Lieberman's Long View
Senator Lieberman gave one important speech yesterday at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, tracing the history of the foreign policy of the Democratic Party. "Confronted by the totalitarian threats first of fascism and then of communism, Democrats under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy forged a foreign policy that was simultaneously principled, internationalist, and tough-minded," he said. Back then, the Democrats were "a party that understood that a progressive society must be ready and willing to use its military power in defense of its progressive ideals, in order to ensure that those progressive ideals survived."
"That Democratic foreign policy tradition — the tradition of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy—collapsed just a few years later, in the trauma of Vietnam. And in its place, a very different worldview took root in the Democratic Party," Mr. Lieberman said. "Reflexively skeptical about America's authority to make moral judgments about the rest of the world, inclined to see the planet's leading problems as more often the result of American involvement than American disengagement, and viscerally opposed to the use of military force, this rival worldview was in many respects the polar opposite of the self-confident and idealistic internationalism that had, just a few years earlier, animated the Democratic Party under President Kennedy."
The senator traced Democratic failures to win the presidency to the "disastrous detour" of George McGovern's presidential candidacy. "The American people didn't trust Democrats to keep them safe, and the McGovernite legacy was a big reason why," he said.
"Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically-elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush," Mr. Lieberman said. "No Democratic presidential primary candidate today speaks of America's moral or strategic responsibility to stand with the Iraqi people against the totalitarian forces of radical Islam, or of the consequences of handing a victory in Iraq to al Qaeda and Iran. … Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus' new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq, reluctant to acknowledge the progress we are now achieving, or even that that progress has enabled us to begin drawing down our troops there."
Mr. Lieberman was re-elected last year in Connecticut, a state that leans Democratic. He was the vice presidential nominee of the Democrats in 2000, a year in which he and his running mate won the popular vote nationwide. We see his comments less as directed to the Democrats — though we don't rule out Senator Clinton moving to the right after winning the nomination. Or to the Republicans, who, with the exception of Ron Paul and Governor Huckabee, are a pretty sound bunch on foreign policy. Rather, we see the beginnings of the logic of a foreign policy platform for a presidential campaign of Mayor Bloomberg, who strongly supported Mr. Lieberman's campaign in Connecticut.
Mr. Lieberman concluded his address at Johns Hopkins by telling his audience not to "become so wedded to a party that you are unwilling to diverge from it, when your convictions diverge from it." He told them, "If you choose to identify as a Democrat or a Republican, in other words, I encourage each of you to be independent Democrats and independent Republicans." It will be advice that Mr. Bloomberg — a Johns Hopkins alumnus and major donor — will need voters to heed if he is to win the presidency.
