Democrats Can’t Dodge
Foreign Policy
By William A. Galston (WSJ)
March 5, 2019 7:24 p.m. ET
Presidential hopefuls
must explain how they’d restore U.S. strategy after Trump.
A presidential campaign is an audition for the most
challenging job in the world. But the Democrats vying for their party’s
nomination don’t seem to understand what that job really is. People with White
House experience know that presidents spend more than half their time—often
much more—dealing with foreign policy and national security. Thus far,
Democratic candidates have had little to say about these issues.
Even in ordinary times, this would be a mistake—and these
are not ordinary times. President Trump has shaken the architecture of the
world order the U.S. took the lead in creating after World War II.
Mr. Trump regards U.S. alliances as entangling rather than
empowering and allies as free-riders rather than friends. He sees multilateral
institutions as devices for reducing America’s power and restricting freedom of
action. He views foreign and defense policy, even joint military exercises,
through the prism of profit-and-loss statements. He does not care whether other
countries are democracies or autocracies, so long as their leaders say nice
things about him. Indeed, he prefers dealing with leaders who can make binding
decisions on their own rather than those who must take into account the views
of their people and elected representatives.
The U.S. faces a choice, Mr. Trump insists, between
nationalism and globalism—between those who put America first and those who
subordinate Americans interests to those of other peoples. This is a false
choice, of course. Other than a handful of philosophers and international
bureaucrats, no one thinks that national leaders should give equal favor to
nonmembers of their communities. When nations have competing interests, one’s
own citizens come first.
The real choice is not between national interest and
universalism; it is about different conceptions of the national interest. Seven
decades of American leaders in both political parties believed that America was
strongest and securest when maintaining democratic alliances and international
institutions, which define the rules of engagement among nations.
These leaders believed that it was worth the cost to provide
other countries with global public goods, such as freedom of navigation. They
understood that America sustained international relationships that were more
than transactional, resting on shared principles of national
self-determination, democracy and individual liberty.
They thought that whatever our disagreements, countries that
share America’s principles are our friends and should be treated differently
from the illiberal and undemocratic regimes with which reality forces us to do
business. The U.S. national interest was understood to lie in creating a world
in which more nations were democratic friends.
Like any policy, this one could be pushed too far. The war
in Iraq demonstrated the difficulty of installing democracy at the point of a
bayonet. (Postwar Germany and Japan, it turned out, were exceptions, not the
rule.) The U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, which began with the modest
objective of denying terrorists a safe haven, morphed into an ambitious
exercise in nation-building—and a war we couldn’t win, at least not with the
resources we were prepared to devote to it.
Two decades of war without end have exhausted the patience
of the American people. Mr. Trump has used this sentiment to attack the entire
postwar consensus of American foreign and defense policy, and he has twisted
anti-interventionism into a zero-sum choice between domestic and foreign
interests. If working- and middle-class Americans are struggling, he argues, it
is the fault of foreign trade, foreign wars and foreign invaders streaming unchecked
across our southern border.
Democratic presidential candidates are not free to ignore
this narrative. Whatever their strategists and pollsters may say, every
presidential candidate should deliver at least one major speech answering some
basic questions:
Do you think America’s longstanding alliances serve our
national interests? If so, what will you do to preserve and strengthen them?
How will you counter threats from Russia and Iran, as well as a surging China
rapidly translating its economic growth into diplomatic clout and military
might? Is the Middle East still vital to our interests, or is our engagement
there a diversion from more important matters?
Is America’s military the right size, and does it have the
right shape, to address core threats to national security? What is the
relationship between national security and international trade? If the global
democratic tide is receding, how much should we care and what are we prepared
to do about it?
In domestic policy, voters often issue specific orders to
their elected officials. In foreign policy, they give the president broad
permission to act on their behalf. As they examine aspirants for our highest
office, they are asking themselves, “Can I imagine this person as commander in
chief?” Democratic candidates should give voters some basis to answer this
question.
Appeared in the March
6, 2019, print edition.