Foreign Policy Credentials, Please.

It was strangely coincidental that as Samantha Power's image was being plastered on the news I was, as I noted in my last Reader Blog, in the midst of reading her new book - Chasing the Flame, about Sergio Vieira de Mello, the late UN diplomat and Special Envoy to Iraq who was killed there in 2003. It seems also interestingly coincidental that I am in the midst of Sergio's lengthy time in the Balkans just as the New York Times places this update on their front page, announcing that Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica has dissolved his government for "failing to support his efforts to preserve Kosovo as part of Serbia." The carnage that Power witnessed in the region when she was working as a foreign correspondent shows up repeatedly in her descriptions of Sergio's work there; though it's almost 10 years since the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo described in such horrific terms in this book and in her previous work, the current news is a scary reminder that nationalism is alive in Eastern Europe and it is not just possible but likely that violence will take hold of the region again. Unfortunately, due to the American foreign policy of the last several years, if Serbian nationalists were to go on the march again, it is unlikely diplomatic efforts this time will succeed in quelling it (not that they were that great the first time around).

More after the jump...

The long-held fear of the anti-Iraq-war movement, or at least, among the ones who weren't becoming isolationists, was that our engagement in Iraq would create "collateral damage" on our ability to conduct foreign policy and push diplomatic interests in other areas of the world. Samantha Power, that "dumb" one, to read this morning's NY Post, addresses this idea of "collateral damage" in an extended lecture at Northwestern University. (YouTube is awesome.) She notes that it is not just that our military and economic power are overstretched and unable to respond to other external threats, but also that our "soft power" has been compromised - that concept written about by Joseph Nye that pertains to our nation's ability to convince other countries to follow our interests based on the example we set and the attractiveness of our culture, government, and position. Much of Power's own advocacy of human rights intervention is in the interest of pushing our soft power - not by being the world's policeman, but by being that figure that puts an end to bullying and stands up for what's right as an example to other nations. This was an important, if oftentimes compromised, position that America played with in the Balkans, but regrettably just as the region seems again at the crossroads, we may find ourselves unable to influence those whose nationalism has given rise to terrible violence in the past.

This is one of the reasons why this election is important. Its one of the reasons that I become so uncomfortable when leaders seem less concerned with their ability to repair soft power than they are with proving they can lead armies and maintain military supremacy or diplomatic exceptionalism. It worries me when I read a post by Zvika Krieger on The New Republic's Plank blog that cannot find much in any of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy wonkiness that says anything about public diplomacy or attempting to rebuild our global soft power through the dissemination of American ideas - in a world that exists beyond Iraq and Afghanistan that is still just as unstable as it was before 9/11, regaining American soft power should be the expressed goal of the candidate for president. It should be the first thing they talk about in what is increasingly becoming the most important foreign policy election in recent memory. They should come out and say how they, specifically, are going to heal the image of America abroad; and not just by ratcheting up diplomatic opportunities with nations we have adversarial relationships with, as Barack Obama has suggested, but by making more concerted efforts directed at the publics and nongovernmental organizations that work within those countries. It is our responsibility as Americans, and global citizens, to push this line of questions, to ask not just how the new government will protect us in the short term but in the long term by improving our image abroad.

And it's important to note, we don't improve our image by withdrawing completely and becoming isolationist. This is a mistake that some in the anti-war movement aren't thinking through completely. Believe it or not, following the mess of the Bush presidency, we're going to have to engage the world even more. We're going to have to become global citizens, all of us, in order to fix this. We're going to have to scale back our military power and make more concerted, atoning efforts with our diplomacy. We've been hit with so much propaganda about the weakness of diplomacy, and it may cost those who push for it political points (you should note; Hillary Clinton knows this - this was the seed behind her critiques of Obama's promise to meet with leaders). But in order to fix this, we have to stay involved with countries that threaten global stability. That means engaging diplomatically with a Serbia that is getting more angrier, not being concessionist with strong men in Russia or Zimbabwe that undermine democracy, not standing by when governments and militias commit genocide. We have to, or else we will become marginalized, and less safe.

So when the candidates talk about foreign policy credentials, in the primary now and also in the general, and when they talk about what makes a good "Commander-in-Chief", I hope they will show understanding of the new responsibilities that America must face. Because so far those that are portraying themselves as "experienced" seem not to have learned much from it.


(This post previously appeared on TPM's Readers Blog.)