The Democrats And Foreign Policy
It has been easy to pillory the Democrats for their position on Iraq, or really lack thereof. Supposedly Senate Democrats ‘convened a private meeting in late June [2005] to develop a cohesive stance on the war and debated every option -- only to break up with no consensus.’ As a recent Nation article reports, besides being incoherent they have also lagged well behind public opinion:
'Sixty-six percent of the public want the United States to "reduce its number of troops," with those respondents favoring a timeline for withdrawal by a margin of 2 to 1. Some 72 percent of American troops serving in Iraq think the United States should exit the country in the next year, a recent Zogby poll found. "The elites in Washington are thinking a hell of a lot different than the people right now," says Joe Trippi, Dean's former campaign manager. "And someone's really wrong."'
Not to mention, they basically authorized the war when they signed the carte blanche ‘Authorization for Use of Military Force’ bill in 2001 and then many added their John Hancock’s to the ‘Congressional Resolution on Iraq’.
But perhaps all this is by the by. Suppose we accept the argument that the above is simply the efforts of a party out of power trying to stay in the game, but that their real foreign policy, should they be in power, would be substantially different. At the moment, they are just trying not to look weak. EJ Dionne has incisively criticized this logic on its own terms as self-destructive:
“Democrats are so obsessed with not looking “weak” on defense that they end up making themselves look weak, period, by the way they respond to Republican attacks on their alleged weakness. Oh my gosh, many Democrats say, we can't associate ourselves with the likes of Howard Dean or Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader who recently called for a troop withdrawal within six months. Let's knife them before Karl Rove gets around to knifing us. Talk about a recipe for retreat and defeat.”
But even this is perhaps not the point. Let’s take Democrats at their word, and judge them not by what they have done, but by what they say they would do. If the Democrats really had their way, wouldn’t it still be better than what we have – less militarism, more cooperation, greater legality, higher respect for weak countries? Let us then investigate what some of the leading foreign policy experts, most likely to influence a Democratic administration, have to say.
Forget, for a moment, the rather annoying tendency of all Democratic foreign policy documents to begin with some need to acknowledge that the Democrats ‘need not to appear weak on security’. Let us imagine the extremely unlikely possibility that the Democrats will want to end the war on terror, and carve out a new path altogether. We cannot look at the views of all the foreign policy experts, including Fareed Zakaria, Peter Beinart, and Jessica Mathews, most likely to influence or even govern in a Democratic administration. Let us look at two other Democratic experts whose ideas are not strikingly different from the aforementioned three. Consider first, the view expressed by Will Marshall, the President of the Progressive Policy Institute, in the major magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council.
‘How can the United Nations be a source of legitimacy if it can't prevent mass murder?... If we can't make it work better, we will pretty much guarantee that the United States winds up being the global gendarme by default…As long as just one country can use its veto to keep the Security Council from acting, the United Nations is more likely to be an obstacle to multilateral action than a catalyst…Ultimately, however, America needs a reformed United Nations that can shoulder more responsibility for preventing conflicts and restoring peace.’
In other words, when the United Nations does what the United States thinks is right, its functioning properly, but when it doesn’t, then it is illegitimate. And what is the problem with the United Nations right now? – that it provides too many procedural mechanisms that might frustrate America’s ethical projects. What exactly is the new role for the UN that Marshall envisions? The maid to America’s muscle. The US supplies the military might to humanitarian missions, and the UN cleans up for all the hard, post-invasion reconstruction work afterwards. This is not a commitment to global democracy or international law, but rather to developing an international architecture that could intervene more effectively, and more pervasively, in the affairs of other countries (we have already discussed our views on sovereignty and on non-intervention previously). This is not that far off from how Bush treated the UN. In many ways, it is more insidious than Bush’s brazen and club-footed attempts at diplomacy. With Bush it’s at least more transparent who is really in charge, no matter how much Bush subsequently has tried to avoid being held to account. But the Democrats seek to hide behind the UN and its ‘international legitimacy’, thereby avoiding responsibility for their own decisions and policies. Even worse, their view rests on the fantasy that one can blow into a country, kill the baddies, save the victims, then send in a team of international experts to rebuild the state, as if there were no political issues involved in such a reconstruction.
The fact of the matter is that the Democrats don’t have any more respect for the autonomy and self-determination of other countries than do Republicans. They just don’t like the fact that Bush is in charge. Anne-Marie Slaughter, director of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy at Princeton and widely considered a favorite for a foreign policy post in a Democratic administration, recently said this about Bush’s foreign policy: ‘So the challenge for us "muscular Wilsonians," is to break out of the corner that the neocons have boxed us into.’ The defense of ‘muscular Wilsonianism,’ by which she means the United States reserving the right to intervene whenever it finds its conscience offended, even after the double debacle of Afghanistan and Iraq, is surprising to say the least. And the attempt to blame the failures of interventionism on neoconservatives is nothing short of lame. It serves as an excuse for the broader project of re-enchanting global American power, and war for ethical ends. Even were it to abandon the war on terror, there is little reason to expect less militarism and global mucking around from a Democratic administration.
'Sixty-six percent of the public want the United States to "reduce its number of troops," with those respondents favoring a timeline for withdrawal by a margin of 2 to 1. Some 72 percent of American troops serving in Iraq think the United States should exit the country in the next year, a recent Zogby poll found. "The elites in Washington are thinking a hell of a lot different than the people right now," says Joe Trippi, Dean's former campaign manager. "And someone's really wrong."'
Not to mention, they basically authorized the war when they signed the carte blanche ‘Authorization for Use of Military Force’ bill in 2001 and then many added their John Hancock’s to the ‘Congressional Resolution on Iraq’.
But perhaps all this is by the by. Suppose we accept the argument that the above is simply the efforts of a party out of power trying to stay in the game, but that their real foreign policy, should they be in power, would be substantially different. At the moment, they are just trying not to look weak. EJ Dionne has incisively criticized this logic on its own terms as self-destructive:
“Democrats are so obsessed with not looking “weak” on defense that they end up making themselves look weak, period, by the way they respond to Republican attacks on their alleged weakness. Oh my gosh, many Democrats say, we can't associate ourselves with the likes of Howard Dean or Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader who recently called for a troop withdrawal within six months. Let's knife them before Karl Rove gets around to knifing us. Talk about a recipe for retreat and defeat.”
But even this is perhaps not the point. Let’s take Democrats at their word, and judge them not by what they have done, but by what they say they would do. If the Democrats really had their way, wouldn’t it still be better than what we have – less militarism, more cooperation, greater legality, higher respect for weak countries? Let us then investigate what some of the leading foreign policy experts, most likely to influence a Democratic administration, have to say.
Forget, for a moment, the rather annoying tendency of all Democratic foreign policy documents to begin with some need to acknowledge that the Democrats ‘need not to appear weak on security’. Let us imagine the extremely unlikely possibility that the Democrats will want to end the war on terror, and carve out a new path altogether. We cannot look at the views of all the foreign policy experts, including Fareed Zakaria, Peter Beinart, and Jessica Mathews, most likely to influence or even govern in a Democratic administration. Let us look at two other Democratic experts whose ideas are not strikingly different from the aforementioned three. Consider first, the view expressed by Will Marshall, the President of the Progressive Policy Institute, in the major magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council.
‘How can the United Nations be a source of legitimacy if it can't prevent mass murder?... If we can't make it work better, we will pretty much guarantee that the United States winds up being the global gendarme by default…As long as just one country can use its veto to keep the Security Council from acting, the United Nations is more likely to be an obstacle to multilateral action than a catalyst…Ultimately, however, America needs a reformed United Nations that can shoulder more responsibility for preventing conflicts and restoring peace.’
In other words, when the United Nations does what the United States thinks is right, its functioning properly, but when it doesn’t, then it is illegitimate. And what is the problem with the United Nations right now? – that it provides too many procedural mechanisms that might frustrate America’s ethical projects. What exactly is the new role for the UN that Marshall envisions? The maid to America’s muscle. The US supplies the military might to humanitarian missions, and the UN cleans up for all the hard, post-invasion reconstruction work afterwards. This is not a commitment to global democracy or international law, but rather to developing an international architecture that could intervene more effectively, and more pervasively, in the affairs of other countries (we have already discussed our views on sovereignty and on non-intervention previously). This is not that far off from how Bush treated the UN. In many ways, it is more insidious than Bush’s brazen and club-footed attempts at diplomacy. With Bush it’s at least more transparent who is really in charge, no matter how much Bush subsequently has tried to avoid being held to account. But the Democrats seek to hide behind the UN and its ‘international legitimacy’, thereby avoiding responsibility for their own decisions and policies. Even worse, their view rests on the fantasy that one can blow into a country, kill the baddies, save the victims, then send in a team of international experts to rebuild the state, as if there were no political issues involved in such a reconstruction.
The fact of the matter is that the Democrats don’t have any more respect for the autonomy and self-determination of other countries than do Republicans. They just don’t like the fact that Bush is in charge. Anne-Marie Slaughter, director of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy at Princeton and widely considered a favorite for a foreign policy post in a Democratic administration, recently said this about Bush’s foreign policy: ‘So the challenge for us "muscular Wilsonians," is to break out of the corner that the neocons have boxed us into.’ The defense of ‘muscular Wilsonianism,’ by which she means the United States reserving the right to intervene whenever it finds its conscience offended, even after the double debacle of Afghanistan and Iraq, is surprising to say the least. And the attempt to blame the failures of interventionism on neoconservatives is nothing short of lame. It serves as an excuse for the broader project of re-enchanting global American power, and war for ethical ends. Even were it to abandon the war on terror, there is little reason to expect less militarism and global mucking around from a Democratic administration.
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