As the lead editorial in today's Washington Post noted, all the top-tier Democratic presidential candidates have now delivered major foreign policy addresses, four just this week. They all illuminate a clear fault line that separates Democrats from the Bush administration on how best to protect Americans and advance their interests in a dangerous world: internationalism versus unilateralism.
This fundamental difference in approach is not simply a matter of each party's preferred diplomatic style. It represents a crucial difference in national security strategy. During George W. Bush's presidency, we've learned the hard way that going it alone makes it harder, not easier, for the United States to achieve its security goals and win the war on terrorism. If Democrats forcefully advocate a tough-minded progressive internationalism that harnesses smart diplomacy and military power to our country's democratic values and long-range strategic interests, they can win the national security debate in 2004. Most Americans understand and support our country's long tradition of international leadership and collective security. They will support a return to this tradition so long as Democrats show a clear-eyed understanding of emerging threats to our national security, and are unshakable in their commitment to use force when necessary to protect Americans against terrorists and other malefactors.
Most of the major presidential candidates have met this crucial condition. But the one outlier is the front-runner, Howard Dean.
Gov. Dean's foreign policy speech in Los Angeles got more attention than others for two reasons. First, it was telegraphed by his campaign as evidence of his repositioning as a "centrist" on foreign policy. And second, it contained the deeply unfortunate assertion that Saddam Hussein's capture by U.S. troops did not make America safer. That line was not just another trademark "off-message" ad-lib by Dean, since one of the speech's key weaknesses was a glaring disconnect between his defiant defense of his opposition to the war in Iraq, and his efforts to make it clear he supports the use of force to defend America's interests elsewhere in the world. Nowhere does he offer an alternative course the United States could have taken in dealing with the threat that Dean has acknowledged Saddam posed.
That's not the only disconnect in Dean's speech. It endorsed an assortment of good Democratic foreign policy proposals, including: a reinvigoration of traditional alliances and multilateral organizations, a much more robust commitment to non-proliferation and homeland security, and a wider war on the causes of terrorism in the poverty and despair so evident in the Middle East and other regions (though the neo-protectionist candidate conspicuously did not follow Joe Lieberman and John Kerry in promoting a full-scale trade initiative to break the Middle East's isolation from the global economy).
But there's no central vision or architecture holding these proposals together. Dean called the war on terrorism his central preoccupation, but spoke of terrorism, rogue states, and weapons of mass destruction as abstractions, not as real threats emerging from specific people and places. Similarly, his call for rebuilding old alliances and multilateral institutions seemed to be based on the illusion of a frictionless world in which conflicts of interest and differences of opinion will simply go away once George W. Bush is removed from office. There was no mention of the growing temptation facing our Western European allies to abandon their role in collective security and make the European Union a political and economic counterforce to the United States. And there was no mention at all of Russia and China.
The real message of the speech was that Howard Dean's strategy for protecting America's interests and values is simply to replace George W. Bush. For those Americans who do not believe Bush is the primary source of evil or danger in the world, Dean's posture is sure to look like the sort of "soft multilateralism" and aversion to military action that earned Democrats so much mistrust on national security in the 1970s and 1980s. That's why John Kerry was justified in charging that Dean espouses a "'Simon Says' foreign policy where America only moves if others move first." And that's why Joe Lieberman was justified in arguing that "Governor Dean has made a series of dubious judgments and irresponsible statements in this campaign that together signal he would in fact take us back to the days when we Democrats were not trusted to defend America's security."
The most succinct line this week about what America needs to protect and advance its interests and values -- and what Democrats should stand for -- came not from a presidential candidate, but from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY): "We need a tough-minded, muscular foreign and defense policy, one that not only respects our allies and seeks new friends as it strikes at known enemies, but which is understood and supported by a majority of the American people."
That's also a good prescription for the message Democrats must embrace to win the argument with George W. Bush on foreign policy and national security in 2004.
