The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [144]
Perhaps someone inside the White House has clear answers to these questions. But our allies—and for that matter our enemies—certainly don’t know what those answers are. More important, neither do the American people. Without a well-articulated strategy that the public supports and the world understands, America will lack the legitimacy—and ultimately the power—it needs to make the world safer than it is today. We need a revised foreign policy framework that matches the boldness and scope of Truman’s post–World War II policies—one that addresses both the challenges and the opportunities of a new millennium, one that guides our use of force and expresses our deepest ideals and commitments.
I don’t presume to have this grand strategy in my hip pocket. But I know what I believe, and I’d suggest a few things that the American people should be able to agree on, starting points for a new consensus.
To begin with, we should understand that any return to isolationism—or a foreign policy approach that denies the occasional need to deploy U.S. troops—will not work. The impulse to withdraw from the world remains a strong undercurrent in both parties, particularly when U.S. casualties are at stake. After the bodies of U.S. soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993, for example, Republicans accused President Clinton of squandering U.S. forces on ill-conceived missions; it was partly because of the experience in Somalia that candidate George W. Bush vowed in the 2000 election never again to expend American military resources on “nation building.” Understandably, the Bush Administration’s actions in Iraq have produced a much bigger backlash. According to a Pew Research Center poll, almost five years after the 9/11 attacks, 46 percent of Americans have concluded that the United States should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”
The reaction has been particularly severe among liberals, who see in Iraq a repeat of the mistakes America made in Vietnam. Frustration with Iraq and the questionable tactics the Administration used to make its case for the war has even led many on the left to downplay the threat posed by terrorists and nuclear proliferators; according to a January 2005 poll, self-identified conservatives were 29 points more likely than liberals to identify destroying Al Qaeda as one of their top foreign policy goals, and 26 points more likely to mention denying nuclear weapons to hostile groups or nations. The top three foreign policy objectives among liberals, on the other hand, were withdrawing troops from Iraq, stopping the spread of AIDS, and working more closely with our allies.
The objectives favored by liberals have merit. But they hardly constitute a coherent national security policy. It’s useful to remind ourselves, then, that Osama bin Laden is not Ho Chi Minh, and that the threats facing the United States today are real, multiple, and potentially devastating. Our recent policies have made matters worse, but if we pulled out of Iraq tomorrow, the United States would still be a target, given its dominant position in the existing international order. Of course, conservatives are just as misguided if they think we can simply eliminate “the evildoers” and then let the world fend for itself. Globalization makes our economy, our health, and our security all captive to events on the other side of the world. And no other nation on earth has a greater capacity to shape that global system, or to build consensus around a new set of international rules that expand the zones of freedom, personal safety, and economic well-being. Like it or not, if we want to make America more secure, we are going to have to help make the world more secure.
The second thing