George Packer’s excellent A Democratic World in the New Yorker reveals why the American Democratic party hasn’t yet had a coherent point of view on foreign affairs and what they must do to get there. Juicy excerpts:

• the Afghan girl was telling [Senator Joseph Biden], “Don¹t fuck with me, Jack. You got me in here. You said you were going to help me. You better not leave me now.” Biden described the encounter as “a catalytic event for me.”
• At conferences and in journal articles, the singular idea of these conservatives was that, with no Soviet threat, the United States was uniquely positioned to exert power all over the world… the conservatives were organized; they had ideas, and they were poised to put them into action.
• Certain mental traits that have spread among Democrats since the Vietnam War get in the way‹not just the tendency toward isolationism and pacifism but a cultural relativism (going by the name of ³multiculturalism²) that makes it difficult for them to mount a wholehearted defense of one political system against another, especially when the other has taken root among poorer and darker-skinned peoples.
• Senator John Kerry, of Massachusetts, said, ³Most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven¹t embraced, because otherwise we¹re inviting a clash of civilizations.²