Following up on John's post on the Texas Conference on Liberal Internationalism, which I also attended, I wanted to link first to an account of the previous week's discussions at the Princeton Project on National Security, which Suzanne Nossel, who attended, posted October 2 on Democracy Arsenal. The papers prepared for the Princeton Conference will be up at the end of the month. See also a terrific post yesterday by Suzanne Nossel on a National Security Contract with America, with a set of ideas that we should engage.
A good number of people attended both conferences; in many ways what John describes is part of an ongoing conversation about the future of American foreign policy. Although many of the participants are clearly Democrats and are likely to be advising Democrat candidates in 2008, the larger issues should ideally form the basis of a broader bipartisan consensus extending across the center to the middle of both parties. As many people at the Texas conference noted, the bipartisan consensus during the Cold War was never as automatic nor as uncontested as it is now recalled, it still provided a strong enough anchor to ensure that succeeding administrations steered a broadly consistent course in the world. Given the threats we now face, from nuclear terrorism to bird flu to growing inequality between the winners and losers from globalization, we must be able to define and pursue such a course over the coming decades.
