A narrow foreign policy debate

They talked about the financial crisis. They talked about Iraq, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia, and about restoring America’s respect in the world. So granted, McCain and Obama provided answers on several important foreign policy issues facing our country today.

But what about trade? What about development? What about democracy promotion? What about the catastrophic failure of the Doha Round at the WTO? The complete omission of these topics from the so-called “foreign policy” debate borders on negligence. Of course American voters may not be interested in such topics (do they understand the significance of Doha?), but the job of the moderator and indeed the candidates is to hold themselves to a higher standard. Besides, if we want to fight global terrorism, or prevent a global economic recession, or restore our respect in the world, we could start by rewarding our allies with trade deals, supporting third world development, ensuring that responsible democracies have the resources to survive their perilous first years, and, above all, by committing ourselves to the vitally important Doha Round of trade talks at the WTO. These issues may not have the Cold War glamor of confronting Russia, or the “I told you so” quality of the Iraq question, but they are just as, or more, important to the future safety, security, and prosperity of our country.

John Bolton’s farcical “realism”

Republicans have always laid claim to some sort of realism in foreign policy. Meet force with force, they say, because that’s the only way to deal with bullies. Usually Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler is mentioned, as well as John Kennedy’s disastrous meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis. For reference take a look at John Bolton’s June 5 opinion in the LA Times.

The public has bought in to Republican “realism”. John McCain, for example, believes he would make a better commander in chief than Barack Obama and polls exist to show that the public agrees. Democrats, like Obama and John Kerry before him, are easily stereotyped by media pundits as wishy-washy pansies who think we can all just get along.

Nowhere has this depiction of Republicans and Democrats been made more clearly, or unfairly, than in John Bolton’s most recent opinion, again in the LA Times. Bolton not only claims that Barack Obama’s vision of the world is “radical”, “naive”, and “dangerous”, but also that Obama’s so far from the mainstream that he’s “on another planet”.

The crux of Bolton’s argument comes towards the middle of the article in a discussion of the Berlin Wall:

But beyond the incoherence [of Obama's foreign policy], there is a deeper problem, namely that “walls” exist not simply because of a lack of understanding about who is on the other side but because there are true differences in values and interests that lead to human conflict. The Berlin Wall itself was not built because of a failure of communication but because of the implacable hostility of communism toward freedom. The wall was a reflection of that reality, not an unfortunate mistake.

The distinction Bolton seems to be making is between realism and idealism. But Bolton, perhaps unknowingly, aligns himself with the idealist position. How so? Realism holds that conflict in international relations is owed to either the quest for power or the quest for security. For a realist, then, the Berlin Wall was either the consequence of two states struggling for power (irrespective of ideology), or of a failure of communication that spiraled out of control into the infamous security dilemma (often recognizable as an arms race or, in this case, as the building and militarizing of the Berlin Wall). But Bolton is not a realist.

Bolton’s position is deceptively idealist. He sees the Berlin Wall, and no doubt the Cold War, as a confrontation between two ideologies: communism and liberalism (although Bolton prefers the term freedom, which isn’t associated with effete senators from Massachusetts). He even anthropomorphizes communism, assigning it qualities like “hostility” and perhaps ‘evil’. In Bolton’s vision of the world ideas drive interests, not the other way around.

That said, let’s drop the semantics game and address the more practical implications of Bolton’s so-called “realism”. Should we agree with him that conflict between countries is best described as a titanic collision of competing and intractable ideologies, or might it be more realistic to acknowledge that cooperation is possible on the basis of shared interests? Is the Homo sapiens species really so different in France or Germany or Iraq or Iran that there isn’t any profit in confronting some challenges together? Bolton facetiously claims that Obama’s from another planet, but I’m more inclined to believe that Bolton’s from another planet. His “realism” is a farce; it can’t be realism if it has little or no basis in reality.