Nina Hachigian has a piece in World Focus that makes the following argument:
To understand this yearning for American policy of yore, you have to remember that American foreign policy leaders during the Bush administration clung to the false promise of primacy, the belief that the lynchpin of American security was for it to remain more powerful than all other countries by a huge, fixed margin.
Hachigian goes onto to argue that this is both a uniquely neoconservative phenomena that reached its apex during the George W. Bush administration and that President Obama has rejected it. Both contentions are wrong.
You know they're wrong because President Obama - despite what his neoconservative critics assert and his progressive boosters hope - is not interested in dismantling this definition of American primacy. Sure, his rhetoric might pay greater lip service to a multi-polar world, but his actions to date are not indicative of someone about to seriously roll back America's dominant position in the world.
Consider: he will not pull U.S. troops from their forward deployments in Europe, South Korea or Japan (indeed his administration is locking horns with Japan to keep a basing arrangement in place). He is not vowing to pull the U.S. out of its mutual defense treaties with partners such as Taiwan or Japan, or withdraw the U.S. from NATO, which entrenches U.S. power in Europe. He is strengthening America's military presence in the Gulf to contain Iran. He increased the Pentagon's budget. These are the engines of American primacy, in the military realm at least, and none of them are on the chopping block.
And need we forget that it was under the Clinton administration that the "primacy project" became the dominant post Cold War paradigm for U.S. foreign policy. NATO was expanded up to Russia's borders, military force was employed unilaterally or without UN sanction against multiple states, and a certain senior official boasted of America's indispensability.
The signature difference in the policy realm between progressives and neoconservatives is that the former wants to make American primacy more palatable to the rest of the world by binding it in some international laws and restricting our freedom of action at the margins, while neoconservatives want to ram American superiority down the throats of the rest of the world. A significant difference, to be sure, but not a fundamental paradigm shift.
