Where's our prog-rock foreign policy? Our emo foreign policy?

A couple days late, perhaps, but I wish to second Damir’s skepticism regarding the concept of a conservative or a progressive foreign policy. They are merely the latest — and perhaps most blatantly partisan — examples of the lamentable “schools of thought” genre that has become a substitute for serious geopolitical analysis.

Whether it’s “democratic realism,” or Wilsonians vs Jacksonians, or realists vs neocons, we must spend more time debating our own predilections than discussing policy. It seems we remain addicted to abstractions, just as Tocqueville said we would be. And it is to our detriment.