As was true during Stalin's heyday, victory requires embracing the causes of greater liberty and greater prosperity around the world. America once again faces a serious totalitarian threat, this time not from Nazis or communists but from Islamist jihadists. To stiffen the Democrats' spine, he wants his fellow liberals to draw inspiration from the principles that drove Cold War liberalism. And the eagerness of Democratic strategists to change the subject seems to prove that liberals follow public opinion polls rather than lead them.īeinart agrees with much of the conservative critique. The neoliberal disdain for ideology is taken by conservatives as evidence that liberals neither believe in America nor grasp what distinguishes us from our enemies. foreign policy have become grist for the right's claims that liberals reflexively blame America first. Anti-imperialist rants about Halliburton and Big Oil driving U.S. Even after 9/11, liberal strategists wanted foreign policy to just go away, arguing (as they did before the October 2002 congressional vote to authorize the Iraq War) that if Democrats changed the conversation to domestic politics, they would fare better at the polls.Ĭonservatives have happily turned all of these positions to their advantage. Meanwhile, a new breed of reformers known as neoliberals responded to the debacle in Southeast Asia by draining foreign policy problems of their ideological content and treating them as technical issues to be solved by dispassionate analysis. The anti-imperialist left coalesced around two wrongheaded convictions: that threats to American security were overblown and that narrow interests dominated Washington's calculations. security and prosperity that lasted nearly half a century.īut then came Vietnam, which shattered the liberal consensus on foreign policy - and liberal confidence to boot. The Cold War liberalism - a term Beinart takes as a compliment, not a slur - of Truman's Democratic Party unified the nation and provided a blueprint for promoting U.S. Truman who developed a coherent and compelling vision of national greatness in the dangerous world. In the years following World War II, it was Democrat Harry S. As Beinart documents in his thoughtful history of six decades of liberal thinking on foreign policy, this was not always the case. And the public's disillusionment with Iraq seems to have Democrats poised to make big gains in this year's congressional midterm elections.īut the very fact that liberals needed the Iraq War to go badly to get a hearing for their foreign policy views attests to their vulnerability on national security issues. Bush won the White House in 2000 not because of his diplomatic prowess but because voters believed that events overseas hardly mattered.

It is, of course, easy to exaggerate how much foreign policy has contributed to the political difficulties that liberals face today. But by dwelling instead on America's limitations and shortcomings, they have lost the opportunity to construct a compelling narrative of their own. Liberals have mocked this tale as simplistic and arrogant. Conservatives, after all, have always had a coherent and appealing story to tell voters: America is good, and it does good overseas. Peter Beinart, an editor-at-large for the New Republic and a columnist for The Washington Post, argues in his deliberately provocative The Good Fight that liberals' inability to articulate a foreign policy vision has been their Achilles' heel. 'Everyone in that room was on edge,' one staffer later remarked, 'because everyone wanted to know: What was that message?' After dutifully thanking his glum team for trying to put him in the Oval Office, he praised them for going before the country with a message.

Kerry (D-Mass.) appeared at a party for his staff. Shortly after losing the 2004 presidential election in a campaign dominated by national security issues, Sen.

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