An example for the Democrats?

There's an interesting piece in New Republic Online (free registration) by Brendan Simms, Reader in the History of International Relations at Cambridge University - on the significance of David Cameron's election to leadership of the Conservative Party.

Cameron is commonly thought to be an ideological blank slate: a vacuous lightweight hoping to triangulate his way to 10 Downing Street.

In one area, however, this is [a] big mistake. Cameron has long supported the British deployment in Iraq; at first this did not distinguish him from the reflexive "back our troops" rhetoric of the Conservative mainstream. But in fact, Cameron, a committed hawk and idealist, has clear and controversial views on the removal of Saddam Hussein and the war on terror.
.....
[He] laid out his ideas at the beginning of his leadership campaign in late August in a speech at The Foreign Policy Centre, a Blairite think tank. (This would be like a Democratic presidential hopeful going to the American Enterprise Institute to make a major foreign-policy address.) In his speech, Cameron spoke of the need for a foreign policy that involves the "consistent application" of the "shared values" of the nation, defining these as "democratic" and "progressive." He said that the challenge of Islamist terror was, "at root, ideological" and identified the origin of terrorism as lying in the "corruption of many states in the Middle East" and a "lack of democracy." The solution, he said, is "to promote change, reform, and liberalization" in the region.

In short, Cameron is much more a neoconservative or liberal interventionist than a traditional Tory guardian of the national interest. Cameron himself has acknowledged this distinction, saying that "As a Conservative, whose natural instincts are to be wary of grand schemes and ambitious projects for the remaking of society, I had my concerns about the scale of what is being attempted." But he appears to have put such doubts aside. Some of those closest to Cameron in the parliamentary party, such as Michael Gove, Ed Vaizey, and George Osborne, are neoconservatives... Otherwise well-informed commentators had speculated that, in forming his shadow cabinet, Cameron might rehabilitate the traditional Tory talent in foreign policy, such as the sometime Foreign Ministers Malcolm Rifkind and Douglas Hurd, both of whom had strongly opposed the Iraq war. Instead, Cameron recalled the former conservative leader William Hague, a staunch and unrepentant supporter of Saddam's removal, to the front bench as shadow foreign secretary. Rifkind, who had entertained hopes of a comeback, resigned from the front benches in a huff. His marginalization reflects not only a generational shift in the party but also an important symbolic break with the past: Rifkind was defence secretary in the 1990s and played a major role in Britain's catastrophic failure to intervene in Bosnia.

Simms goes on to argue that there may be a lesson here for the Democrats in the US:

All of this creates a very different political situation from America, where Democrats have at times reacted to Bush's embrace of democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention by expressing skepticism about those very concepts. Cameron has not turned his back on the idealism of the governing party, but has instead appropriated that ground for himself - or at least insured that it will be shared between the two major parties. By contrast, Howard Dean, John Murtha, and other Democrats have often sounded more like Tory traditionalists Malcolm Rifkind and Douglas Hurd than true progressives.

There is surely a lesson to be learned here about the way an opposition party should conduct politics with respect to foreign policy. Insuring a national consensus on the principles that undergird idealism is more important than partisan point-scoring. It is one thing to criticize the conduct of the war, which opposition parties on both sides of the Atlantic should certainly do. It is quite another thing, as some Democrats have done, to try to build an opposition agenda by playing to voters' realist, national-interest based impulses. (Kerry did this last year with his admonition that "we shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in the United States of America.") An opposition leader should be permitted by his supporters to say that some of the governing leader's principles are correct, even if the implementation of those principles often leaves much to be desired. In fact, perhaps rather than criticizing Bush for projecting American power too boldly abroad, Democrats should be criticizing him for not projecting it boldly enough - our failure to act in Darfur being a case in point.

(Thanks: TH.)