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META-OBAMA. This is the best column David Brooks has written in a very long time:
The question is, aside from rejecting the extremes, has Obama thought through a practical foreign policy doctrine of his own � a way to apply his Niebuhrian instincts?That question is hard to answer because he loves to have conversations about conversations. You have to ask him every question twice, the first time to allow him to talk about how he would talk about the subject, and the second time so you can pin him down to the practical issues at hand.If you ask him about the Middle East peace process, he will wax rhapsodic about the need to get energetically engaged. He�ll talk about the shared interests all have in democracy and prosperity. But then when you ask him concretely if the U.S. should sit down and talk with Hamas, he says no. �There�s no point in sitting down so long as Hamas says Israel doesn�t have the right to exist.�[...]In other words, he has a tendency to go big and offer himself up as Bromide Obama, filled with grand but usually evasive eloquence about bringing people together and showing respect. Then, in a blink, he can go small and concrete, and sound more like a community organizer than George F. Kennan.Brooks's concrete insight here is a good one: As my colleague Garance has noted, Obama has a tendency to lapse into "meta" campaigning, wherein he spends his time on the podium talking about the experience of campaigning and the practice of politics rather than whatever his ostensible subject is. This can, at times, lead to trenchant insights, and at others, obscure his actual thoughts on the topic at hand. It's worth keeping an eye on.Meanwhile, Obama just gave a huge speech outlining his vision for American foreign policy. Brooks, to his credit, mentions this. Why the whole article is nevertheless framed around Obama's understanding of Niehbur's thought -- which, in this context, consists of banalities like "there�s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn�t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction." -- baffles me. Reinhold Niebuhr runs a close second to Harry Truman among Dead White Guys Who Are Constantly, Vaguely, and Uselessly Invoked By Those Seeking To Look Serious On National Security, and so his appearance here is hardly unexpected. Peter Beinart's The Good Fight was largely devoted to explicating Niebuhr's thought, and creating a contemporary theory that conformed to it. Anatol Lieven's Ethical Realism proceeded in much the same vein, though with fairly different conclusions. The determination of these folks who are actually alive in the age of al-Qaeda to couch their ideas in terms of a thinker who wasn't is rather odd.--Ezra Klein
