THE NEOLIBERAL'S LAMENT. Richard Cohen spends some time this morning making the case that George W. Bush is not a traditional small government conservative, and is instead something closer to a historically incompetent neoliberal. Well, yeah. It's a bit of a banal point, but worth making occasionally. Indeed, both No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D have their problems, but they cemented liberal ideals into government policy -- tweaking them to be more efficient is a far easier task. Cohen's other point is much weirder. "For years to come," he writes, "[Iraq] will be cited to smother any liberal impulse in American foreign policy -- to further discredit John F. Kennedy's vow to "pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty." We shall revert to this thing called "realism," which is heartless and cynical, no matter what its other virtues. The debacle of Iraq has cost us -- and others -- plenty in lives. But in the end, it will cost us our soul as well." You see this lament on occasion, and it almost always suffers from the same internal dissonance exhibited in Cohen's column. Cohen "acknowledge[s] that the war is a catastrophic mistake and was incompetently managed," but he seems disturbed that future policy-makers will shy away from repetition of those mistakes. In other words, he grants the lessons of the war, but laments our willingness to learn them. It's baffling. Particularly so given the foreign policy visions on offer from the leading Democrats, none of which lack for soul. Indeed, to listen to the current crop of speeches, we can expect America to become far more attentive to humanitarian crises and deprivations worldwide, and begin a shift towards retaining our authority through aid and advice rather than military eminence alone. That's a far more liberal, and soulful, approach, but because it implicitly downplays the need for military force, you get all sorts of liberal intellectuals lamenting it. They say they fear realism, which they seem to define as a foreign policy defined by force and downplaying morality, but they're utterly without interest in its obverse, a post-Iraq foreign policy that plays up morality and soft power and approaches force with far more restraint. --Ezra Klein
