What Might a Bipartisan Foreign Policy Look Like Posted by David Shorr

Since I was prime mover behind this just-released bipartisan consensus statement, I'll let everyone read it and refrain from offering comment until after it provokes any significant reactions. The drafters / signers (incl. Hurlburt, Nossel, and Katulis) are listed at the end.

Comments

[Null]

Accomplished foreign policy experts? Some people on this list are, like Derek Chollet and Steve Biegun, but some others -- you have got to be kidding me ....

[David Shorr]

Buck stops here. I recruited them and thought I was setting the bar at an appopriate level, but oh well.

[Mike M.]

This is really interesting and well done. I want to respond in more detail over the weekend. My quick take is that I love turning the War on Terror into a Battle of Ideas but that I think you're all too sanguine about the effects of globalization on the world's poor (and in that, I include the poor in the US).

[Mike M.]

Also, any discussion of US security concerns needs more emphasis on the preservation of civil rights within the US.

[Dan Kervick]

Well the document seems a bit limited, David, although perhaps the purposes of the group were very limited to begin with. It certainly doesn’t come close to offering a whole foreign policy, bipartisan or otherwise. There are really only two issues covered: the “battle of ideas” as it applies to the war on terror; and development through the promotion of globalized free trade. I’m guessing it was hard to find substantive agreement between liberals and conservatives on a broader array of suggestions for renewed international cooperation. The document also seems to focus rather narrowly on matters that go through the State Department. But perhaps its target audience is in the end only State Department bureaucrats.

Given that the United States has not faced a major terror attack in over six years now, I wonder why the group thought it was still so important to continue to focus so heavily on the so-called war on terror and the “long war”. Might it not be that terrorism, though still obviously an enduring security challenge, has been a bit overblown and is really not the number one security challenge? Personally, I’m feeling a lot more worried recently about old-fashioned big states with lots of nuclear weapons than about small non-state actors with limited capabilities. I’m also a bit concerned about the fragility of the global economy, global dependence on energy resources and global vulnerability to disruptions of those resources. And then of course there are all the huge quality of human existence issues that are not necessarily related to security, strictly speaking.

Personally, I don’t much like the notion of a “battle of ideas”. My philosophical training always compels me to be conscious of the fact that truth emerges from dialogue and reasoned discourse, and it is rarely the exclusive possession of one side in a conversation, whether the conversation is global and scale, or involves only two people. I’m just as interested in what we can learn from other peoples as I am in what we can teach them.

I guess it’s not much of a surprise to you that your group’s resolutely neoliberal approach to development and the global economy, based so much on the heavy privileging of private sector activity and free trade, doesn’t really appeal to me. Surely one of the problems on the US public diplomacy side is the extent to which the neoliberal agenda is seen by many of the world’s people as an exploitive transfer of public goods held by the many into the private hands of the few; a scheme for capital accumulation by foreign or transnational owners; and an oppressive system imposing debt, dependency and paternalistic foreign demands on local economies. Maybe you think this perception is all just a big overwrought mistake, and shows nothing but a failure to communicate. But couldn’t it be that some of these people are onto something? Perhaps what the world needs is not just more free trade and private capital accumulation, but a more managed approach aiming at economic systems founded specifically on principles of equality and the democratic control of resources and wealth, and conducive to the preservation of that equality?

[David Shorr]

No, it's not an entire foreign policy (I went for a cheap catchy headline for this post). You're also correct that some of the limitations are reflective of how far one side or the other was willing to go. If I were stopping to be fully rigorous, I suppose I'd join you in your view of how a healthy encounter of ideas works, but we could do a lot worse than what's here in picking a frame for all this stuff. By the way, don't you think the statement offers a pretty clear implication that terrorism isn't the mother of all international challenges?

[Dan Kervick]

By the way, don't you think the statement offers a pretty clear implication that terrorism isn't the mother of all international challenges?

Not really. The chief rationale given for the battle of ideas is its role in fighting terrorism and waging "The Long War". Every time I hear the phrase "The Long War", it creeps me out. The notion that we must be on a more-or-less permanent wartime footing because of the threat of terrorism is extremely dangerous in my view, and destructive of democracy. Unfortunately, the threat of terrorism is likely to be with us always, so long as the knowledge for building bombs and other deadly weapons exists. We had WWII and the "The Cold War" and now "The Long War." Not coincidently, the national security apparatus has grown immensely during this period, along with runaway executive power, secret agencies and secret budgets, bloated and unstoppable militarism, shrinking accountability and an overall loss of power by the American people to influence the foreign policy of their country.

If you and your friends insist so reflexively on renewed bipartisanship as the response to every threat to the existing order, perhaps you could at least consider moving beyond these small handfuls of "experts". The experts don't seem to share any of the concerns I just outlined. But when ordinary people do get concerned about those things, experts just seem to circle the wagons around the small official national security club, and powwow with their fellows in the other party.