Ideas matter. In the 2000 campaign candidate George Bush forcefully stated his core ideas: To paraphrase - “We won’t do nation building. It’s a bad idea. We won’t do diplomacy. And especially we won’t deal with evil countries, like North Korea. We will base our foreign policy on a strong military.” Then they acted on their ideas. Again and again. With catastrophic results, as we see in North Korea. Bad idea. So what's next?

For those of us who harp constantly on the need for big core ideas to guide Democratic campaigns and governance, it’s a cautionary tale. Just having ‘ideas’ isn’t enough. They have to be ideas that powerfully and accurately describe the world as it is, and articulate what we need to do to gain benefits from a recalcitrant global system. Sometimes we may try to change pieces of that world. But the conservatives are right to remind us that the world doesn’t like to change very much.

So which part of ‘campaign promises’ didn’t the American people understand? No one should have been surprised when Rumsfeld & Chaney stuck to their guns for six years. These guys are nothing if not consistent.

They said their idea was to isolate ‘rogue states’ whose policies they didn’t like, states like North Korea. And let’s remember, the candidate’s team also said it was not America's role to do nation building. When confronted with collapsed states we should walk away, because we can’t do reconstruction well. It doesn’t work, they said. We’ll just get bogged down. Diplomacy is a bad idea too. We should only use it as a last resort. Put Bolton at the UN. Shun impure states like North Korea and Iran, and lump them into a new idea we call the ‘axis of evil’.

The administration’s problem is two-fold. First, the candidate and his team had bad ideas from the start, inappropriate for the real world we live in. They might have been appropriate for the far-away make-believe world the Bush advisors thought they inhabited. But not for the real world where the rest of us live. Beyond having bad ideas, the team around Bush (and the Decider-in-Chief himself) forgot nothing and learned nothing. They never forgot their (woefully inaccurate) core ideas, and they held tenaciously to them even when they proved absolutely unworkable and decidedly injurious to the national interest. Many remember the infamous New York Times Sunday magazine cover story which quoted administration officials dismissing their critics for adhering to ‘reality based’ policies. Their idea? Re-shape the world to fit their visions; not the other way round. North Korea will come around. But it didn't.

So what’s the lesson here? There are a bunch – but here’s a big one -- when going forth to do battle with the administration on North Korea, Iran or other messy places,let’s remind our viewers/listeners/readers that today’s catastrophe of a foreign policy is not accidental. It was deliberately crafted six years ago, if not before, and it was mistaken from the start. North Korea's nuclear test is just the latest example. It isn't an aberration. Again and again Americans have been misled, whether deliberately and maliciously or just naively because top officials were grossly ill-informed and wrong. Either way, the administration has earned the blame they are getting from all sides.

In 2000 Democratic spokesmen insisted that in a complex and complicated world, America needed a leader who understands complexity – that defense and foreign aid, environment and world trade were all important; it couldn’t be one or the other. The challenge now is to frame that complexity in ways that are accessible and clear. That’s not something we were able to do effectively in 2000 and 2004.

Ideas do matter. Democrats are still desperately seeking a set of core ideas to call their own, able to unite the party, win the election and frame the priorities of the next presidential administration. Ideas that reflect international realities, as well as the aspirations and genuine material needs of the American people. We have begun this conversation on americaabroad.tpmcafe.com in the context of a “progressive foreign policy.” The Princeton group joins the CAP and others with their own foreign policy vision, about which more later. We need to keep at it. The stakes this time around are even higher than before.