it is a problem if social justice “stops at the water’s edge”? Would they not consider this a good thing?

Henninger writes as if there had been sustained, active help for democratic dissidents in these countries under the previous administration, when we know very well that whatever limited help the Bush administration had been willing to offer Egyptian dissidents was withdrawn soon thereafter. If “social justice stops at the water’s edge” today, it hardly went overseas in the past. Perhaps someone is outraged that Obama has not taken stronger steps against the junta in Guinea, but does anyone really think that the actions of the government of Guinea, however abhorrent and wrong they are, should occupy much of the attention of the United States government?

What we have with Henninger’s column is an attack on Obama ostensibly from the right because Obama is conducting a foreign policy that is effectively too conservative and insufficiently radical and revolutionary. There is no significant constituency whose opinion of Obama will change because of this kind of argument. It is a ridiculous kind of opposition, and it is one that will gain no purchase with the general public.