With All Our Might Posted by Michael Signer

A great big shout-out to the good folks at the Progressive Policy Institute for their publication this week of a volume called With All Our Might:  A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty, edited by the redoubtable Will Marshall. 

The book is a spectacular example of how engaged progressives are coming up with specific policy to envision a brighter future -- and to lead the country and the world toward security.  A collection of essays by top scholars and policymakers, including Ken Pollack, Graham Allison, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Rachel Kleinfeld and Matt Spence of the Truman Project (of which I'm a Principal), the book is based on three premises:

1)  Defeating Islamic extremism is America's top security imperative
2)  Victory will require new strategies that are at once tough and intelligent
3)  Progressives need to stop just reacting to President Bush and instead should be taking the lead with their own initiatives on security.

Among others, the book's authors make the following arguments:

-  Rachel Kleinfeld and Matt Spence argue that new surveys reveal the "9/11" generation (those under 30) do not easily fit into familiar hawk-dove dichotomies -- that they're more patriotic, confident in the miiltary, and supportive of free trade than other groups.  They should be embraced by the Democratic Party as "Truman Democrats," and should form the basis of a reinvigorated progressive/security nexus.

-  Reza Aslan calls for supporting Muslim modernizers, taking the right side in the civil war  (called fitnah by Muslims) within Islam between orthodoxy and modernity.

-  Ken Pollack argues that we should create a grand strategy for the Middle East, based on the spread of liberal ideas, habits, and constitutions.

-  In order to spread deeply-rooted democracy Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul suggest a Middle East version of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which formed a network of international institutions and NGO's to help undermine Soviet and Eastern bloc communism.

-  Edward Gresser argues for a "Greater Middle East Prosperity Plan," in order to bolster Muslim economies and create opportunity for restless youth who otherwise turn to terrorism.

-  Melissa Tyran says we need to reconcile Democrats and the military, by forging relationships between progressives with veterans groups, and by addressing the day-to-day challenges of the military community.

-  Anne-Marie Slaughter argues that the United Nations should concentrate more on economic and social assistance to weak and failing states, while NATO takes up more of the burden of collective security.

Progressives can gain the country's confidence again with ideas like these -- victory comes through policy, not just posturing.  If we demonstrate that -- with sincerity and conviction -- we'll demonstrate we're doing the heavy lifting to figure out just what needs to be done to create a safer, more secure, and more stable post-9/11 world order, with America at the helm.  And that will be a mighty accomplishment indeed.

Comments

[Letterhead]

With all due disrespect, Ken Pollack should be laughed out of any discussion on the middle east from now on. Also he should be put out on the street in sackclotch and ashes, with a begging bowl until the families of dead soldiers decide he's paid sufficiently (he can never pay enough) for the boost his ridiculous pseudo-scholarship gave to our Iraq misadventure.

Really, the man has balls of steel just to show up anywhere where the middle east is discussed.

Ken...the words the world is waiting for:

"I'm sorry."

[roadtown]

Sadly, it seems that the PPI avoids one of the key issues -- our "security budget" priorities. Defense spending is the third rail. Touch it and you look weak or god forbid you lose a few campaign contributions from L-M or Boeing!! So, let's throw 1/2 trillion dollars a year at the problem. But will this make us and the world safer? Does anyone in the Dem (or Rep)party dare speak up and question whether $10 billion for missile defense makes sense? Or, countless other multi-billion dollar weapons systems that provide no advantage in this great war on a tactic. And let's not forget about all the earmarks and other wasteful defense programs whch are often paid for out of crucial defense O&M accounts. To be taken seriously, the PPI has an obligation and responsibility to articulate what we should be spending our tax dollars on. Today, we spend six times as much on the military -- 8 times if you include war costs - than on all other security programs and institutions combined -- homeland security, development assistance, diplomacy, non-proliferation, etc. Show us the money, Will.

[JRBehrman]

Let's see:

IKENBERRY and SLAUGHTER want to go back to the TRUMAN era and the PPI still wants to recreate the NeoCon utopia of Henry JACKSON.

In both cases, these were or would be bi-partisan coalitions that (a) had unsound political foundations at the time and that (b) in any case, the GOP now regrets and has repudiated utterly.

So, while I can imagine a new internationalism based on the economic nationalism of, say, Michael LIND or James FALLOWS, I do not see a place in it for the GOP or the Vichy Democrats. They are way too comfortable tending the concessions of our foreign creditors.

I cannot see it led by the Anglo-American overclass, based on the military institutions of the British Empire, or financed by the, now vanished, strong dollar.

It seems to me that there has to be a constituency for this in the Democratic Party. I do not see one now, and I am tired of these self-serving elitists who think they can build on nothing but academic tenure.

[Dan Kervick]

Defeating Islamic extremism is America's top security imperative

False.

[David Billington]

"3) Progressives need to stop just reacting to President Bush and instead should be taking the lead with their own initiatives on security."

Foreign policy is almost always a reaction to some previous policy. The policy of international engagement after 1945 was a reaction to the isolationism of the 1930s. Nobody criticized the Truman foreign policy for being a reaction to the 1930s.

In the late 1940s, what would have been inappropriately reactive (in the sense you are trying to express here) would have been a policy that tried to do isolationism in a tougher and more intelligent way. But clearly an aspiration to pursue isolationism in a tougher and more intelligent way would have been a non-sequitur, because isolationism itself was the cause of the weakness and stupidity associated with its execution.

Is the Bush policy fundamentally flawed? Or is the Bush policy correct in its long-term aims and in need only of more efficient subsidiary goals and execution? Ends and means need to be clearly stated if critics of the present policy are to gain traction with the electorate and with those who make and think about policy in a more professional way.

[Dan Kervick]

Rachel Kleinfeld and Matt Spence argue that new surveys reveal the "9/11" generation (those under 30) do not easily fit into familiar hawk-dove dichotomies -- that they're more patriotic, confident in the miiltary, and supportive of free trade than other groups.

Yet not so confident as to join that military, apparently. Not surprising - because the youthful pseudo-militarism of the Trumans is a puerile holdover of the G.I. Joe phase.

I have only read the chapter summary of this naive and disturbing little exercise in extremist propaganda, which seems to have a well-coordinated blog campaign behind it. But it's enough to know that much of it represents a sort of PNAC for the millenial generation, and must be stopped before it does as much damage as PNAC Classic.

I had hoped the self-styled "Truman Democrats" would be chastened and disspirited by some of the recent, unpleasant turns of history. But apparently they were just planning a new media campaign. It appears we must add "innability to learn from experience" to the list of their other shortcomings.

I'm rather eager for the 2008 campaign, so that those of us who are opposed to this greatly misguided movement will have the opportunity to trounce it thoroughly. The movement appears to consist of a coaltion of dangerous flag-waving naifs, who believe everything their mommies and daddies ever told them about America, and some other bed-wetters who have developed a hysterical fixation on the Middle East and Evil Muslims as a result of the 9/11 trauma.

[J Thomas]

IKENBERRY and SLAUGHTER want to go back to the TRUMAN era and the PPI still wants to recreate the NeoCon utopia of Henry JACKSON.

Henry Jackson? Are you sure you aren't talking about the neocon utopia of Andrew Jackson?

[Jeff Younger]

I’m happy to see liberals actually entering a policy debate. Significantly, this book implicitly repudiates the “re-framing” rhetoric that has rendered impotent the American left.

But irony is lurking close at hand. The book seems to advocate a return to the policies of Theodore Roosevelt, a Progressive president who inaugurated the only truly imperialist foreign policy we’ve ever had. The book’s audience is clearly not the general American public, but rather the Democratic Party. It’s hard to believe that the hard left will be persuaded to return to Roosevelt’s “gunboat diplomacy.” Indeed, the overtly masculine, intensely martial, distinctly American intellectual values of a man like T. Roosevelt must be irreconcilable with the “feminine” values, to use a Machiavellian term, of the American left.

The mere existence of the book shows most clearly that for liberals to return to the world of practical policy-making, they must abandon the entire edifice of post-modern, anti-American leftism that conquered the Democratic Party in the 1960’s and currently dominates liberal philosophy and policy thinking.

A loyal opposition is a good thing. The modern Democratic Party is neither loyal nor an opposition. I’m pessimistic that the book can achieve its aim, but I am hopeful that liberals can become pro-America again.

[Gordon Adams]

I have yet to read the study, and certainly will. But putting "defeating Islamic extremism" at the center of U.S. national security strategy would commit the Democratic Party to the Republican-Bush-Cheney strategy of fear. The last two elections have already amply demonstrated this is a fatal position for Democrats - tried and failed twice is not a recipe for doing it again.

There is, of course, such a thing as Islamic extremism; making it the centerpiece guarantees there will be more of it. Until Democrats develop a strategy of hope, leadership, engagement and strength that pushes past terrorism, into dealing with issues of governance and global equity, they will be condemned to "me too-ism."

That is short-hand. For more, at least, of what I think this means, go to my June 2005 article "Fear versus Hope" in the Foreign Serviced Journal at http://www.afsa.org/fsj/june05/adams.pdf

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