Whose Foreign Policy Is It?

„It’s a good thing, for instance, that President Obama has slow-walked the American withdrawal from Iraq, and it’s a sign of political maturity that his base hasn’t punished him for doing so. It’s a good thing that this White House didn’t just send every Guantánamo prisoner to a civilian court (or back home without a trial). It’s a very good thing that many Democrats seem willing to opt for frontier justice over procedural justice when the circumstances call for it — as they did in Abbottabad last week.

But there are dangers in this turnabout as well. Now that Democrats have learned to stop worrying and embrace the imperial presidency, the United States lacks a strong institutional check on the tendency toward executive hubris and wartime overreach. The speed with which many once-dovish liberals rallied behind the Libyan war — at best a gamble, at worst a folly — was revealing and depressing. The absence of any sustained outcry over the White House’s willingness to assassinate American citizens without trial should be equally disquieting. As Barack Obama has discovered, an open-ended, borderless conflict requires a certain comfort with moral gray areas. But it requires vigilance as well, and a skepticism about giving the executive branch a free hand in a forever war. During the Bush era, such vigilance was supplied (albeit sometimes cynically, and often in excess) by one of the country’s two major political parties. But in the Obama era, it’s mainly confined to the far left and the libertarian right.

This vigilance needs to be mathematical as well as moral. The most dangerous continuity between the Bush and Obama presidencies, perhaps, is their shared unwillingness to level with the country about what our current foreign policy posture costs, and how it fits into our broader fiscal liabilities. Instead, big government conservatism has given way to big government liberalism, America’s overseas footprint keeps expanding, and nobody has been willing to explain to the public that the global war on terror isn’t a free lunch. The next president won’t have that luxury. In one form or another, the war on terror is likely to continue long after Osama bin Laden’s bones have turned to coral. But we’ll know that the Bush-Obama era is officially over when somebody presents us with the bill.”