Interesting story that showed up this morning: Bernard Kouchner, the progressive French humanitarian, founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, former UN envoy to Kosovo, and Nicolas Sarkozy's unlikely Foreign Minister, talked with the International Herald Tribune and others at the launch of the Forum for New Diplomacy in Paris.
Asked whether the United States could repair the damage it has suffered to its reputation during the Bush presidency and especially since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Kouchner replied, "It will never be as it was before."
"I think the magic is over," he continued, in what amounted to a sober assessment from one of the strongest supporters in France of the United States.
U.S. military supremacy endures, Kouchner noted, and the new president "will decide what to do - there are many means to re-establish the image." But even that, he predicted, "will take time."
I've been saying on here that this, at least to me, is a very important issue in the campaign, even if it is not an issue that seems on the minds of most voters. Obviously the economy is tanking - we say we're on the verge of a recession when by all accounts we seem to already be in one, only staying afloat on the back of a weak rhetoric that imagines that "things could get much worse." Foreign policy issues, at least to most Americans, seem to stop at the edge of how it affects their families and friends who are immediately affected by the Iraq war. With the disastrous failure of that policy, the instinct for these Americans is to become isolationist (a bad idea). Foreign policy issues seem to fall under that "bourgeois" category of things that only people who have all their other problems solved can afford to worry about.
More after the jump...
I don't buy this. Much of America's predominance, power, security, and safety have been shakily maintained in the 20th century because of how the rest of the world sees our internal and external actions. Our greatest foreign policy successes have been a beacon that others want to emulate - when we have inspired, through disseminating our ideas or ideals, oppressed people to rise up in self-determination. Our greatest foreign policy blunders have been when we have ignored the power of international public opinion and demonstrated either a double standard regarding human rights or a contradiction to our values. And these rising and falling levels of international image in an increasingly globalized society affect the economic well-being and security of even those not "bourgeois."
I don't know if its as bleak as Kouchner describes. I think perceptions are generational. A whole swath of the Muslim world can be inflamed against us just as their children (as was reported in the NY Times about a week ago) are feeling disenfranchised from radicals. These are the people we should be targetting with a radical break from the diplomacy and the militarism of the past. A president can do this. The candidates should be taking a leadership role, saying that we need to encourage democracy as a reparative - not using the language of George W. Bush, diplomatic exceptionalism (not meeting with leaders), and "commander-in-chief", but rather by demonstrating a willingness to be internationalists.
The United States should never allow itself, for example, to put itself in a situation like the recent one with China, where the US issued a report criticizing their human rights record, and China turned right back around and issued a long report accusing the US of being just as bad a human rights offender. Regardless of the leg they have to stand on in that regard, the US response was tepid - basically it said that yes, maybe we are a violator of human rights. But we have free speech so at least we could talk about it if we wanted to.
That is unacceptable. That makes us less safe, and that creates problems more difficult and challenging than others getting far more play in this election.
Now, I've said I am an Obama supporter. I am a supporter of his partially because he makes a good amount of proposals to combat the declining American image abroad. I am also a supporter of his because I feel that Hillary has not been able to prove to me that she is thinking about these problems. She seems, like I've said, to be a strict statist, and overwhelmingly statist positions usually result in those foreign policy blunders above.
Of course, in deference to the Hillary supporters, I wonder if this is just because, like a large amount of the American public, she wrongly thinks this isn't as important to talk about. Certainly she spends a lot more time talking about those bread-and-butter, kitchen-table, "insert-cliche-here" issues. So I would ask her supporters to express to me the ways that she is going to combat this growing problem. What will she do to win the war for hearts and minds abroad? How can she bring the magic back?
Because there was magic. It may feel like some alternate past history, or science fiction, but it did exist. And it kept us safe and idealistic and was a force for benevolence. And I think it's important that we talk about how we bring it back.
(Crossposted onto TPM Reader Blog.)
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