The New Yorker: Worlds Apart

Whoever says these guys are the same isn't paying attention. While McCain is an old fashioned cold warrior, Obama brings a welcome change to American hegemony inspired by the Phoenix Initiative's report: “Strategic Leadership: Framework for a Twenty-first Century National Security Strategy”

“This report,” Rice writes in her preface, “breaks away from such traditional concepts as containment, engagement, and enlargement and rejects standard dichotomies of realist power politics versus liberal idealism.” It “offers bold and genuinely new thinking about America’s role.” The report lists five top “strategic priorities” for the United States. The first three are issues that governments, or even international organizations, can’t handle on their own: counterterrorism, nuclear proliferation, and, taken together, climate change and oil dependence. The other two are regional: the Middle East and East Asia. The report barely mentions great-power diplomacy, the traditional core concept of statecraft. It is not just post-Cold War but post-war on terror and, arguably, post-American hegemony. (It makes a point of describing the war in Iraq as a bad idea, rather than as a good idea poorly executed.) It speaks of “interconnectedness” and “diffuse power.” It isn’t dovish or sanguine, exactly—those top three strategic priorities are all threats—but it definitely does not envision American military power, or even power combined with diplomacy, as the only effective tool of foreign-policymaking.

While a complete end to American hegemony would be welcome, Obama opens the possibility to an enlightened approach.

Read more >>The Political Scene: Worlds Apart: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker