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.