Luther and the Pope are like two whores debating chastity.

-- Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, a.k.a. Paracelsus (from Phillip Ball's The Devil's Doctor)

If you become president of Ford, your job is to build cars. Exxon, sell gasoline. President of the U.S., preside over Empire.

Nobody should have expected anything different. We could hope for a relatively benign tilt toward restraint in the management of the Empire, less use of violence, less slaughter of innocents, but that's the territory.

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A plague of collective amnesia is spreading across the land. Barack Obama is erasing the intellectual legacy of progressive liberalism. There is a growing inability to distinguish between what is left or 'progressive' and what is centrist. The objective for my rant is not especially to indict anybody for being one and not the other. I maintain that people are forgetting what is liberal, and since liberalism is more valuable than what passes for Democratic policy today, the differences ought to be kept in mind.

In the realm of economic policy, the distinction is between what has come to be called 'neo-liberalism' and what used to be called plain liberalism. Neo-liberalism is the regnant outlook in mainstream economics. Those who fail to subscribe to it simply cannot obtain positions in elite academic departments. These departments are the filter for candidates for the most important government positions.

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Question: Did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration appoint an "anti-Israel lobbyist" as the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat anti-Semitism?

Answer: Of course not.

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The irony is that George Bush, in his zeal to extend the U.S. imperial reach, has actually crippled it for the foreseeable future. McCain's determination to double down on Bush's foolishness will lose him the support of elites committed to the rational pursuit of U.S. global supremacy. In this sense, Osama Bin Ladin has won -- he hasn't come close to bringing down the U.S., but he has broken the back of American Empire. The provocation of 9-11 has bogged down the U.S. in the big muddy of Iraq, which misadventure has failed to resolve the ongoing distraction of Al Qaeda's machinations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

From this standpoint, one can actually appreciate the realpolitik of types like Henry Kissinger, dedicated more to balance of power calculations made possible by incremental maneuvers. Here's a sober review of the situation from a realist, ex-supporter of Bushist foreign policy. And here's another from a right-wing national security think tank.

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Kidding! We kid the Obama people! We kid because we love! Ha-ha. We wouldn't vote for Nader if he peed a Starbucks double shot espresso roast with syrup and ice. As for Gabby Hayes, don't even ask.

But we are concerned. You could call us the campaign concern troll. Maybe we should start our own Obama Facebook group. Some sh*t really needs to be trolled, so a trolling we will go. Merrily we troll along. The object of our disaffection tonight is one Anthony Lake, who tries to make clear that the Obama Administration will be ready to go to war with Iran, if need be. Those last three words can bring us to a world of hurt.

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"Explosion without an objective is politics in its purest form."
-- Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

It was said of George H.W. Bush that he was born on third base but thought he had hit a triple. We could say that John McCain takes himself for Roy Rogers but is really Gabby Hayes. (We realize this reference is lost on the addled youth.) By contrast, Senator McCain has compared Barack Obama to William Jennings Bryan, alas another figure all but lost to young denizens of the Internet.

McCain understands Bryan as a great speaker bereft of substance. Of course, all familiar with Senator McCain know that when it comes to the content of policy, as a Wall Street Journal profile once put it, "he gets lost in the tall mangroves."

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As the one-year anniversary of the failed Darfur Peace Agreement approaches, a key question is whether China will continue to offer strong support to the government of Sudan, despite its role in the four-year old conflict. Or, will China increase pressure on Khartoum to accept an international peacekeeping force out of concern about damage to its international reputation.

A partial answer is that China's policy toward Sudan is driven by more than its growing appetite for oil and natural gas. Beijing also has a stake in positioning itself in Africa and globally as an alternative to western "meddling" on issues of human rights and governance.

Beijing is weighing these issues against against concerns about damage to its international position, reputational and otherwise, especially as it prepares to host the Summer Olympics next year, as I outline in the research note, below.

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Congrats to Greg Anrig for engaging an all-too-rare debate in his post on Jeff Faux's new book. But whatever the specific answer may be for health care or pensions, the right question is "What's the relationship between what we do at home and what we do abroad?"

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Here I am in LA – no ticket to the Oscars, missed the Hillary and Obama moments – but one thing is clear- we need a new category for cool movies called “Most Global Movie Award” And the winner this year is….

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Joe Nye reminds us that soft power is the power to get others to want what we want. By that definition, soft power advocates haven’t done so well. Ironically, they have failed to use soft power to get others to want what they want – that is, more soft power.

It’s easy to beat up on the current administration for failing to understand and deploy ‘soft power’ and public diplomacy in their toolkit of foreign policy. Bush, Cheney and the gang prefer coercion, i.e. hard power.

But the previous Democratic campaigns have not done such a good job either.

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In the debate on Iran the Bush administration seems to be doing similar posturing, spinning and framing as we saw in the run-up on Iraq. Maximize the sense of threat; make some effort at diplomatic options, but only some, and while casting aspersions on their prospects; and start ratcheting up military measures.

Some Bush critics question whether the issue of Iranian nuclear proliferation itself is overblown in one or both of two respects. One is the strength of the evidence that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons. The other is how serious an issue it is even if they are.

I do think the evidence is pretty strong that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. And I do think that it’s a serious issue both directly in terms of Iran with nuclear weapons and indirectly in its fueling further proliferation effects on the region.

In that context I’ve done an analysis of sanctions against Iran, just issued by the Century Foundation. Sanctions are not to be oversold; they’re always a component of a strategy, not a strategy in themselves. But they also shouldn’t be undersold, including in this case.

Chalmers Johnson's warning about the choice between democracy and empire is compelling. But so powerful is his message that it washes away any sense of resistance. Where is progressive politics? And where is the press?

Prof. Johnson does a superb job identifying the conditions and consequences of imperial overreach, but he pays little attention here to Americans who oppose overreach. Maybe it’s in the book, which I will dash out and buy this weekend. (Full disclosure – I took Professor Johnson’s seminar on ‘Revolution’ back in grad school at Berkeley. No surprise to his readers, it was a great course).

But there are domestic forces of resistance trying to keep America democratic.

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Legal Adviser John Bellinger is taking on his critics over at Opinio Juris, in a very interesting discussion about interrogation standards and detainee policy. Check it out.

Let me describe for you Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy. And Barack’s, and Richardson’s and Edwards’. Let me tell you their views on national security and diplomacy, the foreign policy priorities they would aggressively pursue, and the sort of foreign policy president each would become,if elected.

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Jim Hoagland's piece on Iran this weekend made the excellent point that we don't need to follow Bush's "hurry" to make his mark on that volatile piece of real estate.

But it failed to suggest a way to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions--which really should worry Democrats as much as Republicans if not more--since we actually CARE about the women, homosexuals, and minorities whose repression will continue under a strengthened Iranian religious dictatorship. (Not to mention the end of the nonproliferation regime we fought so hard to create).

America and Ahmadinajad have already become great pen-pals... what if the liberals of America sent Europe a letter on Iran that went something like this:

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Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times asked a question last week worthy of further consideration: “Why are we so lousy at foreign policy?” He points to two basic reasons – one is America’s failure to understand nationalism abroad.

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On this day celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, let’s honor his memory by taking time to remember why so many people didn’t like him. Now that Dr. King is dead and gone, leaders of all stripes purr their respect. But back in the day many of these same people didn’t like what he said nor what he did, nor what he stood for.

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Iraq serves as a template for America’s foreign policy in tough neighborhoods. Up to and including Somalia. Here’s how Iraq and Somalia are similar and different, and what they may tell us about future foreign adventures.

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This week on TPMCafe's America Abroad, the bloggers are talking about…The President’s new plan for Iraq, and China. My full summary is after the break.

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Let’s take the President’s speech on its own terms, but push back analytically:

“Tonight in Iraq, the armed forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror and our safety here at home.”

Is Iraq really the struggle that will determine the global war on terror? The argument of Iraq war opponents from the beginning was that it wasn’t. There are so many ways that this critique has been supported: the backsliding in Afghanistan; the global metastasizing of Islamist terrorism with Iraq being a main dynamic; many others as well. To the extent that the statement the President made is now true on its face about Iraq as a central front, it’s because of his policy not in spite of it.

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As we think about our response to President Bush’s upcoming announcement on Iraq, we come face to face with a thorny heuristic question: How do we decide among dreadful options? The Hippocratic tie-breaker—“Above all, do no harm”--works well enough among merely bad choices, but not here, where we’ve already done immense harm and are bound to a great deal more no matter how we choose.

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For at least a decade the United States has been beating on China to change its duplicitous stance on intellectual property rights. We’ve had only modest success. Now some Chinese content producers are suing other Chinese companies for copyright infringement. Now maybe we’ll see some action.

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This week on TPMCafe's America Abroad, the bloggers are talking about... Iraq, Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Kofi Annan. My full summary is after the break.

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