Last week was spent trying to find a new conventional wisdom on where Obama and McCain actually stand on Iraq and Afghanistan—with surrogates for both sides engaging in questions of whether Obama will weep under his desk as Iraq falls to Iranian troops and conjuring visions of a wild-eyed John McCain dropping from a B-52, whooping it up on a nuclear bomb bound for Tehran. Perhaps now some sanity is in order.

Way back in March, Spencer Ackerman wrote a piece in The American Prospect assessing what an Obama foreign policy would actually look like. After rolling out the brightest minds—an odd mix of creaking Mandarins (Lee Hamilton), an activist-turned-counterinsurgency-expert (Sarah Sewall), and a mix of dogooder-leftwing-policy-types (Susan Rice)—he gets to the core of the ‘new’ philosophy:

This ability to see the world from different perspectives informs what the Obama team hopes will replace the Iraq War mind-set: something they call dignity promotion. “I don’t think anyone in the foreign-policy community has as much an appreciation of the value of dignity as Obama does,” says Samantha Power, a former key aide and author of the groundbreaking study of U.S. foreign policy and genocide, A Problem From Hell. “Dignity is a way to unite a lot of different strands [of foreign-policy thinking],” she says. “If you start with that, it explains why it’s not enough to spend $3 billion on refugee camps in Darfur, because the way those people are living is not the way they want to live. It’s not a human way to live. It’s graceless—an affront to your sense of dignity.” …

What’s typically neglected in these arguments is the simple insight that democracy does not fill stomachs, alleviate malaria, or protect neighborhoods from marauding bands of militiamen. Democracy, in other words, is valuable to people insofar as it allows them first to meet their basic needs. It is much harder to provide that sense of dignity than to hold an election in Baghdad or Gaza and declare oneself shocked when illiberal forces triumph. “Look at why the baddies win these elections,” Power says. “It’s because [populations are] living in climates of fear.” U.S. policy, she continues, should be “about meeting people where they’re at. Their fears of going hungry, or of the thug on the street. That’s the swamp that needs draining. If we’re to compete with extremism, we have to be able to provide these things that we’re not [providing].”

This is why, Obama’s advisers argue, national security depends in large part on dignity promotion. Without it, the U.S. will never be able to destroy al-Qaeda. Extremists will forever be able to demagogue conditions of misery, making continued U.S. involvement in asymmetric warfare an increasingly counterproductive exercise — because killing one terrorist creates five more in his place. “It’s about attacking pools of potential terrorism around the globe,” Gration says. “Look at Africa, with 900 million people, half of whom are under 18. I’m concerned that unless you start creating jobs and livelihoods we will have real big problems on our hands in ten to fifteen years.”

Or, in other words: If you have a home, a job, and enough to feed your family, the chances that you’ll be swayed by a man who would like you to blow up both yourself and a bus full of strangers diminish greatly. If this sounds like familiar territory, it should—it was at the core of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program to end the social problems caused by poverty, and has been the foreign policy solution urged by the Chomsky-spectrum of the left for the better part of three decades. Isolated from their recruitment pool, extremists depend more and more on their own hardened ideologues, and become both less relevant to their home populations and easier to capture.

This is an insanely simplified version of Ackerman’s essay, and it’s a best case scenario that may never happen: Even since the writing of the piece, Obama has been forced into rhetoric that is far to the right of what it previously was in order to assuage fears that he’s a secret Muslim terrorist. But what the piece does offer is a clear look at where Obama wants to take the world, and certainly the contrast to what a President McCain might propose.