Will Marshall, cofounder of the Democratic Leadership
Council (DLC) and head of the Progressive
Policy Institute (PPI), has been a leading figure in the effort to push the Democratic Party
toward aggressive foreign policy, in particular in the "war on terror." A contributor to
PPI's Blueprint magazine, Marshall often strives to distinguish his positions from those
of the George W. Bush administration while maintaining a distinctly interventionist take on foreign
policy. In an April 2007 Blueprint article, Marshall wrote: "One welcome casualty of
the Iraq war is the myth of an imperial America. If the United States can't impose its will on a
small country like Iraq, it's probably not bent on world domination. The greater danger, in fact,
is that the United States, burned by its misadventures in Iraq, will sheathe its sword and step back
from world leadership. If that happens, who else is going to confront rogue states, genocide, and
other threats to international order?"
In the introduction to the 2006 book With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism
and Defending Liberty, Marshall promoted what he called "progressive internationalism" as
opposed to the "conservative unilateralism" of the George W. Bush administration. He argued
that the Iraq War is part of a larger strategy for "building a world safe for individual liberty
and democracy," and that the "Bush Republicans have been tough but they have not been smart" in
directing the course of the war in Iraq. Part of being smart is "using our strengths," wrote
Marshall. "Democrats must be committed to preserving America's military predominance, because
a strong military undergirds U.S. global leadership."
The reception to PPI's With All Our Might from the neoconservative corner was warm. In a Weekly
Standard article entitled "The Loneliness of the Liberal Hawk; Dems Who Understand
War, Pols Who Don't," neoconservative stalwart Thomas
Donnelly wrote that the volume "actually represents an impressive lineup of younger defense
and security intellectuals." Book contributor Kenneth Pollack "sounds like a closet neocon," and
Jan Mazurek's essay is "even tougher on Middle East strategy than Pollack," according
to Donnelly (Weekly Standard, May 22, 2006).
With Al From, in 1985 Marshall cofounded the DLC, an important bastion of center-right Democrats that
was once chaired by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT).
In 1989, Marshall founded the PPI, a think tank that is affiliated with the DLC. Both organizations
are sometimes described as neoconservative for their foreign policy positions. In an analysis of the
two groups' stance on the Israeli offensive against Hezbollah in summer 2006, Tom Barry wrote: "In
practice, though, DLC/PPI positions differ little from that of the Bush administration. As Israel rained
bombs down on Lebanon, the DLC's New Dem Dispatch echoed the neoconservative camp in its plea
for the Bush administration to avoid the supposed shame of appeasement in the Middle East. Adopting
the same line taken by the Bush administration and the Israeli government, the newsletter recommended
that the war be taken to Tehran and Damascus, which 'have become clear threats to regional and world
peace, and must be isolated and sanctioned, not appeased.'"
Marshall helped establish the DLC in the wake of Walter Mondale's landslide defeat. The DLC has aimed to create a "New Democrat" movement to shift the party toward the center-right on domestic, economic, and foreign policy issues. Part of the DLC's success can be attributed to the agenda-setting capacities of the Progressive Policy Institute, which was often referred to as "Bill Clinton's idea mill." The PPI was responsible for many of the Clinton administration's initiatives, including the national service agency AmeriCorps.
Marshall is also editor of Building the Bridge: 10 Big Ideas to Transform America (Roman & Littlefield, 1997) and co-editor of Mandate for Change (Berkley Books, 1992), PPI's best-selling policy blueprint for Clinton's first term. Marshall is also editor-at-large of Blueprint, the DLC's magazine of politics and policy.
According to Marshall's biography on the PPI website, Washingtonian magazine has described him thusly: "A University of Virginia graduate and former Richmond-Times Dispatch reporter, the wily Marshall plots ideas campaigns the way Robert E. Lee mapped strategy for the Confederates. His small but nimble 'New Democrat' think tank, an arm of the Democratic Leadership Council, has kept 'Old Democrats' off balance with a fusillade of proposals to reform traditional party thinking on welfare and other issues."
Marshall was one of 15 analysts who co-wrote the PPI's October 2003 foreign policy blueprint, "Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy." Using language that closely mirrors that of the neoconservative-led Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the PPI hailed the "tough-minded internationalism" of past Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman. Like PNAC, which in its founding statement warned of grave present dangers confronting America, the PPI strategy declared that, "Today America is threatened once again" and is in need of assertive individuals committed to strong leadership. The authors' observation that, "like the Cold War, the struggle we face today is likely to last not years but decades," echoes both neoconservative and Bush administration national security assessments. As the "Progressive Internationalism" authors explain, the PPI endorsed the invasion of Iraq "because the previous policy of containment was failing, because Saddam posed a grave danger to America as well as to his own brutalized people, and because his blatant defiance of more than a decade's worth of UN Security Council resolutions was undermining both collective security and international law."
The PPI has a vision of national security that extends to fostering democracy and freedom around the world in "the belief that America can best defend itself by building a world safe for individual liberty and democracy." It's likely that PNAC itself would heartily agree with this PPI comment: "While some complain that the Bush administration has been too radical in recasting America's national security strategy, we believe it has not been ambitious or imaginative enough."
In articles in Blueprint and in other media outlets, Marshall has struck out at Democrats who have either opposed the Iraq invasion or called for a U.S. pullout. As he told the Los Angeles Times in the run-up to the 2004 election: "You hear way too much from the Democrats in this race about turning over the whole mess to the UN. Well, that's not credible and most people know it. It doesn't have the power to achieve the only outcome we can accept" (Los Angeles Times, December 4, 2003).
In a January 2004 article titled "Stay and Win in Iraq," Marshall took a blithely nationalist view of body counts in a war in which most of the dead are Iraqi civilians. "Coalition forces still face daily attacks but the body count tilts massively in their favor," wrote Marshall, a leading voice for the liberal hawks in the United States (Blueprint, January 8, 2004).
The so-called New Democrats insist on the urgency of establishing a "third way" that steers a middle course between "peaceniks" like Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and "warlords" like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. But when it comes to issues of national security, their new progressive internationalism seems like a reconstitution of the old Cold War logic. Citing neocon analysts at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Marshall said in 2004: "The escalating violence prompted facile and mostly misleading analogies between Iraq and Vietnam. But in one respect, the comparison is apt: The United States is once again waging a classic counterinsurgency campaign in a country whose culture seems worlds apart from ours. Like it or not, America is back in the business of winning hearts and minds." In his certitude that the same old wars need to be fought again as part of a third way, Marshall dismisses the unpleasant reality that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party does not agree that the United States has to fight, "like it or not," a new array of counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East (Blueprint, January 8, 2004).
Although Marshall calls himself a "centrist," he has associated himself with neoconservative organizations and their radical foreign policy agendas. At the onset of the Iraq invasion, Marshall signed statements issued by the Project for the New American Century calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein, advocating that NATO help "secure and destroy all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," and arguing that the invasion "can contribute decisively to the democratization of the Middle East."
Marshall's credentials as a liberal hawk have been well established by his affinity for other PNAC-associated groups, including the U.S. Committee on NATO and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Marshall served on the board of directors of the U.S. Committee on NATO alongside such leading neoconservative figures as Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, Randy Scheunemann, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Hadley, Peter Rodman, Jeffrey Gedmin, Gary Schmitt, and the committee's founder and president Bruce Jackson. At the request of the Bush administration, Jackson also formed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which, with former DLC chairman Joseph Lieberman serving as co-chair with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), aimed to build bipartisan support for the liberation, occupation, and democratization of Iraq. Marshall, together with former Democratic Sen. Robert Kerrey of Nebraska (who coauthored "Progressive Internationalism"), represented the liberal hawk wing of the Democratic Party on the committee's neocon-dominated advisory board. Other advisers included James Woolsey, Eliot Cohen, Newt Gingrich, William Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Joshua Muravchik, Chris Williams, and Richard Perle.
On February 25, 2003, Marshall joined an array of neoconservatives marshaled by the Social Democrats/USA (SD/USA)—a wellspring of neoconservative strategy—to sign a letter to Bush calling for the invasion of Iraq. Marshall and others asked the president to "act alone if that proves necessary" and then, as a follow-up to a military-induced regime change in Iraq, to implement a democratization plan. The SD/USA letter urged the president to commit his administration to "maintaining substantial U.S. military forces in Iraq for as long as may be required to ensure a stable, representative regime is in place and functioning." Others signing the SD/USA letter included Jackson, Kagan, Woolsey, Hillel Fradkin, Rachelle Horowitz, Penn Kemble, Nina Shea, Michael Novak, Clifford May, and Ben Wattenberg.
In the DLC's Blueprint magazine, Marshall wrote: "In addition to scoring Bush's unilateralism and the narrow approach of the neo-imperialist right, the proponents of progressive internationalism—including this author—take on the protectionist, pacifist tendencies of the non-interventionist left. We write: 'Too many on the left seem incapable of taking America's side in international disputes. Viewing multilateralism as an end in itself, they lose sight of goals, such as fighting terrorism or ending gross human rights abuses, which sometimes require the United States to act, if need be, outside a sometimes ineffectual United Nations.' With such a robust strategy, Democrats can take on President Bush in the area of his presumed strength—if they have the courage to seize it" (Blueprint Magazine, November 20, 2003).
In the same article, Marshall takes Bush to task for his "my way or the highway approach" and for "riding roughshod" over allies and multilateral institutions, even though Marshall himself signed statements urging the administration to invade Iraq, even if it did not obtain UN approval or the consent of its main allies.
At the onset of the Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon in summer 2006, Marshall's DLC dusted off the old trope about appeasement to criticize those who did not stand firmly behind Israel. An editorial in the DLC's New Dem Dispatch asserted: "Both Tehran and Damascus have become clear threats to regional and world peace, and must be isolated and sanctioned, not appeased" (July 18, 2006). At a time when the most of the world was calling for an immediate cease-fire, the DLC backed the Bush administration's position that Israel needed more time to rid Lebanon of Hezbollah. According to New Dem Dispatch, proposals for an immediate cease-fire "represent little more than a demand that Israel stop defending itself and passively wait until the next time Hamas or Hezbollah chooses to kidnap or kill soldiers or rain missiles down on Israeli civilians."
Marshall and the PPI are also active in developing national economic strategies, which largely adhere to free trade policies pushed by both Republican and Democratic administrations. In June 2006, PPI published "Raising Our Game: A National Competitive Strategy," which, according to DLC chairman and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, "outlines a competitiveness strategy based on modernizing policies in this new economic era." In an op-ed appearing in the Financial Times, Vilsack said that the aim of the report was "to jump-start a debate about the realities of the new world we live in, how we can shape economic change in the national interest while 'expanding the winner's circle' of Americans prepared to compete and win, and the urgent need for action. Surrendering to global competition is immoral and unpatriotic; pretending it can be made to go away is an illusion. Americans must do what they have always done in changing times: use their brain power to adapt and succeed" (Financial Times, June 29, 2006).
The report, which was written by Marshall and two other PPI scholars, argues that in order for America to "raise its game as it did under John F. Kennedy after the Sputnik launch and as it did again under Bill Clinton when the pace of globalization began to quicken in the 1990s," the country must establish a "National Competition Strategy" based on four "fundamental sets of reforms:" "put innovation first" by refocusing national policies to encourage innovation and the strengthening of skills; "strengthen the world trade system" by working to open markets more quickly and enhance enforcement of trade agreements; "establish a new compact for worker security" that would, inter alia, give workers training so that they can more easily transition to new jobs as the economy changes; and "restore fiscal sanity in Washington" by implementing "tough measures to eliminate spending, raise revenue, reduce public borrowing, and spur private savings." Such a strategy, argue the authors, will help ensure that the "ingenuity and work ethic of the people can once again ensure the world's highest standard of living for American families and preserve America's role as the world's paramount source of new industries, new products, and new ideas."
