DEAN AND DEMS FOREIGN POLICY DISASTER


There was little surprising in the speech that Howard Dean gave yesterday. It could be summed up by the photo of Warren Christopher standing in the background of the lectern - behind all of the bluster, Dean is simply a mainstream Dem who will reverse Bush's radical course and bring us back to mainstream policies of the Clinton era. The problem is, that in contrast to its excellent record on most domestic issues, on foreign policy the Clinton Administration was not an unqualified success. Sure, it handled the details of diplomacy, international trade, and important unsexy issues like securing ex-Soviet weaponry well. But on the big challenges faced by the post-Cold War era - rogue states, failed states, Islamic terror and the impotence/irrelevance of international security organizations it failed miserably to rise to the occasion with a new vision. The current Dems, with the exception of Lieberman, fail to understand this and promote policies to address an alternate reality in which the UN is functional, the Europeans are not obsessed with coralling American power and ideology is irrelevant.

There is much that is problematic with the neocons radical approach that had driven the Bush Admistration's foreign policy agenda: its impatience with details, its blanket reliance on unitilateral solutions and its ideological puritanism that have fueled out-of-control turf wars with the State/CIA realist establishment. But on the big issues - on the importance of democracy promotion and the impotence of current international institutions for global security, they are correct. Perhaps one day, the Dems will move beyond their worship of the Clinton years to develop a foreign policy agenda that will create real multilateral alternatives to the neocon's vision. Until then, the United States is better off with the semi-competent execution of the Bush Agenda than with a flawless execution of a neo-Clintonian alternative.