These points are both places where he comes dangerously close to having to discuss the Vietnam war, but turns away. They are:
"He has always been much closer in his views to 1948 liberal foreign policy principles than 1968 ones, if you know what I mean. The surprise -- the happy surprise among conservatives, and the anger among some on the left -- says less about Obama than it does about the presumptions of listeners in both camps."
and
"So he is undertaking here nothing less than a re-centering of American foreign policy theory, forcing the defenestration of the false categories of the Bush years and trying to reintroduce into our discourse that older foreign policy liberalism, which has been largely abandoned within the architecture of both political parties -- the Republicans because they've moved so far to the right; and the Democrats not so much because they've moved so far to the left, but because on the whole Democrats just kind of stopped thinking really seriously about foreign policy after Vietnam."
Starting with the first segment. No, I don't know what he means when he says when comparing liberal views of 1948 to 1968. Perhaps he means the views of the young as far as the hippies and peace movement are concerned, where there is a difference of views, but it is worthy of consideration that it is the generation of politicians who were cutting their teeth near the time of 1948 (LBJ, Humphrey, Nixon, JFK) carried on such interventionist policies into the era surrounding 1968, which is when these policies failed on a massive level. The domino theory is not essentially different than Truman's doctrine of containment. The problem is that it is an application of 1948 circumstances to 1968 reality, and in this case I would argue that the material conditions do not support the transferability of the approach. If we are looking at the leadership, the sad reality is that the 1948 policy has been pursued, by both parties to the point of failure. Although Nixon was of a different political party, he did not have an alternative approach and ended up continuing Johnson's war. The 1948 approach had become orthodox in both parties. The relevant question here is, are current circumstances conducive to its reintroduction? I will return to this question later.
The second segment attempts to describe the post Vietnam foreign policy methods of both political parties. Here he errs in his analysis in two manners. First he assumes that there was a divergence of policy between the two parties after Vietnam, and secondly rather than engage with what the conventional wisdom was after Vietnam, he simply declares that there was no liberal thinking about foreign policy after Vietnam. I propose looking at the era from Nixon's withdrawal from Vietnam to the election of George W Bush as the "Post Vietnam" era, which has two phases. The lynchpin to this era was Operation Desert Storm, with which the second segment of the era began.
Although the term "Vietnam Syndrome" was originally coined by Reagan to accuse Carter of inability to confront the Soviets, in reality both parties displayed an extreme reluctance to commit US forces to anything that could become a prolonged conflict. Although there were minor excursions into Granada and Panama, for all the swaggering talk Reagan really didn't have the nerve to get involved in a protracted war with the prospect of casualties (see Beirut bombing). Carter and Reagan both pursued Cold War conflicts through proxies rather than the direct intervention that had dominated from Truman to Nixon. These proxies are exactly what gave the Soviets their Afghan war defeat. But US policy was a clear avoidance of situations that risked significant casualties.
With the first Gulf War, the issue of direct intervention came up, and there was much discussion about Vietnam Syndrome again among the TV talking heads. Ultimately Bush settled on the Powell Doctrine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_Doctrine which allowed for direct US involvement but set firm rules to assess the situation and avoid another Vietnam. Clinton followed this doctrine as well, with his general reluctance to put troops on the ground and preference for bombing (See Yugoslavia). Until George W. Bush came around, great care was taken by all presidents to avoid another Vietnam. Bush (or should I say Cheney) didn't give a fuck. Obama is left cleaning up this mess, but while the article denies that Obama is operating under Bush's schema (called Neocon), a demonstration is lacking. I'm willing to entertain the argument that the 1948 doctrine has a significant difference from the neocon approach, but this has yet to be demonstrated. I will wait for that demonstration.
Now to return to the big issue. Does the 1948 system of intervention apply? I'm going to say no. And here is my reasoning. In order to win a war, you have to make the realization of your enemy's goal impossible. the 1948 approach to intervention is largely the outgrowth of WWII, where the prevention of the enemy's goal was quite easy to conceptualize although it took a lot of work to pull off. Both Germany and Japan wanted national empires. In order to have an empire you need a functioning state capable of waging war. By the end of the war, neither Germany or Japan were able to wage war. Germany was unable to even maintain territorial integrity against the red army, and Japan had been brought to its knees and introduced to the real possibility of systematic nuclear annihilation. While I suppose one could argue that it would be possible for Germans and Japanese to fight a guerrilla war against occupation, it wouldn't really make sense. Even a successful resistance movement (not that the idea was popular) would not be able to create the kind of functioning modern military apparatus needed to pursue the original goal of empire. Move on to the Berlin blockade. Stalin's goal was a unified Germany, but one that was non-aligned in the cold war so that it would serve as a cordon sanitaire. How does one prevent that? Create a West German government out for the Western occupation zones. This effectively blocked Soviet plans, and they created an East German state with very difficult borders in response. Only with Korea did cracks begin to appear on the 1948 policy. Here both sides engaged to a nearly identical degree discovered that a draw was about the best they could hope for. Then with Vietnam, the US took a major defeat because our goal became much harder to realize than the prevention of our goal. We wanted to maintain a functioning South Vietnamese state, the Communists merely wanted us gone. So they killed some of us, we killed a lot of them. Eventually it became clear that there we could not prevail. So, what do our enemies want, and what do we want? We want to stabilize Afghanistan, while our enemies (and are they just Al Qaeda or also the Taliban) want us gone, they want to impose religious law, and are perfectly content to have the country made a shambles until we leave. The 1948 approach does not apply because we are dealing with an enemy far less ambitious than the post war USSR. Their goals are so much simpler to realize than ours.
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