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January 04, 2008

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.

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Comments

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 ....

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

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).

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

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