Least Surprising Foreign Policy Item Of The Month

A bunch of neoconservative foreign policy experts (plus Bill Kristol, Liz Cheney, Gary Bauer, Marty Peretz, John Podhoretz, and Marc Thiessen) connected with the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) have issued a letter calling for an expansion of the U.S. military intervention in Libya.

Middle East Progress obtained a copy of FPI’s merge template:

We share the concerns of many in Congress about the way in which the Obama administration has conducted and justified this operation. The problem is not that the President has done too much, however, but that he has done too little to achieve the goal of removing _________ from power. The United States should be leading in this effort, not trailing behind our allies. We should be doing more to help the _________ opposition, which deserves our support. We should not be allowing ourselves to be held hostage to U.N. Security Council resolutions and irresolute allies.

What would be even worse, however, would be for the United States to become one of those irresolute allies. The United States must see this effort in _________ through to its conclusion. Success is profoundly in our interests and in keeping with our principles as a nation. The success of NATO’s operations will influence how other Middle Eastern regimes respond to the demands of their people for more political rights and freedoms. For the United States and NATO to be defeated by _________ would suggest that American leadership and resolution were now gravely in doubt — a conclusion that would undermine American influence and embolden our nation’s enemies.

Joking! But, of course, letters like this one are the stock in trade of the neoconservative faction. As I wrote back when FPI first appeared, the group is basically a re-branded Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which spent the 1990’s issuing letters much like this one, pressuring a Democratic administration to be more hawkish, and guarding against creeping non-hawkishness in the GOP. Because PNAC was so closely identified with the Iraq war debacle, it was necessary to shut down and re-boot it as FPI.

After last week’s GOP presidential candidate’s debate, in which what little foreign policy was discussed had a distinctly isolationist anti-interventionist flavor, a number of writers have commented on the growing challenge to the neoconservative dominance of Republican foreign policy. I agree that this is a very interesting development, one worth monitoring closely, but while it’s clear that the conservative rank and file aren’t that crazy about the neocons’ expansive, militaristic vision of America’s role in the world, at the elite level, the conservative policymaking and punditry apparatus remains largely in their hands. For now.