Dean on foreign policy

Calpundit (Kevin Drum) is not impressed with Dean's foreign policy speech at the CFR:

A few pro forma words about being responsible and working with our allies, and that's it? Followed by a quick jump to homeland security?

What does he think about military transformation? Relations with Saudi Arabia? The neocon domino theory? Reform of the CIA? Etc. etc.

Fairly or not, Dean more than anyone has to prove that he's not just a squishy peacenik who doesn't really know anything about national security issues. And while I realize that campaign speeches aren't white papers, this was a major address to a serious audience, so I assume he put a good deal of thought into it and consulted with foreign policy experts in its preparation. If he had any major proposals for actively fighting terrorism he would have mentioned them, but I don't see much there, and I don't see any sound bites that he could extract from this speech either.

This kind of thing might sound good on the blogosphere, but if Dean wins the nomination he's going to get pummeled on this stuff starting next summer — and BushCo's phasers are going to be set firmly on obliterate. He'd better have a bit more to say than this, or else we'll be scraping him off the floor come November.

I think that it's premature to look at the CFR speech as evidence that Dean isn't prepared on foreign policy - as Kevin points out, there's still a LOT of time for Dean to make his case. But at the same time, I think that Kevin raisd some excellent bullet points about what specifics areas Dean needs to address directly and explicitly. Dean's next foreign policy address has to cover this kind of ground.