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A good place to find the mainstream Democrataic counter-argument to the hawks is a book published in March called
The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It
Alone, by Joseph S. Nye, Jr., the dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and someone who might well have turned up in a high-ranking foreign-policy job in a Gore Administration. Nye acknowledges that the United States is supremely powerful right now, but he says that is is a temporary condition to be taken advantage of, and not something that can become permanent. We should pursue "soft power," a complex web of alliances and aid agreements that bind the rest of the world to our interests and give us a more benign reputation abroad…
The contrast between Democrats’ faith in international treaties and organizations and the hawks’ mistrust of them couldn’t be more deep-seated; it reflects fundamentally different views of human nature. Do you get people to behave the way you’d like them to through power and force, or by encouragement and friendship? The haws would say, Clearly the former, especially in the Arab world. They see the tough, threatening messages that Bush has been sending to other governments, through his rhetoric and through his refusal to participate in international organizations, as having already paid off in the form of increased influence for the United States ... Robert Kagan, a prominent hawk…says, with good-humored condescension, that of course the Europeans believe in international law and multilaterialism. Who can blame them? Weak nations, lacking the resources and the will to maintain military power, always have.
-- Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker, September 16, 2002
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