Abstract

A WORLD NEGLECTED: THE FOREIGN POLICY DEBATE WE SHOULD BE HAVING

The article looks at the foreign policy debate prior to the 2004 United States presidential election. This election, more than any other since 1980, could turn on questions of foreign policy and national security. Yet despite the obvious difference in worldview of the two candidates, and the increasingly acrimonious exchanges between them, the two campaigns have staked out remarkably similar positions on Iraq, the "war on terrorism," and more generally on America's position in the world. The "war on terrorism" has always been a troubling concept, in part because it leaves to everyone's political imagination just who the enemy is and in part because it provides a license to ignore the political background to terrorist activity and to overemphasize a military response. Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's campaign, which has recently begun to mount a more coherent critique of President George W. Bush's failures, has been correct to criticize the war in Iraq as a diversion of resources from the fight against Al Qaeda, but it has been wrong to accept other aspects of the "war on terrorism" so uncritically. Iran's and North Korea's nuclear weapons programs are not just the result of Iran's regional ambitions or North Korea's economic blackmail goals, but of real security fears, some of them fostered by American policy and, in the case of Iran, by Israel's nuclear capabilities. After reading the policy statements of the Bush and Kerry campaigns, one would think that the American homeland was under daily terrorist attack, that Iran and North Korea were readying nuclear arsenals for war, and that the future of the world depended upon America succeeding in Iraq. They continue to see the United States as the center of the universe; in fact, we have been on the periphery of nearly all of the most important geopolitical and geoeconomic developments of the past half-decade.