Max Boot has a terrific OpEd in today’s Los Angeles Times today discussing, with examples, Kerry’s acceptance, or rejection (sometimes simultaneously), of the three approaches to American foreign policy — isolationism, idealism, and realism. “At various points in his career,” Boot writes, ” — sometimes at various points in the same speech — Kerry has championed all of them.”
Boot concludes that there is one constant, however, in Kerry’s foreign policy positions over time:
his stances track precisely mainstream Democratic opinion, which was isolationist in the 1970s and 1980s, idealistically interventionist in the 1990s and coldly realist since 2001. When the Democrats were split, as they were over Iraq in 2002 and 2003, he clumsily tried to appease both hawks and doves. Where he will wind up nobody knows — not even, I suspect, him.
Well, that’s not exactly right. Based on his career to date, we can be confident that if he is elected Kerry will support, at least for a while, whatever it is the Democrat in the White House decides to do.
