Los Angeles Times: The first step back to consensus

July 20, 2007

From the Los Angeles Times

The first step back to consensus

A Hawkeye State think tank points the way toward a unified foreign policy.

Ronald Brownstein

July 20, 2007

The great Canadian rock band Arcade Fire says "the lion and the lamb ain't sleeping yet," but really how far off can that be when Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan jointly put pen to paper?

Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Council aide for Bill Clinton, opposed the Iraq war more passionately than almost anyone else in the Democratic foreign-policy establishment. Kagan, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department aide for Ronald Reagan, was among the war's biggest boosters. Kagan often shares bylines with Bill Kristol, the hawkish neoconservative who founded the Weekly Standard; Daalder was the rare blue-chip Democratic foreign-policy thinker to support Howard Dean in his anti-war 2004 presidential campaign. Each is smart and personable, and they have known each other somewhat over the years, but based on the causes and candidates they have associated with, merging their views might have seemed as promising an enterprise as Woody Allen's old suggestion of combining Dissent (the venerable leftist quarterly) and Commentary (the neoconservative flagship) to produce a new magazine called Dysentery.

Yet last month, on the website of the Iowa-based Stanley Foundation, Daalder and Kagan appeared as the co-authors of a compelling, if prosaically titled, paper called "America and the Use of Force: Sources of Legitimacy." Their presence on the same byline testified most immediately to the Stanley Foundation's success at attracting odd-couple liberal-conservative pairs to contribute thoughtful essays to a project called "Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide." But more important, the Daalder-Kagan collaboration reflects a desire among many (though by no means all) foreign-policy thinkers in both parties to find a course for advancing America's international interests that can inspire broader support at home and around the world. "I think there is a hunger for bipartisanship and new principles everyone can agree on," Daalder says.

This may seem an unpromising time for such a reconciliation to take root. In Washington over the last two weeks, the war over the Iraq war has reached new heights. President Bush's reflexively combative style and his refusal to meaningfully consult even with friends, much less critics, have relentlessly stoked the flames of foreign-policy conflict since 2001. Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz, two prominent professors of international relations, don't exaggerate by much when they write in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs that leaders of the two U.S. political parties now "share less common ground on the fundamental purposes of U.S. power than at any other time since World War II."

The Daalder-Kagan collaboration is best understood as part of a recoil against that reality. This backlash among broad sections of the foreign-policy elite reflects an understanding that Bush didn't start this fire and it won't extinguish itself when he leaves office. It rests on the understanding that the next president, from either party, will be weakened if the world believes that he or she speaks at most for half of America. And it is grounded in the conviction that America can construct a sustained and steady strategy for combating Islamic radicalism only by involving both parties in its design — the way the World War II generation did when formulating containment as the compass for the Cold War.

The most ambitious attempt so far to transmute these powerful but inchoate impulses into a practical agenda is the Stanley Foundation's project on bridging the foreign-policy divide. Stanley offered a congenial home for such an effort precisely because it toils so far from the front lines of the partisan wars. The foundation is based in Muscatine, Iowa, where it has operated since 1956 on an endowment provided by one C. Maxwell Stanley, an office furniture magnate who also ran an engineering consulting company but reserved perhaps his greatest passion for encouraging multilateral international cooperation. The foundation makes no grants but, with a staff of 25 and an annual budget of $5.5 million, it produces research papers and prepares educational materials for similarly minded civic and educational groups. It describes itself as nonpartisan, but the statements of "vision," "mission" and "core values" it posts on its website are infused with the priority that post-World War II liberals placed on alliances, international engagement and even global governance in preventing another cataclysm.

The project on bridging foreign-policy divides was conceived by Derek Chollet, a young Democratic foreign-policy thinker at the Center for a New American Security who also advises former Sen. John Edwards. Chollet brought the idea to David Shorr, a program officer at Stanley, and together they recruited as co-director Tod Lindberg, who edits Policy Review at the Hoover Institution. Beginning in summer 2006, the trio recruited liberal-conservative teams to see if they could produce common responses on 10 difficult foreign-policy dilemmas — among them reforming the United Nations, promoting democracy and setting the balance between values and interests in foreign policy. They started publishing all 10 papers this spring.

I didn't read all 10 essays, but the ones I did read struck me as serious and thoughtful efforts to escape the dead-end confrontations that now pass for foreign-policy debate in Washington. Occasionally the authors agreed to disagree, as one liberal-conservative team did in a paper on recalibrating the war on terror. But mostly the authors found common ground, frequently on creative suggestions with potential appeal in both parties.

Daalder and Kagan, in their paper, tackle the toughest issue in the aftermath of Iraq: when and how the U.S. should use force. Given how frequently the U.S. has intervened militarily since the end of the Cold War (on average once every 18 months), the two assume that no post-Iraq syndrome will prevent future presidents from flexing American muscle again. If that's the case, they ask, how can future interventions be seen as more legitimate, both at home and around the world, than the Iraq invasion? Their answer is to involve other democracies more intimately.

The gold seal of international approval remains support from the United Nations Security Council, but they think that is unlikely in most cases because of opposition from Russia and China. Over the long term, the two endorse creating "a global organization of democracies" — an idea Daalder has promoted for several years — and asking that body to validate military intervention when the U.N. won't. Until such an organization exists, they say, an American president considering the use of force should seek formal approval from NATO, perhaps supplemented by other democracies from the region where military action is contemplated. The model they cite is Bill Clinton's success at winning NATO endorsement for the bombing campaign in Kosovo during his second term after Russia blocked approval by the Security Council.

This vision contains elements to unsettle both left and right. As Daalder notes, "the left would have to concede the notion that there is something other than the U.N. Security Council that can legitimize the use of force" and that the opinions of democracies such as our NATO allies should matter more to the U.S. than the views of autocracies like China and Russia. As Kagan notes, the right would have to concede that the U.S. should care about the opinion of anyone else before using force — an idea "that the experience of the last six years does not make conservatives think is so obvious." But their approach of building consent among democracies through NATO offers a president from either party a plausible pathway to attracting greater international support for future interventions — which, both agree, is a key to maintaining broader and more durable domestic support than Bush has obtained on Iraq.

It is, of course, one thing for scholars to reach agreement in a conference room (Daalder and Kagan largely thrashed out their paper in a single afternoon in Brussels) and another for politicians to come together in the maelstrom of modern politics. Recent polling — like the exhaustive survey John Marttila conducted for the new center-left American Security Project — show that the rank and file of each party are deeply divided on the core question of whether the U.S. can best protect its interests by working with others or unshackling itself from alliances. Yet that same survey also found surprising convergence among Republican and Democratic voters in rejection of a retreat from the world and shared concern that America's moral authority around the globe has declined. Those are materials a new president can work with to help fashion a truce.

Disagreement over foreign policy has always been with us — Jefferson and Adams feuded over whether to tilt our new republic toward France or England — and always will be. And no reconciliation of any sort will be possible until America reaches a broader consensus on how to wind down its commitment in Iraq — a challenge that Bush, confusing obduracy with resolve, appears determined to leave for his successor. But after the next president fulfills the country's overwhelming desire to change course in Iraq, the opportunities for cooperation on other international challenges may be much greater than they now appear. Any presidential candidate hoping to seize those opportunities in 2009 could do worse than to harvest the seeds Daalder, Kagan and their fellow Stanley Foundation authors have planted this spring.

Ronald Brownstein is the Times' national affairs columnist. Send us your thoughts at opinionla@latimes.com.

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