They'd Better Clarify Tonight
Bush must explain why his doctrine is better than Kerry's Soft Realism.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
- Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
Margaret Thatcher once sat down with the editors of The Wall Street Journal to explain, along the way, her disagreement with the editorial page's views of her government's handling of Hong Kong. At the end of her disquisition, the aptly named Iron Lady leaned forward and said, "Do I make myself clear?"
Mrs. Thatcher's indisputable clarity of meaning comes to mind as we settle in to hear Messrs. Bush and Kerry respond to questions in tonight's "town hall" debate. It is the conventional wisdom that Mr. Bush expressed himself poorly about Iraq last week and that Mr. Kerry's foreign-policy agenda, fogged in for months, suddenly came clear.
Iraq dominates the debates, as it should. But neither man has made sufficiently clear during the campaign how he intends to position U.S. foreign policy in the world beyond Baghdad, the world we live in now, after September 11.
Mr. Kerry has set up Iraq as a stand-in for the whole wide world. Reading back through the text of last week's debate, one finds Mr. Kerry citing the insurgent violence in Iraq alone as sufficient reason for voters to hand over management of the entire post-9/11 world to John Kerry.
But we aren't voting for crisis manager-in-chief. Something larger is on the table for judgment from the American electorate than the problems in the Sunni Triangle.
George Bush, speaking in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., this week properly identified the fulcrum of the argument. "Senator Kerry," he said, "approaches the world with a September the 10th mindset." He then said: "After September the 11th, our object in the war on terror is not to wait for the next attack and respond, but to prevent attacks by taking the fight to the enemy" (emphasis added).
While the thrust of Mr. Bush's statement has been a subject in foreign-policy writing for some two years, the campaign itself hasn't made clear to voters how different the world views of these two men are. Yes, the two candidates "agree" on training the Iraqis and such minutia, but these are trees in the global forest.
In an important article in the September issue of Commentary (and excerpted here) on the competing visions of foreign affairs post-9/11, Norman Podhoretz identified the formative moment in the policy that Mr. Bush is now arguing before the voters, citing his Sept. 20, 2001, address to Congress: "Whether George W. Bush had been a strictly conventional realist in the mold of his father, he was now politically born again as a passionate democratic idealist of the Reaganite stamp. It was this speech that marked the emergence of the Bush Doctrine."
A year later, Mr. Bush formalized this doctrine in the National Security Strategy of the United States. There Mr. Bush made clear that he believed the world had entered a phase unlike any before: "The United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. . . . We cannot let our enemies strike first."
It is not merely Iraq that John Kerry is running against as a "colossal mistake," but the whole sweep of global policy laid out in the Bush national security strategy two years ago. Beyond pre-empting terror at its source, Mr. Bush articulated a vision committed to "free enterprise," pro-growth regulatory policies and low tax rates. "Decades of massive development assistance" he calls "a failed strategy." He includes NATO in his coalitions of the "able and willing" but that is contingent on Europe spending more on defense modernization.
Together, this combination of policies could be expected to bring forth opposition from Democrats, the U.N. (both its antidemocratic members and its bureaucracies), the world of nongovernmental organizations and the European establishment. And it has. The Bush doctrine--emphasizing aggressive pre-emptive offense and aggressive free-market economics--breaks with the postwar status quos of both U.S. liberals and many conservatives. Ergo, the U.S. is now "going it alone." Translation: without them. Mr. Kerry is now leading that opposition. It is this opposition that caused Poland's president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, to pointedly rebuke Mr. Kerry's notion of "allies" in the first debate.
No Kerry Doctrine exists. But an oft-cited July 4 op-ed piece in the Washington Post comes closest. It's generally agreed that this piece aligned Mr. Kerry with the "realist" foreign-policy school most often associated now with Brent Scowcroft, James Baker and Mr. Bush's father. Old school.
Mr. Kerry admirably cited their traditional realpolitik in the first debate. The current issue of National Interest carries two articles by Kerry-supporting foreign-policy specialists articulating this vision. One is called "Liberal Realism," the other "Real Democratik."
But this isn't Sen. Henry Jackson's liberal democratik or even Joe Lieberman's. It is John Kerry's and that of the modern, post-Vietnam Democratic Party. It would be more accurate to call Mr. Kerry's foreign-policy Soft Realism. Soft Realism will respond if attacked (as stated policy anyway), pursue a consensus policy brokered with France, Germany and the U.N. Secretary General and substitute multilateral sanctions for pre-emptive action.
In a telling moment, Mr. Kerry said that Mr. Bush was "intoxicated with American might." As a soft realist, Mr. Kerry will steer clear of "American might." Mr. Kerry's foreign-policy vision, one suspects, will not be carried out in Baghdad or Kabul but in Georgetown, Geneva and Turtle Bay. (Question for Mr. Kerry: Is the problem not so much that this is the "wrong war," but that it is simply, a war?)
Let's put these competing policies for the post-9/11 age to a vote. The burden for elevating the importance of that vote lies with George Bush. Mr. Bush's vision, not John Kerry's, is up for renewal. In the first debate, he ill-served the men and women who've carried out his policy by failing to describe in any detail of their achievements in Afghanistan or Iraq. And why the weird Bush refusal to identify Mr. Kerry's cherished "allies" as the hell-no-we-won't-go duo of France and Germany?
This election is a four-year pitch into a dangerous world. Smoke him out, George!
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