Soft Power and Liberal Fascism

Our friend Dafydd ab Hugh finds the explanation for Samantha Power’s foreign policy prescriptions in Jonah Goldberg’s best-selling book Liberal Fascism. One of Goldberg’s theses (as Dafydd presents it; I haven’t yet read the book) is this:

Liberal fascists abhor the status quo more than anything else; the driving force behind this detestation may well be simple boredom. . .[T]hey’re filled with ennui when things stay the same and only feel alive — and can only flex their power — when they’re actively changing things around. It really doesn’t matter how they change them; being pure pragmatists, they have no coherent ideology anyway. But when they’re moving pieces around the chessboard, they experience the godlike high of pure power. They’re shaking things up; they’re on the move; they’re taking action directe.

Thus, as Dafydd sees it:

Samantha Power’s major foreign-policy proposals — to send American forces to carve up Israel and hand over choice pieces to the Palestinians, and to precipitously flee Iraq while ethnically cleansing the inhabitants — is not to achieve any particular result. The purpose of them is simply to do them. “Action, action, action.”

Dafydd may be right. But why do the foreign policy prescriptions of a certain type of liberal almost always entail “action, action, action” in the form of concessions or worse by this country and its close allies?
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