QandO

August 05, 2004

Mr. Kerry, which is it?
Posted by McQ

Max Boot, of the LA Times, is confused. It seems if you do as John Kerry has asked, and judge him by his record, one gets confused trying to guess which foreign policy school he follows ... or touts.

There are three main schools of American foreign policy: isolationism, idealism and realism. At various points in his career — sometimes at various points in the same speech — Kerry has championed all of them.

I'm not sure if that's a surprise to Max (I don't think it is), but given his record on almost everything, its certainly not a surprise to me.

Isolationism: His first paean to isolationism came with his vocal opposition to the Vietnam war. But it especially developed after his election to the Senate in 1984:

After winning election to the Senate in 1984, he was a vocal critic of support for the Contras fighting to free Nicaragua from the Sandinista dictatorship; he even journeyed to Managua to shake hands with strongman Daniel Ortega. He consistently voted against defense spending and in favor of a nuclear freeze. He opposed the 1983 invasion of Grenada ("a bully's show of force against a weak Third World nation") and the 1991 Persian Gulf War ("a war for pride, not for vital interests"). It did not matter to Kerry that the U.N. Security Council had voted unanimously to authorize military action to free Kuwait; at that point, isolationism was more important to him than multilateralism.

In the case of Kuwait, even the UN's sanction wasn't enough to change Kerry's isolationist approach. What was? Why Bill Clinton's election, of course.

Idealism: Kerry became an idealist who championed preemptive, unilateral action in war's of choice for humanitarian reasons.

Kerry changed his tune with Clinton's election in 1992. He supported all of Clinton's military actions — in Bosnia, Haiti, Iraq and Kosovo — although these were manifestly wars of choice, not necessity. He chided Republican realpolitikers who opposed using force for humanitarian ends, warning them in 1999 "of the human price the world suffers when we avert our eyes from international atrocities." In keeping with his support for humanitarian interventions, Kerry has recently criticized President Bush for not doing more in Liberia, Haiti and Darfur. This would seem to make Kerry a Wilsonian idealist who is willing to promote human rights at gunpoint if necessary.

That's right, don't forget that in 1998 Kerry was all for what would have been Clinton's war of choice in Iraq for the stated reason of "regime change". But not in the case of Iraq under Bush. Then, suddenly, Kerry becomes a realist.

Realist:

Except that during the last year he's also developed a realist critique of Bush's foreign policy. In discussing the war on terror, he seems to have adopted the Kissingerian view that we should defend only our vital strategic interests, not try to promote our "ideology" (a.k.a. our ideals). One of his aides told the Atlantic magazine that there would be "a lot of similarities" between his foreign policy and the cautious, status quo approach pursued by the first Bush administration, which was once roundly criticized by Democrats, including Kerry, for being amoral

That is precisely what his promise to have us cleave to a non-existent foreign policy tradition of no wars of choice or preemption during his acceptance speech spells out.

So where does that leave us besides confused?

This muddle raises the question of whether Kerry has a worldview, or whether he merely goes wherever the political winds blow. Surely it's no coincidence that his stances track precisely mainstream Democratic opinion, which was isolationist in the 1970s and 1980s, idealistically interventionist in the 1990s and coldly realist since 2001. When the Democrats were split, as they were over Iraq in 2002 and 2003, he clumsily tried to appease both hawks and doves. Where he will wind up nobody knows — not even, I suspect, him.

Indeed.

But you have to admit ... its quite nuanced.

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