Countering the Radical GOP

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A25

Our foreign policy debate right now pits radicals against conservatives. Republicans are the radicals. Democrats are the conservatives.

That jarring but shrewd perspective, offered by Anthony Lake, President Clinton's former national security adviser, explains much that is strange in our national discussion. And while Lake is critical of President Bush's policies, he does not use the word "radical" to make a partisan point. He is also critical of his own party's newly discovered conservatism.

…His son's democratic imperialism is genuinely radical. What Bush 43 calls for is very different from the transformation of Germany and Japan after World War II. By thrusting war on the rest of the world, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan made unconditional surrender and their long postwar occupations inevitable. By contrast, the war in Iraq was an optional war for the United States. We now learn from Bush's latest speech that it was less a war about immediate threats posed by Saddam Hussein than a bold experiment in support of a grand theory. "The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East," Bush said in his speech, "will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution."

… But Lake is right to say that conservatism in foreign policy is not enough. He offers a useful metaphor: "If you had a house that was being knocked down, in whole or in part, you probably wouldn't just use the old plans to rebuild it. You'd want new plans for new conditions."

Instead of simply defending the old institutions, this means that those who support them should insist on their reform. Much has changed since the United Nations was founded more than 50 years ago. The original mission of NATO died with the Soviet Union. The United States and its European allies need to work out a new division of labor in facing terrorist threats and humanitarian disasters. The global financial institutions need change. The United States and Europe need to come to terms on agricultural subsidies that make a mockery of their claims of standing for either free or fair trade. Democrats, Lake argues, "need to be thinking large, and they're not."