Josh Micah Marshall is one of my favorite webloggers. Sometimes I almost forget that he’s also a real journalist with a PhD in history. Then something like this new article he’s written for The Atlantic Monthly comes along: Kerry Faces the World.

Wow. There are no pretty pictures, but the analysis is razor-sharp. Marshall looks at Kerry’s advisors, and attempts to divine what a Kerry administration’s foreign policy would look like. In the process, he thoroughly lays to rest the notion that there “wouldn’t be any difference” between Kerry’s and Bush’s approaches to the world.

An excerpt:

Democratic foreign-policy hands tend to be less ideologically driven than Republican ones. Their strengths lean toward technocratic expertise and procedural competence rather than theories and grand visions. This lack of partisan edge is best illustrated by the fact that two of Kerry’s top advisers served on Bush’s National Security Council staff as recently as last year (Beers as senior director for counterterrorism, and Flynt Leverett as senior director for Middle East initiatives). The team that advised candidate Bush in 1999 and 2000–the so-called “Vulcans”–was practically the mirror opposite of the Kerry team. Though all its members had served at least one stint in government, most had held political appointments rather than working for decades in the security bureaucracy, as Beers did. And whereas Kerry’s team is the embodiment of the nation’s professional national-security apparatus, key members of Bush’s team, such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had spent entire careers trying to overthrow it.

There’s lots more, and it’s really, really good. All I can say is, my God; can I please have government by grownups again?

This entry was posted by jbc on Thursday, June 3rd, 2004 at 12:20 am and is filed under the_usa, the_world. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.