Their hostility toward the Administration is so consuming that it leaves little room for imaginative thinking about any alternative foreign policy beyond the conviction that, to paraphrase Kerry, we should be opening firehouses in New Orleans and closing them in Baghdad.
Mr Blair's neo-conservatism, they imply, may be purer and deeper than Mr Bush's.What distinguishes the neo-con approach to foreign policy is the conviction that, by and large, democracies don't go to war with each other; and that powerful countries have both an interest and a moral duty to increase the number of democratic governments in the world.
But at the heart of Obama's foreign policy doctrine is a conviction that the U.S. must find ways to engage with even the harshest of regimes, partly because it is the only way to export American beliefs about justice and liberty.
According to a 2008 paper in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, the Henry Jackson Society has influenced "Conservative party foreign policy discussion," especially the "interventionist convictions" of David Cameron and William Hague.
In the speeches I heard, Sanders rarely discussed foreign policy, though he spoke with conviction about climate change and the need for the U.S. to set an example for Russia, India, and China by using fewer fossil fuels.
This is of a piece with Hague's conviction that British foreign policy has to be less exclusively focused on Europe, the US and China.
As for conservatism today, Mr. Buckley said there was a growing debate on the right about how the war in Iraq squared with the traditional conservative conviction that American foreign policy should seek only to protect its vital interests.
– Representative Howard Berman of California: The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr. Berman's endorsement seems well timed given the furor over President Bush's comments in Israel today: Barack Obama has laid out a foreign policy vision driven by principle and conviction, and he understands that our moral authority and our safety as a nation go hand in hand.
I don' t think he' s doing this in a major way for foreign policy objectives but out of personal conviction".
Yet public opinion counted for something in the making of British foreign policy, and so, on occasion, did the personal moral convictions of the policymakers.
