Would it have killed you to do some research and actually provide an example of two from each tradition? In particular, I just don’t know any “liberals” who fit the description you try to assign them, and I’ve been studying international relations and liberalism professionally for the last nine years. “Paleo-con” foreign policy is not only much more complex, but also more varied, than that which you describe. You get the Political Science 203: Introduction to International Relations version of realism more or less right, but I don’t think you’re fair even to the neocons.

In one way, though, this post is emblematic of all the problems with this site; the hope that, if we just add everything together and stir sufficiently, we’ll come to an answer that accomodates everyone. A pox on all of their houses, split the difference, the golden mean, and so forth.

It’s not politics. Rather, it’s anti-politics; the hope that pluralism can somehow be made to disappear or rendered irrelevant if we try hard enough.

For Rob
Stereotyping is one of our favorite passtimes … for instance when you see a man in robes and a turban, and wires hanging out of his jacket you think “Here comes one of those terrorist assholes”, you see Cheney with a shotgun and you think ” I’m safe … I ain’t no lawyer” (ha ha) The point of the post is that all of the types have some value, and it might be a good time to get together and build some cohesiveness before we get our collective asses slammed again.

Everybody Stereotypes … variously we are seen around the world:
Imperialist Pigs, Western Devils, Suckers (Yell at the Americans …. they will send money”)

Why just a few months ago I saw a guy on TV that was wearing a cowboy hat and boots and thought “must be a cowboy”. Guess what, it turns out he was the President. No shit! Now there is fodder for stereotyping.

People adopt certain positions. They speak from those positions. Others, listening to them, have a right to respond to them based on their positions. And a right to satirize or criticize them based on those positions.

If I am a Marxist, is it wrong for you to criticize me on that basis? Wrong for you to bring up forced collectivization or incompetent industrial planning? Of course not. If I’m an Islamist do you not have a right to criticize or lampoon me on that basis?

Without a degree of stereotyping it is simply impossible to discuss political issues. We’re not talking here about race or faith or gender, we’re talking about specific ideological positions. For example, neo-cons have a large body of writtten and spoken words on their beliefs. I have a perfect right to characterize people who identify with those written or spoken words. Right?
Hope so, because otherwise I’m at a bit of a loss as to how we discuss ideologies, political parties, factions, etc…

But notice that I say a “degree” of stereotyping. Just as I said liberals, neo-cons, and so on “in general.” Qualifiers are important, not just as CYA, but because we can’t let ourselves be trapped by stereotypes anymore than we can entirely dismiss stereotypes.

As for reading some of the posts here before I started, I did, of course. I’ve been reading them for a long time, since the blog started. Just as Justin had been reading my blog for a long time before he asked me to join the Donklephant team. I’m pretty sure that neither Justin, nor Callimachus nor Alan Stewart Carl are surprised by my style.

That having been said, one of the great strengths of this blog is that you, the reader, can choose among a half dozen excellent writers and ignore those that disappoint you.

You should have read some of the posts here before you started writing.

The four-way division in American foreign policy outlook isn’t really new. Walter Russell Mead wrote about them a few years back and characterized them as Jeffersonians, Hamiltonians, Wilsonians, and Jacksonians.

Various problems at once arise. One was a paradox noted by the German theologian Reinhold Niebuhr 50 years ago: America cannot at the same time project its world power and maintain the fiction that it is an innocent, virtuous nation.

Yet we need to believe in our virtues in order to aspire to them, and power like ours, without virtues, is a terrible thing. That — the Niebuhr paradox — is the problem I have to wrestle with in my own approach to foreign policy. I happen to put great stock in our virtues. Many people in one of the categories you describe only sneer at that. They ought to be wiser.

Others have their own. Paleo-cons and what you call liberals often taunt the neo-cons and their ilk by saying “yes, but we created Saddam.” If they’d think it through to the next step they might arrive at, “and that makes him our responsibility.” But I’m not holding my breath.

I introduce it, though, because the other point they don’t seem to get is, we didn’t simply create him in the Kissinger’s chess piece sense; we created him every dawn of every day after the end of the Cold War that he woke up in his palaces, running his nation. We’re the people who have the force capable of changing things in places like Iraq. If you have such power, the decision to use it and the decision not to use it involve you equally in the consequences. There’s no going back, in our times, to the years when America was just another country.

For the realists, the challenge is, perhaps, something Alan has mentioned before: The game they play is a game between nation-states. Increasingly, those are not the main actors on the world stage. There are no rules and strategy books for this new game.

We as a people need not just a better education, but the ethical maturity to make painful choices among crappy options. Good luck. What’s on TV tonight?

We live in a country with a great deal of diversity. We live in a superpower that does not always know how to deal with the rest of the world. There are a number of schools of thought pertaining to foreign policy. We’ve got liberals, neo-cons, paleo-…

Foreign policy is damned hard. All actions have undesirable consequences. Even inaction comes with serious risk.

They key I think is not to try to craft “doctrines” or stick to one ideology but to try to manage all the competing interests you stated above. There’s a lot of gray area out there and it ain’t a pretty path to walk. Perfection or even near perfection can’t be the goal. But competency is a good place to start.

As to the rest, that’s exactly the point I was making. I’m glad we agree.