A More Civil Discourse -- Foreign Policy Wonks' Edition Posted by David Shorr

As the country gropes for ways to lower the temperature and make political disagreement less disagreeable, I thought I'd look back to a 2006-07 initiative that brought together a bipartisan group of 20 foreign policy experts. The Stanley Foundation's Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide project was the brainchild of Derek Chollet, who is about to move from the State Department Office of Policy Planning to the White House NSC staff. Together with our our conservative friend and colleague Policy Review Editor Tod Lindberg, we recruited ten bipartisan pairs of co-authors who were commissioned to find points of agreement on different areas of policy.

In the preface for the resulting book, I explained how the project worked and offered some reflections on foreign policy bipartisanship and the possibility for a more constructive debate about policy. I quote a couple passages below, but if you'd like to read the preface, it's pages ix-xiii at Google Books.

Here's how I described our consensus-seeking enterprise:

Politics today leaves little room for deliberation over issues; by and large, it is total war between sworn enemites. Rather than winning arguments on the particular merits of a matter, each side seeks to thoroughly discredit the other. As a result, what the public sees primarly are the caricatures that both parties draw to define their counterparts.

and

As a shared frustration with the low level of political discourse, many of the essays set aside the false choices that many politicians have sought to use as domestic political wedges: international law or power realities, China as partner or adversary, arms control regimes or the direct disruption of some nations' efforts to acquire the bomb, preservation of due process or the aggressive pursuit of terrorists suspects. In the place of these either/or choices, the authors stress the importance of managing inherent tensions and striking careful balances.

I'm not sure precisely how to apply these observations (though I took a stab recently at a respectful exchange on the question of sanctions), Maybe the key thing to say is that a resevoir of goodwill, personal relationships, and experience with cooperation do exist within the foreign policy community.

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