The Kosovo Conundrum

By PETER BEINART

At first glance, the Democratic presidential front runners look like foreign policy clones. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all want to get out of Iraq. They all want to double down in Afghanistan. And they're all for a diplomatic deal with Iran. To find someone who sounds really different, you have to scroll down--past Bill Richardson, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd--all the way to Dennis Kucinich, near the rock bottom of the 2008 field.

But it's an illusion. The Democrats just look unified because the press isn't asking the right questions. It's comparing the candidates with George W. Bush--who inhabits a different ideological universe--when it should be comparing them with another world leader, Tony Blair. Viewed through that lens, the Democrats aren't so united at all. In fact, a deep foreign policy division runs through the party, not between the major campaigns but within them.

To understand it, start with Blair--not the Blair of today, but the Blair of 1999. Back then, the British leader was supporting the U.S. in a different war, in Kosovo. Remember Kosovo? It was fought without U.N. approval against a dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, who, while slaughtering his own people, posed no direct threat to the U.S. Had NATO's campaign failed, it would have been Clinton and Blair who looked like reckless ideologues. But it worked. And Blair made it the centerpiece of a new foreign policy creed, which he called the "doctrine of international community."

That vision, which Clinton largely shared, summed up Democratic foreign policy at the turn of the millennium. In a globalized world, bad things that happen in other countries spread more quickly to our shores. Genocides spawn refugees, who destabilize their neighbors. Corruption sparks financial meltdowns, which rock the world economy. Pandemics hopscotch across the globe. Blair's answer was for Britain and the U.S., working through international institutions, to intervene more aggressively in the domestic affairs of other nations: to strengthen their financial and public-health systems, to push them toward capitalism and democracy, and in cases of extreme neglect and abuse, to take over the nation-building process by force.

For much of the democratic foreign policy establishment, that's still the prism--look at Obama's push for U.N. or even NATO intervention in Darfur, or Edwards' tough talk about Vladimir Putin's rollback of democracy in Russia. Blairism, at its heart, is optimistic. It assumes that the U.S., working with its allies, can make other countries freer, healthier and richer. It assumes those countries will generally want our help. Above all, it assumes that the key to U.S. security is building a world that looks more like us. Blairism may be less militaristic than neoconservatism, but it's still a missionary creed.

Grass-roots Democrats, however--the people who will actually vote for Clinton, Edwards or Obama--are not in a missionary mood. In a June 2006 German Marshall Fund survey, only 35% of Democrats, compared with 64% of Republicans, said the U.S. should "help establish democracy in other countries." While that response was colored by Iraq, most Democrats opposed even nonmilitary efforts such as supporting dissidents and imposing political sanctions. Blairites are big fans of foreign aid. But according to a 2005 Security and Peace Institute study, only 38% of Democrats said the U.S. can afford it. (The Republican number was 20 points higher). Almost two-thirds of Democrats (compared with less than one-third of Republicans) told CBS in December, "The United States should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can." That's about as direct a refutation of the Blairite creed as you can get.

At the heart of anti-Blairism is a convergence between antiwar doves and realists like Virginia Senator James Webb, a former Reagan Administration official who believes the U.S. should "send American forces into harm's way only if the nation is directly threatened." Webb and his allies don't oppose all military action, but they vehemently oppose efforts to forcibly remake the world. In Iraq's wake, one of the core anti-Blairite arguments is that real internationalism means understanding what other societies want for themselves, rather than seeing them as clay waiting to be molded in the U.S.'s image.

So which vision will prevail? If a Democrat wins the White House, Blairites will claim most of the top foreign policy jobs. But without the support of people like Webb, they won't get much done. The U.S.'s interest in how other countries govern themselves hasn't changed, but our capacity to influence them has. Blairism still has a lot to recommend it, but when it comes to foreign policy, Democrats can no longer party like it's 1999.

Beinart is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations

Source: The Time
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1609765,00.html