This has been out for a while, I guess. Somehow I missed it. In case you did too, George Packer has written what I think is an absolutely must-read piece in the New Yorker asking why the Democrats have failed to articulate a coherent, passionate, internationalist vision for foreign policy in the wake of September 11th, here.

...Biden told me these stories in answer to a simple question: Why hasn’t the Democratic Party played a serious role in shaping the national debate about foreign policy since September 11th? Biden has been one of the few Democrats to try. His views defy Party orthodoxy. He has criticized the Administration relentlessly, not for doing too much in the war on terrorism but for doing too little, and in the wrong way—for failing to understand that this war has to be waged on many fronts, the most important of which is ideological. The fate of the schoolgirl in Kabul is as critical to ultimate victory as the next generation of unmanned aircraft.

Biden’s own party has all but forfeited the chance to make this case. The two complementary tendencies that doomed his effort on Iraq have characterized Democrats since the war on terrorism began: on one side, the urge to take cover under Republican policies in order not to be labelled weak; on the other, a rigid opposition that invokes moral principle but often leads to the very results it seeks to prevent. Neither posture shows a willingness to grapple with the world as it is, to do the hard work of imagining a foreign policy for the post-September-11th era.

Several smart people have been grappling with just this issue of late, and we can expect to see much interesting writing and debate on this crucial question in the coming weeks and months, both as the election season matures and the Iraq situation evolves, and potentially, further unravels. As this article makes clear, the Bush administration, and its sometimes allies the neocons, may be rhetorically championing democratization in the Middle East (as Orwellian as that may sound to many in the Arab world). But their demonstrated contempt for all US foreign policy tools except military force and their contempt for multilateralism means in practice their efforts to bring more democracy and human rights to the Arab world falter, and, as we have seen in Iraq, potentially may backfire spectactularly, leading to a dramatic increase of anti-American hatred and violence in the world. But it's still important to ask, as Packer does, where have the Democrats been while Richard Perle and George W. Bush called for more democracy and human rights in the Arab world, an idea that would seem to belong to a progressive Democratic agenda? Why have the Democrats seemingly become the party of expedience and reluctance to have bold foreign policy ideas? Why are we so conflicted about what the role of the US should be in the world? [a conflicted state that is not exclusive to Democrats by any means].

Packer writes:

If you’re paying attention, you can hear the sound of Democratic leaders straining to pry the Party away from its long aversion to America’s world leadership. The ghosts of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy are frequently summoned. These leaders have a thankless job, and, politically, a difficult one. Whatever they thought of the Iraq war, the struggle there is now the epicenter of the war of ideas, and leading Democrats have to show more commitment to the new Iraq’s success than they did in opposing the Administration’s reconstruction package.

One problem Biden and other pro-democracy Democrats identify? Their ideas --and what they recognize is needed to get the job done -- are just not as flashy as the bumper sticker "freedom" that the Bush White House relentlessly repeats.

A broader approach to the war includes a willingness to fight—and, for Democrats out of power, it’s all the harder to persuade a skeptical public that they will fight. But this approach also demands an ability to make judgments about when and where and how to fight—or not. Compared with “axis of evil,” “efficient multilateralism” is a pallid phrase...Biden admitted, “This is a place where the President’s bragging to me, ‘Mr. Chairman, I don’t do nuance’—where he has an advantage.”

I asked Thomas Carothers, an expert on democracy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to name one project that might help change the political culture of the Arab world. He mentioned a nonprofit group, the Center for International Private Enterprise, that is working to spread the idea among Arab business associations that transparency and the rule of law will attract foreign investment. Carothers has studied democracy-building programs for two decades...His experience has left him wary of the rhetoric coming out of Washington these days....

“It’s long-term, it’s not flashy, it’s not expensive,” Carothers said. “All of our programs now are showy, expensive, big-impact. And maybe we need to do that, but we also need to do things for fifteen to twenty years down the line.”... The President, Carothers said, has failed to make the struggle to liberalize the Muslim world the concern of ordinary Americans—to take one small example, by creating high-school exchange programs. “He’s unable to connect it to us in any way other than fear,” Carothers said. “And I don’t think that’s going to do it.”

Here's the whole piece.

[Thanks to J who studied writing with Packer at Harvard way back when for the heads up -- however belated. The magazines have been piling up by the chair as I work on other projects the past few months and have been unable to keep up.]

Posted by Laura at April 21, 2004 07:36 AM