Kerry's Muscular Internationalism
In an early February editorial, "Time for clarity from the front-runner," the Rocky Mountain News questioned how U.S. Sen. John Kerry would conduct America’s foreign policy as president, calling his views on the use of American power "conflicted." In fact, a Kerry administration will embrace a “muscular internationalist” agenda with tough-minded diplomacy, backed by the credible use of force, that will unite the world in the war on terror.
That should not come as much of a surprise. Historically, Kerry is a lineal descendant of the Democratic internationalists: Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy. Recognizing that U.S. global leadership requires strong military forces and the will to use them, Kerry rejects the left's attempts to cast Democrats as a reflexively anti-war party. In fact, his position in the race as the likely nominee reflects the party's rank-and-file collective mind on national security.
For example, on Iraq, he voted to support the war but demanded that President Bush aggressively challenge the United Nations to live up to its responsibilities to disarm Saddam Hussein. He saw the Iraq crisis as a test of Western resolve and the United Nations' credibility as an effective instrument of collective security to enforce and help guarantee the principles of international law.
That position faithfully reflected Americans' instinctive internationalism which would have much rather attacked Iraq with United Nations backing than without it. At the same time, this "yes, but" policy irked the antiwar left and some political commentators, who prefer the parties to take starkly opposing stands on every issue, no matter how complicated.
It also put Kerry at odds with the "blustery unilateralism" of Bush and his band of neoconservatives who seem to yearn for a new Augustan age based on unfettered U.S. power. Bush’s “my way or highway” approach unnecessarily alienated America’s friends and potential partners.
While successful in war, this White House was anything but in the months leading up to the attack on Iraq, triggering the most virulent wave of anti-American sentiment in decades. In addition, the president's rash decision to go-it-alone has left us trying to win the peace - a much more complicated and expensive proposition - without significant contributions of either troops or money from the international community.
Not surprisingly, postwar Iraq revealed Bush’s fundamental weaknesses - an unreflective nature that sees the world in black and white and retreats easily into platitudes; a tendency, when challenged, to assert 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.
In sharp contrast, a Kerry administration will advocate policies that see no contradiction between national strength and international cooperation, between the willingness to use America's power for liberal ends and the recognition that working through global alliances and institutions makes us stronger, not weaker.
It will favor internationalizing Iraq's reconstruction, sharing economic burdens and political risks with our allies and the United Nations and quelling widespread fears in the region that America will become the new colonial overlord. It will repair the breach in the Atlantic alliance, by expanding NATO and refocusing it on the new common threats of terrorism and proliferation.
That foreign policy will enable Kerry to aggressively take on Bush in the area where he is supposedly strong. The White House should be worried.
Jim Gibson is president of the Colorado Democratic Leadership Council, a think tank advocating new ideas and the Democratic Party's historic commitment to economic growth, personal responsibility, community, individual liberty and equal opportunity. This commentary was published in the Rocky Mountain News on March 8, 2004.