Caution for those with weak stomachs: the follow includes stated agreement with Thomas Friedman, who is generally a pompous "free market" ideologue and apologist for the Israeli occupation, among other vices. Proceed at your own risk.
For the first time in a long time, we have an administration articulating a bold and forceful foreign policy objective: spreading liberal democracy around the globe, at gunpoint if necessary. Bush's inauguration address was a brilliantly written, if flatly delivered, declaration of a new role for America in the world.
It's easy to tear the speech apart as hypocritical and impractical. The anti-war left does a decent job attacking the administration on the first front and the Democratic Party foreign policy establishment does a marginal job attacking it on the second.
What's not so easy is to articulate an appealing alternative. Let's try a thought experiment: if John Kerry, or even Howard Dean, had decided to turn his inauguration speech into a foreign policy vision, what would he have said? What themes would he or she emphasize? Undoubtedly, two themes would figure prominently:
(There is also a third theme which neither major party wants to touch: disentanglement, perhaps even to the point of isolationism. I'm having trouble finding a suitable quotation, but the basic line here would be something like: "Today, many of the national security threats we face are of our own making: terrorism breeds on resentment towards continued American support for despotic governments. We must return to our roots as a modest republic and stop meddling in the affairs of other nations across the globe." This would be a more fundamental break with the administration, but it ain't gonna happen.)
Both themes expresses a certain degree of wisdom. But neither is the stuff that dreams, or even doctrines, are made of. They have a "yes, but..." quality to them (as in "yes, let's invade Iraq, but let's get France on board first and make sure we've got a plan for the occupation"), which makes for ineffective political communcation. But more importantly, they're both missing the "vision thing." Bush wants use the military and economic might of the United States to bring democracy to the world, and we want to? Err... um... do so more politely?
Moreover, they reflect, as Dick Cheney would say, a pre-9/11 mindset towards public opinion. We no longer live in a country where most people could care less what goes on outside our borders. (Note that this does mean most people have a reasonable understanding of what goes on outside our borders.) As a result, the bar is raised for Democrats when it comes to national security. Simply appearing credible isn't enough anymore.
What the left, broadly constituted, needs is a foreign policy vision which builds on the obvious criticisms of the administration's policy while also demonstrating our ability to lead. Like the Bush vision, it must be presented, first and foremost, as a strategy for combatting anti-American terrorism, even if -- again, like the Bush vision -- it has other important goals which the public cares little about.
I'm hardly the best person to come up with such a vision, but I'm arrogant enough to try:
"While continuing to use the best intelligence and law enforcment tools available to combat terrorism, the United States must embark on a massive campaign to eliminate the causes of terrorism around the world. The forces of anti-Americanism in the Middle East are strengthened by corrupt governments fed by the outrageous prices we pay for their oil. Terrorists finds recruits among the poor and the desperate, in societies where young men and women have no opportunity to get ahead in life. We must free our nation from the dangerous shackles of dependence on foreign oil, undermining terrorists overseas and creating jobs at home. And we must show the world our generosity by leading a global effort to fund education and economic development in countries with devastating levels of unemployment."
The idea here is to integrate tough, bold, and patriotic language with the Democrats' core appeal on domestic policy: economic fairness. Moreover, it can be tied into a cohesive attack on the Bush administration policy as hypocritical, self-serving, and inconsistent for playing nice with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia while talking about freedom and democracy.
Lest I sound like a starry-eyed leftist, consider Thomas Friedman's column in this Sunday's New York Times:
Yes, there is an alternative to the Euro-wimps and the neocons, and it is the "geo-greens." I am a geo-green. The geo-greens believe that, going forward, if we put all our focus on reducing the price of oil - by conservation, by developing renewable and alternative energies and by expanding nuclear power - we will force more reform than by any other strategy. You give me $18-a-barrel oil and I will give you political and economic reform from Algeria to Iran. All these regimes have huge population bubbles and too few jobs. They make up the gap with oil revenues. Shrink the oil revenue and they will have to open up their economies and their schools and liberate their women so that their people can compete. It is that simple.
I'm not sure it's quite that simple (and I'm not with him on nuclear energy), but it's a damned good start.
Posted by Michael at February 1, 2005 11:19 AM | TrackBack