Of course, foreign policy is vitally important in any election for the White House, not least because the candidates hope to become commander-in-chief. And in this election, with at least two continuing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, foreign policy may loom larger than in any other election since the Vietnam era.
But the foreign policy of a presidential debate is often far removed from reality. During the Republican primaries in 2000, the most important figure on the world stage was not Saddam Hussein but a small Cuban boy who had washed up on Florida’s shores: Elian Gonzalez. In fact, it was the primaries themselves that elevated Elian’s story to national and international status.
Then there was the televised debate between the candidates in the general election. At Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Bush and Gore engaged in mouth-to-mouth combat over nation-building–which is now critical to the success of the war in Iraq. At the time, the candidates were debating Wes Clark’s war in the Balkans–although both also discussed Saddam Hussein’s fate (more of that later).
It was then that Bush declared his undying opposition to nation building in general, and U.S. operations in the Balkans, Haiti and Somalia in particular. “Maybe I’m missing something here,” he said. “I mean we’re going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war…The mission needs to be clear and the exit strategy obvious.”
At the same time, Bush really did miss something, issuing an entirely mistaken challenge to Europe. “I hope our European friends become the peacekeepers in Bosnia and in the Balkans,” he said, ignoring the fact that European troops were already more than 80 per cent of the forces on the ground. “I hope that they put the troops on the ground so that we can withdraw our troops and focus our military on fighting and winning war.”
The U.S. media largely missed that gaffe and concentrated instead on the far more important measures of presidential candidates. In the reviews the next day, Bush was hailed for his ability to pronounce foreign names without sounding like “a bumbler,” as the New York Times put it. Gore was praised in similarly superficial terms, for seeming more likeable than he did in his first debate.
It was in that context that Condoleezza Rice, now the president’s national security advisor, gave an interview to The New York Times the following week to flesh out her candidate’s position on peacekeeping in the Balkans. There she promised “a new division of labor” with Europe. “Carrying out civil administration and police functions is simply going to degrade the American capability to do the things America has to do,” she said. “We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.”
That image–and the policy that underlies it–endures to this day. As the Bush administration continues to seek foreign troops to police Iraq, along with a new United Nations resolution, the White House’s gut opposition to American forces engaging in nation building remains unchanged. (Even if the president has yet to make clear his obvious “exit strategy.”) Yet for those who supported the U.S. intervention in the Balkans, it is a policy built on inaccuracies and misstatements, just like the presidential debate. “Their criticism of the situation in the Balkans is based on fraudulent statements like we don’t use the 82nd Airborne to escort children to school,” Richard Holbrooke, the former ambassador to the U.N. told the Council on Foreign Relations last week. “They never did there, but they are now doing it in Iraq.”
The spat over Howard Dean’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just as mistaken and instructive. Dean said the United States should not “take sides” in the conflict, arguing that he would take “an even-handed role” to negotiate peace. His comments prompted a heap of abuse from his rival candidates John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, who accused Dean of stumbling into “a major break from a half a century of American foreign policy”.
Yet Lieberman’s own running mate in 2000 sounded remarkably similar to Dean. Al Gore, in the same TV debate on foreign policy in North Carolina, said the United States should stand with Israel but also maintain an independent position. “If we throw away that ability to serve as an honest broker, then we will have thrown away a strategic asset that’s important not only to us but also to Israel,” Gore said. In fact, Lieberman’s position is closer to the current Bush administration than to that of the Clinton years, even if his attack on Dean was effective in portraying him as weak on foreign policy.
Amid the heated emotions of a presidential election, the reliance on sound bites to rescue or propel a campaign can easily distort the details of foreign policy. Wes Clark may well be an expert on peace keeping, nation building and the art of keeping alliances together. And all those skills may well be essential for a president at this time. Yet his attention to details could easily be flattened by the stampede of his presidential rivals and the media pack that follows them.
Left in the dust are the good intentions and the signs of things to come. Three years ago, the then-governor of Texas said he wanted the United States to behave like “a humble nation” to the rest of the world. “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us,” he said, making a near-perfect prediction about how many allies view his own leadership now. He also made a near-perfect prediction about the leadership in Iraq. Lamenting the collapse of the gulf-war coalition and the U.N. sanctions against Hussein, Bush added: “We don’t know whether he’s developing weapons of mass destruction. He better not be or there’s going to be a consequence, should I be the president.”
Somewhere in the middle of the conversation between Wes Clark and his Democratic rivals, there might be something just as useful and prescient for voters to hear. But you’ll have to strain to find it amid the noise of the campaign. And unless Clark can turn his expertise into aggressively naked politics, he may never be heard at all.
