IT’S HALF PAST NOON on a dreary Tuesday, and John Podesta, onetime chief of staff under President Clinton, is welcoming a crowd of several hundred Democrats gathered at a Marriott hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C. The occasion is “New American Strategies for Security and Peace,” a two-day conference coinciding with the launch of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank founded by Podesta, who will also serve as president and CEO. The center, he announces, is a “nonpartisan” institution. Podesta says this with a straight face, even though the crowd consists predominantly of former Clinton officials. Even though the conference, which is also sponsored by the paleoliberal American Prospect magazine and the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, bills itself as an opportunity to fashion the Democratic alternative to Bush administration foreign policy. And even though the keynote speaker, retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, is a Democratic candidate for president. (Podesta later explains that Clark was booked to speak at the conference before he announced his candidacy.)
From a certain point of view, however, “New American Strategies for Security and Peace” is a nonpartisan, even bipartisan, gathering. General Clark registered as a Democrat only a few weeks ago. One of the conference’s most hyped speeches is delivered by Republican senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. And the individual who figures most prominently at the conference is also a Republican–George W. Bush.
The Democratic foreign policy types at Tuesday’s conference appear unified in their opposition to a single enemy, and that enemy is the current president of the United States. Podesta never mentions the president by name in his opening remarks, but he does go after the current attorney general, a reliable proxy for Bush. “I am not one who subscribes to the John Ashcroft theory of political dialogue,” Podesta says. “I do not question the patriotism of administration officials, nor their commitment to protecting the American people.”
Others have different theories about the nature of the enemy. Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the American Prospect, says that “a radical fringe has taken control of American foreign policy.” Ambassador Joseph Wilson, these days perhaps the most famous former National Security Council official, says a “neoconservative juggernaut” is responsible for today’s foreign policy. Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s national security adviser, says Bush engineered “a radical shift in the nature of American foreign policy.”
“The root of the problem,” intones Gen. Clark, “lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Yet what’s striking about the foreign policy vision at the conference is how similar it is to the president’s. No one disputes that it was right to topple the Taliban after 9/11. Few argue that it was necessary to end Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. And some, like Senator Hillary Clinton, even credit aspects of the administration’s positions on controversial multilateral agreements like the Kyoto accords. “The fact is [Bush officials] have some good arguments,” Clinton tells the crowd, before adding that the administration’s stance on Kyoto was nevertheless a “petulant exercise of ideology.”
Most of the criticism, in fact, doesn’t counter Bush’s foreign policy goals at all. Instead, these Democrats focus on process. Susan Rice, assistant secretary of state for African affairs under Clinton, says the administration leads “in a poor and selfish way.” A common refrain is that the president “squandered” opportunities to bolster the goodwill of our allies after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “American unilateralism undermines our good intentions,” says Clyde Prestowitz, the author of “Rogue Nation,” in which the rogue nation is–you guessed it–the United States.
When Senator Clinton takes the stage Wednesday morning, she sounds like many other Democrats in Congress, especially when they’re voting on some aspect of Bush’s foreign policy. They talk big–Clinton criticized Bush’s “radical” agenda–but then they side with the president. And that’s pretty much what Clinton and others do at the conference. At a media roundtable, for example, Berger said his “greatest fear” was that the administration might pull out of Iraq too quickly–an argument more commonly associated with the neoconservative right.
It wasn’t much of a surprise, then, that by the end of “New American Strategies for Security and Peace,” the question that the conference was meant to address hadn’t been answered. Namely: Do the Democrats have a foreign policy?
“The Democratic party speaks with a cacophony of voices at this point” on foreign policy, says Democratic senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, an advocate of the Iraq war who did not attend the Center for American Progress’s conference. “What we’re seeing here is that when you’re out of power, there is less coherence to your party’s message.”
Still, Bayh added his own voice to the cacophony last Thursday as he announced the release of “Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy.” Signed by 15 Democratic intellectuals, including the Brookings Institution’s Kenneth Pollack and the Hoover Institution’s Larry Diamond, this document stakes out unusual ground in the fight over the future of Democratic foreign policy. “Unusual” because the document attacks Bush’s policies from the right: “While some complain that the Bush administration has been too radical in recasting America’s national security strategy, we believe it has not been ambitious or imaginative enough.”
The authors of “Progressive Internationalism” call for increased attention to threats posed by Iran and North Korea. They advocate “the bold exercise of American power.” They support lessening American dependence on Mideast oil and expanding free trade. They embrace the American military as an instrument for advancing our national interests. “Too many on the left,” they write, “seem incapable of taking America’s side in international disputes, reflexively oppose the use of force, and begrudge the resources required to keep our military strong.”
Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank associated with the centrist New Democrats, and one of the authors of “Progressive Internationalism,” argues that an anti-Bush tide on the left has undermined Democrats’ judgment on Bush’s foreign policy. Says Marshall: “The question of Iraq got caught up in this deep antipathy among liberal activists to George Bush. And the desire to be opposed to Bush led to opposition on Iraq.”
“Democrats currently have a credibility problem on national security,” says Bayh. “But the Democratic party has a long and honorable tradition of defending American interests. We should harken back to that tradition.”
The vision put forth in “Progressive Internationalism” is one of three competing foreign policies in today’s Democratic party. Another is that which you find at events like the Center for American Progress’s “New American Strategies” conference.
The third and most worrisome is the one you find at events like the recent “End the Occupation” march in Washington, organized by the International ANSWER coalition, which opposed the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. This is exactly the foreign policy vision the authors of “Progressive Internationalism” wish to defeat. It is equally suspicious of American power and the Bush administration. Its chief advocates, Democratic presidential candidates Dennis Kucinich and Rev. Al Sharpton, have called for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. As one young marcher from West Virginia told Salon magazine’s Michelle Goldberg, “I wasn’t for [the war] in the first place, so I don’t feel I have a responsibility” for what would happen if America were to suddenly renege on its foreign commitments. A good name for this vision is “regressive isolationism.”
Regressive isolationists don’t make up a majority of Democrats. But their outlook often bleeds into Democratic policy debates, not least because of Kucinich and Sharpton’s presence in the presidential race. The antiwar energies tapped by the regressive isolationists have also played a part in Howard Dean’s ascendancy.
What are the chances of the regressive isolationists capturing the party in next year’s primaries? Senator Bayh likes to point out that twice in the last eight presidential elections–in 1984 and 1972–his party lost 49 states. “You have to be out of touch for that to happen,” he says.
Are today’s Democrats similarly out of touch? Bayh says it’s “too soon to tell.”
Maybe not. A recent poll by Democratic strategists Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Bob Shrum spoke volumes about where the party is on foreign policy. As Byron York reported in the Hill newspaper, when pollsters read aloud a dozen topics to Democratic primary voters–things like the environment, education, fighting terrorism, and homeland security–and asked which worried them the most, the results were staggering. Among New Hampshire primary voters, fighting terrorism and homeland security tied for last place at 2 percent. The results were the same in South Carolina. In Iowa, only 1 percent said they were that worried about fighting terrorism.
Pollsters also asked respondents which of the following two statements they agreed with: “America’s security depends on building strong ties with other nations,” or “Bottom line, America’s security depends on its own military strength.” In New Hampshire, 77 percent agreed with the first statement. A mere 17 percent agreed with the second. In South Carolina, 56 percent agreed that American security depends on good relations with its allies, and 33 percent believed that military power was the most important aspect of American security. In Iowa, 76 percent agreed with the first statement. Only 18 percent agreed with the second.
So maybe the question the Democratic foreign policy establishment should be asking isn’t whether they have a foreign policy vision. It’s what they should do about the far-left vision already embraced by the Democratic base.
Matthew Continetti is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.
