No more ‘wars of choice’

Michael Lind is exactly right that this needs to be part of a new Democratic “contract with America.” Unfortunately, he’s also right about this:

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party's foreign policy mandarins are ill-prepared for peace. Many centrist Democrats have spent so much time in the last few decades trying to prove that Democrats can be as hawkish as Republicans that they have become hard to distinguish from bellicose neoconservatives.

Beyond that, Lind says both Clinton and Bush II treated Russia and China as though those two countries still had one foot stuck in the Cold War deep freeze (while alternatively pandering to them and trying to outflank them on energy issues at the same time).

In short, a new American internationalism can be practiced without being a zero-sum game of one-upmanship, Lind says.