Here's an excellent Michael Hirsh piece on foreign policy and Barack Obama in the new issue of the Washington Monthly, you will not want to miss. Subhed: the international system isn't broken:

For all his openness to rethinking first principles, there’s reason to believe that this is something Obama understands better than any other leading candidate. “I don’t oppose all wars,” he declared in 2002, while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards were triangulating their way toward authorizing the Iraq invasion. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” Perhaps, ultimately, this is his real value right now. Not as the perfect vessel for a shining new world order. Though, of course, he is just that: Who could better reassure a jittery and suspicious world that America is ready to resume global leadership than a new young president who is the son of a black African father and a white Kansan mother, with a Muslim middle name who grew up in Asia? Rather, Obama’s value is as someone with the courage, independence, and basic common sense to declare, without equivocation, that America’s loss of global leadership is a result not of the inevitable breakdown of the existing structure, but of the Bush administration’s radical and disastrous policy decisions. And that, with the right mix of patience, wisdom, and common sense, we’re not as far from reclaiming that leadership as it might appear.

Recommended.

Posted by Laura at March 17, 2007 03:43 PM