THE KERRY IMPERATIVE:
Real Clear Politics
John Kerry gave a big national security speech yesterday. In it he outlined four "imperatives" for his new national security policy: 1) build & strengthen international alliances, 2) modernize the military, 3) deploy all resources against terrorism (diplomatic, economic, etc), and 4) break our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
Numbers 2 & 3 are rhetorical window dressing. They are already being done by the Bush administration to great effect.
Number 4 is a political nod to the environmental wing of the Democratic party and a whack at Bush-Cheney Big Oil, but it's also a long-term plan (10 years) that may or may not produce any real gains in national security.
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The real meat of John Kerry's new national security policy - and the distinction he's been trying to make between himself and the President for months now - is point number 1: John Kerry will rebuild the global alliances destroyed by George W. Bush over the last four years and restore the credibility of the United States within the international community.
Put aside, at least for the moment, that Kerry has repeatedly dismissed the coalition of 30-plus countries operating in Iraq as "fraudulent." Exactly how will President John Kerry accomplish the goal of rebuilding our alliances?
Out of a speech yesterday that was over 2,900 words long, Kerry devoted a measly 215 words to explaining the single most important imperative of his new national security policy. Here they are:<font size=2>
"The first new imperative represents a return to the principle that guided us in peril and victory through the past century – alliances matter, and the United States must lead them.
Never has this been more true than in the war on terrorism.
As president, my number one security goal will be to prevent the terrorists from gaining weapons of mass murder. And our overriding mission will be to disrupt and destroy their terrorist cells.
Because al Qaeda is a network with many branches, we must take the fight to the enemy on every continent – and enlist other countries in that cause.
America must always be the world’s paramount military power. But we can magnify our power through alliances. We simply can’t go it alone – or rely on a coalition of the few. The threat of terrorism demands alliances on a global scale – to find the extremist groups, to guard ports and stadiums, to share intelligence, and to get the terrorists before they get us. In short, we need a “coalition of the able” – and in truth, no force on earth is more able than the United States and its allies.
We must build that force – and we can. We can be strong without being stubborn. Indeed, that is ultimately the only way we can succeed. "<font size=4>
That's it, folks. Personally, I'd say that's a little lean in the specifics department. Kerry's overarching national security vision boils down to something like, "trust me America, I'll get the French and Germans to like us again."
I'm being a little flip, but this is deadly serious stuff. The limitations (or perils, if you prefer) of a multilateralist driven foreign policy are real, especially if they are conducted at the direction of a person who has demonstrated such a marked capacity for ambivalence and an aversion to the use of force for anything other than humanitarian purposes.
In the Washington Post today, Jim VandeHei reports that
Kerry's own advisors can't even explain when and where we
might possibly exert force under his new vision:
Still, it is unclear how Kerry's multilateralism would administer military force. In a briefing before the speech, Kerry's foreign policy advisers said it is uncertain whether the senator from Massachusetts would have waged war with Iraq if he were president.
Since it seems unclear to some people, let me help clarify: there is no way - and I mean not a snowball's chance - that John Kerry would have taken military action against Saddam Hussein without the explicit authorization of the UN Security Council. Kerry has made it clear that the unanimous vote on Resolution 1441 calling for "severe consequences" against Saddam wasn't good enough.
Remember, Kerry wasn't even in favor of taking military action after Saddam Hussein had invaded another country and his army was pillaging Kuwait City in 1991.
Remember also that there wouldn't even have been a Resolution 1441 pushed through the Security Council in the first place if President Bush hadn't laid down the markers of just how serious a matter Iraq's full compliance was to the United States of America.
In other words, it's almost beyond dispute that if John Kerry were president, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. Hussein and his sons would still be running a rogue state, flouting international law, destabilizing the region, and profiting daily from a corrupt and scandalous UN -un oil-for-food program.
The more apt question - and one which I think does remain unclear given Kerry's overriding concern for multilaterism - is the following hypothetical: if for some reason one of our allies (France, Germany, and/or Russia) had objected to an invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, would John Kerry still have put boots on the ground? If faced with a similar choice in the future, what will he do?
As with so many other parts of his candidacy, Kerry is offering a return to the policies of the Clinton administration. His foreign policy vision is being crafted by the same people who led us through much of the 1990's: Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, William Perry, Richard Holbrooke, and Rand Beers.
Americans can make their own judgments about the consequences and results of the policies and policymakers who guided us before September 11. But Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Kerry advisor, doesn't paint too pretty a picture:
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"They might as well go into the situation room and commit the same mistakes they did before," said Mr. Gelb, a former New York Times foreign affairs columnist. "The ideas they bring to the table are basically ideas that worried the American people for the last 20 years - whether Democrats are clear-sighted enough, tough enough."
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To a very large degree the question this November will be whether the public wants to hand the keys to America's national security back to these people again.
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