Obama's not crusading for dignity, he's just not stomping on it.

Sullivan references a skeptic, Hampton Stephens who in my view gets Obama’s foreign policy wrong:

...The problem with Bush’s foreign policy, according to the current liberal internationalist critique, has not been its fundamental goals, but the means used to pursue them: military force, unilateralism, etc.

To replace neoconservative democracy promotion by force, Obama seems to be proposing a different kind of crusade. He and his advisers seem to believe that American foreign policy can deliver the human race from indignity and want. Even if their strategy for achieving this goal doesn’t rely on military force, such an expansive view of the capabilities of U.S. foreign policy is dangerously unrealistic...

I’d switch "fundamental goals" to "stated goals" in the first paragraph but otherwise I’ll accept that argument. I’ll similarly accept the basic argument on the attempts to deal with global need being tricky, there’s room for fair debate there. However, he’s got the dignity promotion idea fundamentally wrong.

Dignity promotion isn’t an attempt to uphold dignity world wide, it’s an attempt to stop humiliating many of the peoples U.S. power interacts with, especially those who are under U.S. occupation (in part by ending said occupations). Similarly, by talking to foreign leaders, we recognize that while unelected leaders often have different interest than their people, their nations also have legitimately different interests than the U.S. At the same time scaling back our relationships with friendly dictators makes us less responsible for the offenses to their people’s dignity that they commit. Dignity promotion is restraint, not some oddball attempt to make the world safe for egos. So why does this matter? Because unlike poverty, anger about being occupied or at an unpopular government with a foreign is directly linked to terrorism.

As for dealing with people’s needs; ultimately this aid is not coercive and doesn’t tend to involve loans. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t problematic, there’s still risks certainly, but while it may prove an inefficient use of resources blowback is unlikely.