A string of recent White House fumbles from Iraq to North Korea has shaken public confidence in Team Bush's ability to make Americans safer. Such doubts, in turn, could change the dynamics of the 2004 election by converting what has widely been seen as President Bush's greatest political asset -- his post-9/11 reputation for resolute leadership on security -- into his biggest vulnerability. As Democrats search for a candidate who can get across the threshold of credibility on national security, our current commander in chief suddenly seems in danger of slipping below it.
This stunning turnaround opens the door for Democrats to offer Americans a compelling alternative to President Bush's foreign policy. So far, however, the party's candidates have mostly accentuated the negative, lighting into the president with renewed gusto with each blast of bad news from Iraq. But criticism alone won't allay lingering public doubts about Democrats' toughness and resolve when it comes to waging the war on terrorism or finishing the job in Iraq. Democrats need to offer their own strategy for protecting our people and our values -- a "progressive internationalism" that updates the party's historic support for a strong defense, tough-minded diplomacy backed by the credible use of force, and energetic U.S. global leadership to organize alliances and global institutions around the shared values of liberal democracy.
The immediate cause of Bush's woes is, of course, Iraq, which has turned out to be much tougher to pacify than the administration reckoned. But on other critical fronts as well, the White House seems to be losing control of events. Consider the bill of particulars:
First, the president has been unable to put an effective check on the dangerous nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran.
Second, his Middle East "road map" brought only a momentary respite in the bloodletting between Palestinians and Israelis.
Third, after early successes, even the war on terror seems to be bogged down: Taliban remnants are launching bolder attacks in Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden is urging his followers to go to Iraq to kill Americans.
Fourth, the White House has yet to fashion a long-range strategy for changing the conditions -- harsh repression, blighted economic prospects, endemic corruption -- that breed extremism and make terrorism seem like a rational career choice to some young Muslim men.
There is trouble on the home front, too. Significant gaps remain to be plugged in homeland defense, especially in intelligence, information-sharing among law enforcement agencies, bioterrorism, and port security. Meanwhile, the economic news has been mostly bad on Bush's watch, with more than 3 million lost jobs, ballooning budget deficits, and a serious breakdown in the world trade system.
The mounting costs of rebuilding Iraq have heightened the glaring contradiction at the heart of the Bush fiscal policy: The president says we are at war, but instead of calling for shared sacrifice, he insists on cutting taxes for the rich. This policy is driving America deeper into debt, undermining business and investor confidence, and eroding the economic foundations of U.S. security and global leadership.
Overarching all these problems is a more general worry about the president's leadership style. No one doubts that Bush will confront America's enemies; the question is why that should also require alienating America's friends and potential partners. The Iraq crisis has thrown into sharp relief the president's shortcomings -- an unreflective nature that sees the world in black and white and retreats easily into platitudes; a tendency, when challenged, to assert his good intentions rather than argue the merits of his case; and, above all, a reluctance to engage skeptics in the hard work of persuasion and compromise.
Bush's "my way or the highway" approach has unnecessarily polarized the domestic debate on Iraq and set loose a toxic tide of anti-Americanism abroad. In fact, it's hard to exaggerate the damage done to America's international standing by Team Bush's all-too-evident disdain for the views of long-time friends and allies. They worry that the United States, intoxicated by its growing military superiority, is no longer willing to work through multilateral alliances and institutions to achieve its aims and legitimize its global leadership. By riding roughshod over their sensibilities, the White House has virtually invited other countries to withhold cooperation on issues vital to us, such as rebuilding Iraq.
This radical departure from America's internationalist tradition is the Bush administration's biggest mistake. By steering a unilateral course, it has isolated the United States, breeding global mistrust of our motives and leaving us to bear the lion's share of the costs and risks of policies that benefit other countries as well as our own. Instead of asking how they can work with us to confront common challenges like terrorism and weapons proliferation, too many of the world's leading nations are wondering how they can restrain or balance America's overweening power.
These failings recur in the Bush administration's mishandling of several key security challenges:
Iraq. In retrospect, Bush's speech last May on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln marked a turning point not only in Iraq but in his political fortunes as well. Using made-for-TV pageantry, he boasted of the military's stunningly swift victory in Iraq and declared the end of "major combat operations." That phrase has since acquired a bitterly ironic ring, as scarcely a day goes by without reports that more Americans and Iraqis have been killed in ambushes and suicide bombings.
Meanwhile, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, together with the White House's misuse of intelligence reports to hype Iraq's nuclear threat and insinuate links between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, have cast doubt on the administration's central rationale for the war.
The White House further damaged its credibility by consistently low-balling the costs of the war and assuring Congress that oil-rich Iraq could finance its own reconstruction. It was a rude shock to lawmakers when the president finally asked for an additional $87 billion for U.S. operations in Iraq. Republicans were especially shocked, because the request included $20 billion for rebuilding the country -- the largest U.S. foreign aid package since the Marshall Plan. It was nation-building on steroids.
The president's rash decision to fight the war without broader international support has left us trying to win the peace -- a much more complicated and expensive proposition -- nearly alone. Contrast that with his father's success in winning U.N. backing for the first Persian Gulf War, which triggered about $60 billion in allied contributions. The Bush II administration dragged its feet for months before finally agreeing to a largely symbolic role for the United Nations in overseeing Iraq's reconstruction. The result was a watered-down Security Council resolution in October that put coalition forces under the United Nations' nominal control, but failed to unlock significant new contributions of either troops or money from the international community. The October donor's conference in Madrid yielded only a grand total of $5 billion in new grants for Iraq.
The war on terror. To many Americans, the war on terror may seem an unalloyed success. After all, we routed the Taliban, destroyed al Qaeda's main base of operations, and won the help of nations around the world in monitoring terrorist suspects, disrupting plots, and dismantling the financial infrastructure of global terrorism.
But look at the other side of the ledger. The administration's reluctance to put enough U.S. troops on the ground led to overreliance on local forces, which in turn enabled bin Laden and other terrorist leaders to slip through our fingers. Now the terrorist-in-chief is urging Muslims to converge on Iraq for "martyrdom operations against the enemy" and is, no doubt, planning the sequel to 9/11. His son and other top al Qaeda leaders have found refuge in Iran, where they apparently continue to direct terrorist attacks around the world.
The administration's failure to help the new Afghan regime extend its writ beyond Kabul has left most of Afghanistan in the hands of the same warlords whose misrule paved the way for the Taliban. Meanwhile, Taliban remnants have regrouped and are attacking U.S. troops and assassinating international aid workers, prompting relief organizations to flee the country. Although Congress has authorized $1 billion to expand the U.N.-mandated International Security Assistance Force, the White House hasn't asked for the money.
Global terror networks need money to ply their grisly trade. The White House, however, has shied from confronting the country that administration officials call the epicenter of terrorist funding: Saudi Arabia. According to FBI and Treasury officials, at least $100 million has flowed from Saudi financiers and Islamic "charities" to terrorists in recent years. Rather than press the Saudi government to crack down on this tide of blood money, the administration persists in lauding the kingdom for its cooperation in combating terrorism.
The WMD threat. Preoccupied with a, so far, futile hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the White House has been unable to settle on an effective response to the more urgent proliferation threats posed by the other charter members of the "Axis of Evil": North Korea and Iran.
On the contrary, by inflaming the North Koreans' legendary paranoia, Bush has put the spurs to Pyongyang's nuclear program. Citing the Bush doctrine of pre-emption, the North Koreans say they have begun reprocessing fuel rods with the explicit aim of making nuclear weapons to deter U.S. aggression. What gives U.S. defense planners nightmares is the prospect that dictator Kim Jong Il will export nuclear materials to help keep his regime afloat, or threaten to sell them to extort further financial assistance from the West.
Nearly as worrisome is Iran's ramped-up nuclear program. With Russian help, Tehran is building a nuclear power plant at Bushehr, ostensibly to generate electricity, though skeptics wonder why a country awash in oil couldn't build another oil-fired plant. With Saddam out of business in Iraq, Iran's Islamic hard-liners clearly represent the greatest long-term threat to peace in the Middle East. Their close ties to terrorist groups like Hezbollah and decision to give refuge to top al Qaeda operatives makes the prospect of a nuclear Iran deeply unsettling.
In response to these twin perils, however, the White House has oscillated indecisively between confrontation and engagement. Pentagon hard-liners oppose talks that, like the Clinton administration's 1994 framework agreement, would offer Pyongyang food and other inducements in return for shutting down its nuclear program. They argue instead for destabilizing the regime, though it's hard to see what could be more destabilizing than the economic collapse and mass starvation North Koreans have suffered in recent years. And despite Bush administration saber-rattling, there's no credible "hard option" at hand, since neither South Korea nor neighboring powers like China or Russia would countenance a U.S. pre-emptive strike on the North.
More promising is the administration's decision to enlist North Korea's neighbors in six-way talks with the regime. Pyongyang is much more likely to be tractable if it faces a united front that includes its traditional allies, China and Russia. Now that the White House has acknowledged the limits of a unilateral approach, it ought to negotiate a new quid pro quo, guaranteed by the gang of six, in which Pyongyang agrees to give up its nuclear program and adopt Chinese-style economic reforms in return for security guarantees and increased aid from its neighbors and the United States.
Dealing with Iran also requires a collective approach, especially as the United States has no diplomatic relations with Tehran. Britain, France, and Germany have taken the lead, winning Iran's pledge to suspend its uranium enrichment activities. But it's not clear whether Tehran will consent to the intrusive inspections necessary to ensure compliance with its obligations under the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, the Europe-Iran agreement does not cover the Bushehr plant, which will generate fuel that Iran could easily reprocess into weapons-grade plutonium. Working closely with our European allies, the IAEA, and the United Nations, the United States needs to sustain international pressure on Tehran to prove that it is not trying to build nuclear weapons.
Finally, the Bush administration has undermined America's credibility on nonproliferation by launching an effort to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons, including low-yield "bunker busters." Whatever marginal military utility such weapons might yield is vastly outweighed by America's interest in reinforcing global norms against nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
Road map to nowhere. The Bush administration's churlish determination to do things differently from its predecessor has come to grief in the Middle East. Noting that President Clinton devoted countless hours to trying to nudge the Palestinians and Israelis toward a peace settlement, only to be rebuffed by Yasser Arafat, the Bush administration chose to stand aloof from the conflict until the parties decided on their own to resume talks. That didn't happen, and the United States watched helplessly as the two sides locked themselves in a vicious, tit-for-tat cycle of retaliation that has claimed thousands of lives.
After the decisive American victory in Iraq, the administration finally bestirred itself and unfolded its "road map" to Middle East peace. But this plan unraveled when the Palestinians failed to suppress terror groups and Israel failed to make a meaningful commitment to closing illegal settlements.
The Bush administration got one thing right: By refusing to deal with the unreliable Arafat, it forced the Palestinians to choose new leaders to negotiate with Israel. But the president failed to give former Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas timely support or to put serious pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to shut down illegal settlements. The result is another round of dashed hopes and renewed carnage. Arafat is back in full charge, and the Israelis are building a security fence through the West Bank to acquire unilaterally the security the Palestinians seem unable or unwilling to grant them.
The Bush policy of disengagement has been a dismal failure. What's required to break the impasse is forceful intervention by a U.S. president willing to commit his energies and prestige to mediating the conflict.
U.S. economic leadership. In addition to his failing foreign policy, Bush has promoted domestic policies that weaken the economic foundations of U.S. global leadership. A looming $600 billion budget deficit, a projected $5 trillion debt, $1.3 trillion in reckless tax cuts -- all these serve to undermine America's ability to advance its national interests, pay for nation-building abroad, and sustain an ambitious foreign policy. And by choosing trade policies that revive protectionism at home and abroad -- on steel and farm products, for instance -- the Bush administration has stalled progress toward expanding trade and helped to scuttle the World Trade Organization's Doha round in Cancun, Mexico. The "Cancun swoon" could prove costly: Economists estimate that successful completion of the round would generate an additional $500 billion in world trade.
The Democratic alternative. Progressive internationalism, as
recently proposed by a group of Democratic foreign policy thinkers, is the most
promising alternative to Bush's failing policies. [The full proposal, "Progressive
Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy," is available at ppionline.org.]
This new strategy goes beyond the Bush administration's narrow focus on military
power to mobilize America's "soft power" -- trade, aid, multilateral institutions,
and the broad appeal of human rights and democracy. At the same time, it updates
the tough-minded internationalism of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Clinton.
It would build the world's most technologically
advanced military while advancing liberal democracy abroad, reinvigorating America's
strategic alliances, and keeping mass destruction weapons out of the hands of
rogue dictators. In addition, it would plug gaps in homeland defense and undo
Bush administration tax and budget policies that have brought back huge deficits
that undermine U.S. global economic leadership. Progressive internationalism
also challenges the Bush administration to reconsider America's partnerships
with such "friendly" autocracies as Saudi Arabia; putting stability over democracy
in the Middle East has produced an unstable status quo while fanning anti-American
sentiments.
In addition to scoring Bush's unilateralism and the narrow approach of the neo-imperialist
right, the proponents of progressive internationalism -- including this author
-- take on the protectionist, pacifist tendencies of the non-interventionist
left.
We write: "Too many on the left seem incapable of taking America's side in
international disputes. Viewing multilateralism as an end in itself, they lose
sight of goals, such as fighting terrorism or ending gross human rights abuses,
which sometimes require the United States to act -- if need be outside a sometimes
ineffectual United Nations."
With such a robust strategy, Democrats can take on President Bush in the area of his presumed strength -- if they have the courage to seize it.
Blueprint Keywords: Extra Foreign Policy
