A DEMOCRATIC WORLD by GEORGE PACKER Can liberals take foreign policy back from the Republicans? New Yorker Magazine, Issue of 2004-02-16 and 23
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Another approach remains available to the Democrats—one that draws on the Party’s own not so distant history. The parallels between the early years of the Cold War and our situation are inexact. The Islamist movement doesn’t have the same hold on Westerners that Communism had. It draws on cultures that remain alien to us; the history of colonialism and the fact of religious difference make it all the harder for the liberal democracies of the West to effect change in the Muslim world. Waving the banner of freedom and mustering the will to act aren’t enough. Anyone who believes that September 11th thrust us into a Manichaean conflict between good and evil should visit Iraq, where the simplicity of that formula lies half buried under all the crosscurrents of foreign occupation and social chaos and ethnic strife. Simply negotiating the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraqis has proved so vexing that an Administration that jealously guarded the occupation against any international control has turned to the battered and despised United Nations for help in dealing with Iraq’s unleashed political forces. Iraq and other battlegrounds require patience, self-criticism, and local knowledge, not just an apocalyptic moral summons.
Nonetheless, for Democrats and for Americans, the first step is to realize that the war on terrorism is actually a war for liberalism—a struggle to bring populations now living under tyrannies and failed states into the orbit of liberal democracy. In this light, it makes sense to think about the strategy and mind-set that the postwar generation brought to their task: the marriage of power and coöperation. Daalder said, “The fundamental challenge—just as the fundamental challenge in ’46 and ’47 and ’48 in France and Italy was to provide Italians and Frenchmen with a real constructive alternative to Communism, to defeat it politically—is to provide people in the Islamic world with an alternative that gives them hope in a period where they have only despair.” He pointed out that America now spends forty times more on defense than it does on foreign aid, and that half of this aid goes to Israel and Egypt. “This is like the new Cold War, and we’ve got to fight it as a generational fight in which we need to invest,” he said.
As it happens, an increasing number of Democrats are pursuing this theme. Wesley Clark talks about a “new Atlantic Charter” that would make nato the first resort of American military power, starting in Iraq. “Uncertainties, nations looking for leadership, a multidimensional challenge on a global scale—all of that is similar” to the early Cold War, he told me. “As is the indefinite duration of the challenge.” Clark argued that nato’s war in Kosovo, which he conducted as Supreme Allied Commander, could become the basis for a new foreign policy. “You could call it efficient multilateralism—the recognition that if you link diplomacy, law, and force, you can achieve decisive results without using decisive force.”
Senator John Kerry, of Massachusetts, has for some time advocated the extension of nato forces in Kabul to the whole of Afghanistan, and he recently called for expanding public diplomacy in the Muslim world and imposing international sanctions against countries and institutions that fund terrorism, a money flow that the Bush Administration has had little success in shutting off. In a recent debate, Kerry said, “Most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven’t embraced, because otherwise we’re inviting a clash of civilizations.” Senator John Edwards, of North Carolina, proposes publishing an annual list of dissidents imprisoned around the world, and forming an organization of Western democracies and Arab countries moving toward liberalization which would be modelled on efforts to reform the former Eastern Bloc. Invoking Truman and Marshall, Senator Biden talks about a Prevention Doctrine: long-term engagement in troubled regions to head off threats before they lead to war—for example, by funding programs to destroy nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union. (The Bush Administration’s remarkably sluggish approach to securing “loose nukes” is one consequence of a policy aimed narrowly at terrorists and their state sponsors, like cards in a deck.) All these Democrats advocate a domestic policy that would acknowledge the reality of wartime, including alternative energy, tax fairness, and greater spending on security. But Biden reminded me, “It took the Democratic Party after World War II six years to get that figured out.”
If you’re paying attention, you can hear the sound of Democratic leaders straining to pry the Party away from its long aversion to America’s world leadership. The ghosts of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy are frequently summoned. These leaders have a thankless job, and, politically, a difficult one. Whatever they thought of the Iraq war, the struggle there is now the epicenter of the war of ideas, and leading Democrats have to show more commitment to the new Iraq’s success than they did in opposing the Administration’s reconstruction package. A broader approach to the war includes a willingness to fight—and, for Democrats out of power, it’s all the harder to persuade a skeptical public that they will fight. But this approach also demands an ability to make judgments about when and where and how to fight—or not. Compared with “axis of evil,” “efficient multilateralism” is a pallid phrase. Millions won’t rally behind the banner of the Prevention Doctrine. Spending twenty million dollars on schools in Afghanistan is a harder sell than spending four hundred billion on defense; fear is more compelling than foresight. Biden admitted, “This is a place where the President’s bragging to me, ‘Mr. Chairman, I don’t do nuance’—where he has an advantage.”
full: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040216fa_fact1 --
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