RE: EDWARDS AND EXEMPLARISM. I think Dana makes some very good points on the implausibility of the John Edwards' Grand Unified Theory of Energy Independence. But I don't think that's actually the relevant question. While it was, and is, an interesting vision, the appeal of his vision had literally nothing to do with whether it'll happen or not. We all appear to agree on pursuing renewable forms of energy and undoing our intense reliance on Middle Eastern oil, so whether such efforts actually create a classless socialist utopia in the Middle East or just lead to some weakened dictatorships is really neither here nor there. The key is that though the rhetoric may have envisioned a causal role for the US in changing the world, the policy -- invest in biofuels -- really suggested nothing of the sort. It was just sold as if it did. And that's what's new and useful here: What I read Edwards as trying to do was put some meat on the bones of a soft power foreign policy vision. Too often, soft power approaches are read as isolationism or retreat by another name. We'll stop being a forceful player in the world, but we will donate $25 million to clean water efforts. That's not a terribly popular foreign policy, and it tends to bring down extraordinary amounts of oppobrium from political elites, almost all of whom seem oddly invested in a quasi- or fully-hegemonic conception of america's role in world affairs. Edwards' odd discourse on the domino effects of energy independence were, I think, an early attempt to articulate a more aggressive vision of a soft power foreign policy focus. In the same way that force is sold in terms of what it can get us (a democratic Middle East!), Edwards was selling soft power in terms of what it can get us (a democratic Middle East!). In both cases, my hunch is that the speaker is lying or misguided. The Middle East simply isn't going to be democratic in the near future. But insofar as it's really important to move America from a foreign policy defined by force and intimidation and towards a sort of rules-guided, humanitarian internationalism, framing soft power as a legitimate alternative, rather than a dishonorable fallback, to hard power, is something Democrats are going to have to start doing. --Ezra Klein
