Candidates foiled by foolish acts
The three presidential candidates and much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment all favor presenting a “kinder, gentler” face to the world than President Bush’s, but both parties have opened big holes in their appeal.
For the Democrats, it’s union-pandering opposition to free trade, which will deny foreigners access to U.S. markets — and vice versa — and wipe out the benefits of the big increases in foreign aid that they advocate.
Democratic Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton are vying with each other to denounce the landmark North American Free Trade Agreement, a net boon to all countries involved, and Democrats in Congress are blocking the Colombia Free Trade Agreement despite it including labor and environmental standards.
Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are mounting new efforts to embarrass Democrats — and their own nominee, Sen. John McCain — with restrictive new measures on immigration.
Iraq remains a major political burden for McCain, with most polls showing that 60 percent of voters believe the war was a “mistake,” although polling also indicates increasing awareness that the McCain-backed “surge” is achieving results.
Almost daily, Obama and Clinton repeat the charge that McCain advocates a “100-year war” in Iraq — a canard that McCain should have taken steps to correct in his recent major foreign-policy speech in Los Angeles.
What McCain actually said in a January town hall meeting in New Hampshire was that U.S. troops might be stationed in a peaceful Iraq for 100 years on the same no-casualty basis that they’ve been in Germany for 60 years and South Korea for 50.
Beyond those two big issues, however, a broad consensus is developing that the United States needs to change its image and practice in the world by emphasizing diplomacy, development and multilateralism instead of concentrating on exercises of military power.
“Smart power” is the tagline being used by a number of establishment figures in both parties to describe the combination of aid, trade, exchanges and diplomacy needed to supplement, though not replace, America’s military might.
Emphasis on smart power is a recurrent theme for Obama and Clinton. But McCain, too, is sounding a tune different from the tough-guy talk from Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during Bush’s first term — and which still lingers in world opinion despite significant exercises in disease-fighting and diplomacy during Bush’s second term.
In Los Angeles, McCain reiterated his conviction that terrorism is “the central threat of our time” but also declared that “the United States cannot lead by virtue of its power alone. We must be strong politically, economically and militarily. But we must also lead by attracting others to our cause.”
McCain also hopes his past advocacy of comprehensive immigration reform will distinguish him from Congressional Republicans, who this month proposed a bevy of new measures designed to catch and deport illegal immigrants and punish employers who hire them.
In the meantime, Democrats threaten to reverse free-trade policies pioneered by presidents of their party, including Bill Clinton. The 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, tripled trade between the United States, Canada and Mexico and contributed to 58 percent growth in U.S. manufacturing output between 1993 and 2006.
Clinton has gone so far as to question whether the United States should pursue worldwide free-trade agreements — a sure way to condemn poor countries to continued poverty. And rejection of the Colombia agreement would be a boon to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a declared enemy of the United States.
The bottom line is that the candidates are talking a good new game in foreign policy. But in action, they are threatening to adopt policies as ugly as any advocated by Bush.
Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.