This Yglesias post on the FPI conference on Afghanistan reminds me that Robert Stacy McCain was completely wrong when he made this prediction. My response back in October holds up pretty well, and we’re just getting started with this administration:

He is, however, quite wrong when he says that foreign policy differences will fade in significance in the coming years. To the extent that Obama is relatively hawkish on most things except Iraq, which Republican hawks deny for electoral reasons now but will rediscover once he is in power, we will see exactly the same splits between the hawks who side with the Obama administration’s interventions in (name a few countries where we have no business being) and the conservatives who do not believe these interventions to be in the national interest. It will be very much like what we saw in the 1990s. Mainstream, “responsible” and “realist” conservatives and Republicans will support Obama’s actions, and a significant but largely uninfluential minority on the right will protest against them. All of the bogus arguments war supporters have trotted out for years to justify the Iraq debacle will be turned around on them, and most of them will end up backing the next intervention to halt a “genocide,” “liberate” another country or stop weapons proliferation. They will delight in the frustration of the antiwar left and praise the bipartisan consensus in favor of American hegemony.

I would like to be able to say that this is a result of my far-seeing powers of prediction and insight, but anyone who followed my election predictions know that I have no such powers. It was fairly simple to make this claim seven months ago, and it could have been made long before that, because on policy substance it has been clear for a very long time that neoconservatives were largely pleased with Obama’s foreign policy views. Once you set aside election-year hackery and partisan spin, neoconservatives have never made a secret of their sympathy for Obama’s interventionist vision. It was also obvious that neoconservatives would make this move, because, as Yglesias says, this is more or less exactly how they responded to Clinton’s activist foreign policy. This suits liberal hawks and the center-left of the foreign policy world just fine, because neoconservatives are ultimately the ones they are willing to do business with and they regard the mass of Jacksonian nationalists and non-interventionists on the right and the anti-imperialists on the left as the far worse alternative.

Filed under: foreign policy, politics