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MODERATOR (BABS CHASE): Good afternoon and welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center. We are very pleased today to have two senior fellows from the Council on Foreign Relations, Peter Beinart and Max Booth. They are going to discuss the 2008 elections and foreign policy's impact on the election.
With no further ado, I will introduce them. But one more thing before I start, we're going to begin with the opening remarks and will have plenty of time to take your questions. I want to remind you, if Barbara didn't already, make sure your cell phones are turned off. Also, when you ask a question, remember to identify yourself and your organization.
Okay, great. At this point, I will now introduce Peter Beinart.
MR. BEINART: Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. I won't speak for very long. I'll just say enough things to give Max some thought or to explain why I'm wrong and then turn it over to you.
I think perhaps the first thing to say about foreign policy and the 2008 elections is so far I think one of the stories of the 2008 election is that foreign policy is not dominating the elections as much as some might have expected as I think as I would have thought over the summer, and I think the reason is pretty simple. The single biggest issue -- foreign policy issue in the campaign is certainly Iraq. That's the driver for a lot of the attention to foreign policy. And Iraq is not as big an issue in American politics as it was a few months ago.
I think there is a fairly clear kind of algorithm by which it's deaths in Iraq, particularly of Americans but to some degree of Iraqis, that puts Iraq on the news pages and then gets that newspaper coverage translated onto cable t.v. And I think you've seen a real drop-off in news coverage as a result of the decline in particularly U.S. deaths but also Iraqi deaths.
And particularly -- it's really particularly striking if you watch t.v. I think frankly that the cable news channels were already pretty sick of Iraq as an issue, and it's really striking -- I wrote in a column the other day, you know, watching the cable news channels you might think that America was -- you might be more likely to think America was at war with illegal immigrants than at war with insurgents in the heart of the Middle East.
And there's some polling to back -- to suggest now that Iraq has declined in its salience as an issue. A couple of national polls, one done by The Washington Post, one by The Wall Street Journal, and a very striking poll in New Hampshire, all of which shown that the percentage of democrats and republicans who say that Iraq is their number one concern in the election has gone down quite significantly.
On the republican side, illegal immigration I think is now rivaling Iraq as an issue. On the democratic side, healthcare has become an even bigger issue than it was. And there is more of an attention to questions of candidates' personality and characterize, a little bit more like the elections that we saw in the 1990s as Iraq has receded.
And now the new news about Iran, Iran may not turn out to be as big an issue in the Presidential election as one might have thought as well. So foreign policy certainly matters in the election. It matters certainly far more than it did in the elections of 1992, 1996 or 2000, but I think at this point I would guess that it will matter less than it did in the elections of 2002, 2004 or 2006.
When democrats and republicans talk about foreign policy, and you can particularly see this in the primaries when democrats are talking to one another and their base voters and republicans are talking to one another and their base voters. What you see is that foreign policy means something different for democrats than what it means for republicans.
For republicans, foreign policy, at least as discussed in the Presidential campaign, pretty much is the war on terror. The most striking example of this I thought was Rudy Giuliani's article in Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations' publication, asked some of the major candidates to write articles about what their foreign policy visions were.
There was virtually no discussion in Rudy Guiliani's article about anything in foreign policy other than the war on terror. The war on terror, to be fair, is defined broadly by republicans, I think more broadly by republicans than by democrats, but it dominates foreign policy discussion in the Republican Party more.
You know, the questions of terrorists, not only terrorists who have attacked the United States but terrorists who attack American allies like Israel, and the nexus of governments that have terrorist connections even if those terrorist ties have not been particularly focused at us, and countries that are trying to get nuclear weapons. That really dominates the republican foreign policy discussions.
The democratic foreign policy discussion, less so. Trade and the economic effects of globalization are much bigger issues in the Democratic Party than they are in the Republican Party.
There was a poll I saw a while back interestingly which suggested, for instance, that when democrats and republicans look at China, republicans are more likely to perceive China as a military threat or military challenge. Democrats are more likely to perceive it as an economic challenge.
Democrats tend to be more concerned with what you would call "low politics." The international environmental questions are much bigger in the Democratic Party. Global warming is a much bigger issue in the Democratic Party than it is in the Republican Party. Issues like public health issues are a bigger issue in the Democratic Party. While there are conservatives who are certainly concerned with things like AIDS and global poverty, those don't show up nearly as significantly.
Again, the Foreign Affairs articles are useful here because the candidates are only given a certain number of words and you can see what they write about and what they don't write about. Democrats write a lot more about questions of global poverty, AIDS, much more about the global environment and much more about economic questions and trade
You saw that in the Clinton Administration. In the Clinton Administration, foreign policy was much more involved with economic policy than it has been by and large in the Bush Administration. That's party, of course, because of 9/11, but I think it's also because of the attitude and the predispositions about the way the two different parties see foreign policy.
Republican foreign policy is the war on terror or at least its national security. Democrats sometimes tend to gravitate toward the idea that foreign policy should really be about what's sometimes called "human security," the way in which globalization can create threats to individuals lives that do not necessarily come from military force and the concern, therefore, with the economic effects of globalization, questions of the environment, questions of public health.
I think one can see a bit of an analogy here to the way in which foreign policy was discussed in the 1970s. In the 1970s after Vietnam, many liberals and democrats began, liberals in particular, began to feel that perhaps the Cold War was not a sufficient prism through which to understand the new kind of foreign policy challenges that America faced. There was much more concern amongst liberals about North/South development questions about the environment, about the threat of global nuclear war while conservatives argued very strongly that, in fact, the Cold War still was the dominant prism through which American foreign policy should be seen. And I think we see some of that again today in the different kinds of issues that the two parties talk about.
There is also I think a fundamentally different attitude towards universal international institutions that runs through both parties. I think this has very deep roots. I think you could probably trace it back to the debates between Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge. I think Wilson in some ways are -- liberals I think are in foreign policy, I think, the children of Woodrow Wilson in his vision of collective security. I think conservatives in some ways are the children of Henry Cabot Lodge who didn't want the League of Nations. He wanted a security pact with France against Germany.
I think it's a mistake to think that republicans and conservatives are unilateralists and democrats are multilateralists. It's more complicated than that. I think conservatives and republicans are very happy with bilateral alliances. The Bush Administration has put a lot of emphasis with the relationship with Japan, for instance, and wants to build a strong relationship with countries like India.
When you start talking about, however, universal international institutions, international institutions that are meant to bring in all nations together to solve common problems, basically that fundamentally goes to the question of how much cooperation you believe is possible between nations; ultimately, your vision of how much cooperation human nature itself can sustain. And I think there you start to see quite large differences.
The Clinton Administration was more interested in working through universal international institutions. I'm thinking of things like the U.N., the IMF and World Bank, Kyoto, the International Criminal Court than the Bush Administration has been. And I think that difference is likely -- is a theme in this Presidential campaign and will be probably expressed in the next presidency.
Let me just end by saying something about some of the individual candidates on both sides. Because while I think there are these macro difference between almost all the democrats and almost all the republicans, there are also differences between the individual candidates.
Sometimes you have to try to read between the lines, squint to see the differences, but I'll throw out a theory about a difference that you might see between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and then between some of the republicans.
I think one way of understanding Hillary Clinton's views on foreign policy is to see her as the product of the Clinton years and to understand how American foreign policy evolved in the Clinton years. There was, I would argue, a trajectory to American foreign policy over the course of the 1990s. And Hillary Clinton -- one way of understanding Hillary Clinton is to understand where the Clinton Administration ended up by the end of time in its office.
What was that trajectory? I think the Clinton Administration started out as more hopeful about the U.N. than it was by the end of its term. I think one of the lessons that the Clintonites drew from their years in office -- again democrats I think by nature tend to be more hopeful and optimistic about how much U.S. foreign policy you can run through the U.N.
If you look at the discussions in the early 1990s by Clinton and even by his predecessors George H.W. Bush and even by Ronald Reagan at the end of the Cold War and around the time of the Gulf War, there was a lot more optimism about how much of American foreign policy could run through the U.N.
I think the Clinton Administration was disillusioned by how difficult it was to actually work through the U.N. I think they found, on Bosnia for instance -- on Somalia for instance, they found the experience with the U.N. frustrating. I think on Bosnia they found the experience frustrating. And if you look at Kosovo, which takes place in 1999, which I think is the kind of best example to look at about where Clinton's foreign policy ended up, they went outside the U.N. They did it with NATO which I think was an instinct that they probably would not have had at the beginning.
So somewhat more skepticism I think by Hillary Clinton perhaps than Obama, who is not the product of those experiences about the degree to which one can run the U.S. foreign policy through the U.N.
Another lesson of the Clinton years was that diplomacy is not very effective unless backed up by the use of force. Again, I think the Clintonites were by and large quite proud of their deal with North Korea in 1994 and quite cognizant that that deal took place in part because America did, in fact, threaten military force as an alternative. And of course, also the experience of Bosnia and Kosovo where the U.S. had to use military force. In Bosnia, we had to use military force in order to get to the Dayton Agreement that I think the Clintonites were also quite proud of.
And I think similarly out of the bulk of experience, a sense that the Europeans, while important to have on board, will not act proactively, that America has to decide which direction it wants to go and then the Europeans will come if we lead.
In 1993 Warren Christopher went to Europe and said basically on Bosnia, what do you want to do. And the Clintonites found that that didn't work very well because they found that the Europeans didn't want to do very much, at least not what America was hoping they would do. If you compare that to Kosovo in 1999 when Madeleine Albright basically says "We're going to do this; are you with us or against us?" it's not quite Dick Cheney but it's somewhere between Dick Cheney, I would argue, and where the Clintonites start.
I think Hillary Clinton is a product of those experiences and Barack Obama is not. So there is maybe something of a slightly more realist tendency I think in her foreign policy than Obama's, slightly more hawkish, slightly more realist.
Obama reminds me a little more of the slightly more hopeful, less chastened spirit that existed in democratic foreign policy at the beginning of the Clinton years as opposed to at the end.
On the republican side, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain both speak -- all the republican candidates speak overwhelmingly about the war on terror. What strikes me about Mitt Romney is he is the only candidate amongst the republicans who seems to speak with any passion or even interest about global economic questions, about globalization, which is not surprising given his background in business. It strikes me that Romney, of the republican candidates, the one most interested in global economic questions in a party that by and large right now is not terribly interested in them.
As for McCain and Giuliani, if one were to contrast the two of them I think what strikes me is that McCain seems to believe more -- McCain seems to believe that self-power matters a little more than Giuliani does. McCain seems -- while he often takes a hard line on Iraq and our other question, Iran, if you listen to his discussion of torture, where he's in a different place than the other republicans, he has greater concern about issues like global warming than some of the republicans, one gets the sense that McCain's is a war on terror which is more concerned about global opinion of the United States than Giuliani's would be at least judging from their rhetoric. I think Giuliani gives, in my view, the crudest, least convincing, most -- version of the conservative war on terror argument where I think McCain gives a somewhat more nuanced, more sophisticated version but with he same broader orientation.
So I'll stop there and let Max tell you why I was wrong.
MR. BOOT: Well, thank you, Peter. I would very much like to say why you were wrong but I'm having trouble bringing that out at the moment. It actually makes a distressing amount of sense to me. But let me -- instead of -- I beg your indulgence, by the way, because I'm nursing a cold here, an occupational hazard of having kids I'm afraid.
Instead of trying to argue with you or contradict you, let me kind of add on to what you were saying because I think the details and the specifics of what Peter said makes a lot of sense. But I think it's important to keep in mind part of the big picture here because a lot of what he was talking about was the differences among candidates, in particular the differences between the parties.
And I think he's absolutely right, of course, that democrats talk more about softer environmental type issues, talk more about globalization, their differences over are we on a war on terror, and there are some real differences over what should we do with detainees at Guantanamo or what should we do about domestic surveillance and so forth.
But I think it's important to caution you, don't pay too much attention to what people are actually saying the middle of a presidential campaign. It often has very little relation to what they wind up doing once in office and there are countless examples of that. For example, the fact that the current President, George W. Bush, in 2000 ran a campaign in which he derided the idea of nation building. And his future Secretary of State said we should not be escorting to children to kindergarten in the Balkans. That should not be an American military mission. And then, of course, he launched two of the biggest nation-building exercises in our history.
If you look at Bill Clinton in 1992, he ran against the administration of Bush, (inaudible) on China saying that we were too soft on China and we had to get touch with China. And of course, then he continued pretty much the same soft on China policy that we had under the previous administration.
I don't think -- you know, the fact that there is a lot of continuity here does not suggest that candidates are actively lying in the campaign season, but there is a tendency when you're trying to get votes to exaggerate differences, and then once you get into office what usually happens in this country is that a fairly centrist group officials, whether they're from the center right or from the center left, actually take control of the levers of power. And a lot of candidates may not know that much about foreign policy before they come into office all of a sudden realize that there choices are a lot more constrained than they thought before. And I think what we generally see is that the biggest changes in American foreign policy are brought about not by changes of candidates and changes of political parties in control but really by external events.
When you think about, for example, the Bush foreign policy, I think would have looked very different were it not for 9/11. It was really 9/11 that has changed American foreign policy. It wasn't the fact that George Bush beat Al Gore, because American foreign policy would have looked very different post 9/11 whether it was Bush or Gore in office.
So I think there's always going to be a tremendous amount of continuity. And even today I see a lot of continuity. For example, the democrats, of course, have been beating up on President Bush over Iraq, a little less so now that Iraq is starting to go well. But obviously this has been a big campaign issue and they have pledged, every single one of them, I will end the war; I will bring the troops home. But then if you read the fine print, none of the top democratic candidates, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama nor John Edwards has been willing to commit to pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of their first term in office because they realize, in fact, that could be a very irresponsible move to make and they don't want to bidn themselves. They want to leave themselves a lot of options.
And so basically when you come down to it, it's very hard to pin down what are the differences between the democratic and republican positions on Iraq because both republicans and democrats say we want to draw down U.S. forces as conditions permit.
Now democrats have been a little bit more insistent in pushing for those drawdowns not withstanding the conditions that exist which I don't think permit, up till now, have permitted safe drawdowns. But nevertheless, at the end of the day democrats are not willing to commit to an all out pull-out. They want to take things as they see them once they come into office and act based on the situation as they see it. And so it's very hard to predict to me how U.S. policy will change based on the outcome of the election.
And the same thing with Iran, by the way, because you might say well, somebody like McCain or Giuliani has been extremely hawkish on Iran, and that's certainly the case whereas a lot of the democrats, especially Barack Obama, had been cautioning taking too stern of a line and have been criticizing more militaristic approaches to Iran. While that may suggest to you that we're not going to go to war under democratic administration but, of course, you know if we'd been standing here in 1964 listening to the campaign rhetoric at the time, you would easily say that based on the campaign rhetoric of Lyndon Baines Johnson, we are not going to commit American boys to fight the battles that Asian boys ought to be fighting for themselves in Vietnam. And then of course as soon as he came into office, he turned around and made that very massive commitment.
So I would caution against drawing too many implications from some of the overheated campaign rhetoric. And in fact, what I hear and which doesn't get commented upon enough I guess is actually many of the similarities among the leading presidential candidates. And when I say "leading presidential candidates," I'm leaving folks like Ron Paul or some of the others on the extremes out of it, but sort of the mainstream candidates, the ones who you can plausibly imagine coming into office.
A lot of the things that they're basically saying to my mind sound to me like they will basically try to pursue a foreign policy similar in many ways to the one that President Bush is pursuing but they will manage it better than President Bush or so they claim. They want to manage it better than President Bush. They haven't -- when you think about what is the Bush doctrine, for example, it basically consists of preemptive military action if necessary and also democracy promotion.
And obviously there has been a lot of criticism of how those doctrines have been implemented, specifically in Iraq. But again, none of the major candidates has really said I will not promote democracy or I will not take preemptive military action if we have actionable intelligence on terrorists who are carrying out -- plotting attacks; in fact, quite the opposite. Barack Obama, who in many ways has been more (inaudible) alternative in the democratic race, made headlines when he said "I will be willing to act unilaterally to attack terrorists in Pakistan." So taking very much of a Bush-type preemptive position that you would associate more with the Republican Party.
Again, I think what they're basically talking about, democrats as well as republicans, is they're very critical of some of the snafus we've had, especially in Iraq, and they're basically trying to put themselves forward as more responsible stewards of roughly I think the same policy that President Bush is pursuing.
And so you hear John McCain talking about his foreign policy credentials. You hear Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani talking about their management experience. You hear Hillary Clinton talking about her experience in the White House and why this prepares her for office. And you hear Barack Obama talking about how being in the Illinois State Senate is great preparation for being Commander-in-Chief. No, I just actually made that up. He's actually not talking about that. He has to finesse that issue of experience because he doesn't have a lot and he's actually trying to promise more of a fresh face but also better implementation of American foreign policy.
There's also I think a lot of commonality in terms of the candidates. Both democrats and republicans basically agree that we should continue to spend as much as we're spending on defense and actually maybe increase it somewhat, which is pretty impressive given that we are spending more than or as much as the rest of the world combined but nobody's really calling for a draw down of defense expenditures. And if anything, the candidates are calling for an increase, which I think is long overdue, in the size of our ground forces. And there's a lot of agreement, I think, on both sides of the aisle on the need to do that.
There's also been a lot of calls for improving our capacity for strategic communications for getting our message out to the world better than we've done under the Bush Administration, for increasing our nation building capacity so that we can deal with the troubled lands like Iraq and Afghanistan more effectively than we've done. And really all of the candidates have proposed administrative and bureaucratic and structural reforms to improve our capacity in that regard.
So, you know, I don't by any means want to suggest that the candidates are carbon copies of one another, but I think that there is a lot more continuity than change that you're seeing on display. And in terms of what you're actually going other get, I have no idea and I don't think anybody else does either. It really depends on circumstances which are unforeseeable in the way that they react with the personality of whoever becomes Commander-in-Chief. Very, very hard to figure out.
So I think that the only thing that you can confidently predict is that we will be surprised. But I don't -- bottom line is I wouldn't pay too much attention to the rhetoric you hear right now as a guidepost for foreign policy.
MODERATOR: Okay, questions?
QUESTION: Nadia Tsau with The Liberty Times. So what you just said that because we heard a lot of people in town criticizing, you know, this administration was basically dominated by neo-conservatism, who a lot of -- you know, the leader portrayed as very hawkish leaders. And basically what you said is that the policy they pursue will be continued by the, you know, the future leaders. So you're saying that, you know, there's not much difference based on their policy or you think that the management will be different?
MR. BOOT: Well, certainly there will be differences, but I think they're hard to predict. And just on the issue of neo-conservatism, I think the depth of neo-conservatism has been much exaggerated, and I say this as somebody who at times has been labeled a neo-con, and I sort of scratch my head. I'm not quite sure what people mean when they say that, and it's often used in kind of a crude way to suggest somebody who's simply hawkish or strong on defense. Well, I don't think that's a very useful guide because I'm not going to bore you with my whole analysis of different schools of American foreign policy, but I think when people talk about folks who are neo-cons, what -- they're leaving aside individuals. There are certainly individuals like Doug Fife or Paul Wolfowitz who are strongly identified with that neo-con label, and I'm guessing they're probably not going to play a prominent role in the future administration. But that -- those are personnel issues.
But if you look at the ideas involved, I mean what neo-cons basically believe is a strong defense and an aggressive assertion of American foreign policy, unapologetic defense of the idea of freedom and democracy, really putting idealistic concerns often at the forefront of American foreign policy and thinking that it's in our interest to promote freedom and democracy around the world and not just to pursue a narrow real politic foreign policy. And of course, neo-conservatives are also suspicious of institutions like the U.N. or others which claim to have this international body of law that they can implement but don't actually have the enforcement mechanism to do so.
But so when you think about what I'm describing as kind of a neo-conservative foreign policy, it's actually the mainstream foreign policy of the Republican Party and also of a good chunk of the Democratic Party as well because the differences between so-called neo-cons and I would argue neo-liberals like Dick Holbrook or Madeleine Albright or others who were prominent in the Clinton Administration would probably be prominent in another Clinton Administration, the differences are not that great.
Both sides have agreed, for example, that we, both neo-cons and neo-liberals agree that we needed to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo, which was something which was (inaudible) on isolationists on both the left and the right. And I think that there's this mainstream school of foreign policy which really dominates the administrations of whatever party that come into office which basically believes in a very strong, aggressive engagement of the world which includes democracy and freedom and some of these other tenets.
So I would not read too much into these stories, which are now yellowing in any case, about how, you know, neo-conservatism is allegedly dead or on the decline or whatever, because I think the actual ideas that are associated with neo-conservatism are very much alive and well.
MR. BEINART : Maybe I should -- I think we have hit on a little bit of a point of disagreement. So maybe just to keep things interesting I'll dissent a little bit from that premise.
First of all, just -- Max is undoubtedly right that American foreign policy responds to big events, and he's also right that there are strong themes and traditions that run through American foreign policy that cut across both parties. But I think that one -- there is also -- events don't simply explain themselves, events have to be interpreted. And so when one talks about how American foreign policy would have looked different, for instance, had Al Gore won the election in 2000, I think one could make an argument that it would have looked actually quite profoundly different. I don't think Al Gore would have launched the invasion of Iraq. I say that as someone who supported the war in Iraq. But Al Gore came out quite strongly against it. I
think he might have done something on Iraq to try to get the inspectors back, but I don't think he would have launched a war. That was, whether you think it was a good idea or not, an extraordinarily fateful thing to do. I think he might have been more open to the approach that the Iranians seem to have made to us after the Afghan war. And I think that the relationship with Iran might have taken a different trajectory.
I think he probably would have been involved more with the Middle East peace process than the Bush Administration had been up until very recently. I think those are all quite significant. And he probably certainly would have tried to do something more than the Bush Administration has done on global warming, which is a massive issue in much of the world on which America has not been exactly at the forefront.
And I suspect that on issues like detainees in Guantanamo Bay, while he might have done something that would have just comforted America's allies, I don't think he would have gone -- he would have done what the Bush Administration has done. So I think there are significant differences.
When one says well, you know, the Bush doctrine is democratization and every democrat is going to follow the Bush doctrine, I think the problem with that argument is that democratization to some form or another has been at least rhetorically part of American foreign policy going back for a century. George W. Bush didn't invent this idea; it was Tony Lake, Clinton's foreign policy advisor who said that there doctrine in 1993 was democratic enlargement. All American Presidents talk about spreading democracy.
It's true Bush talked about it with a particular focus on the Middle East, but the reality is that all American Presidents talk about spreading democracy. All of them find that their capacities to spread democracy are genuinely limited by the other interests that America has in the world and by the limits of our power over other countries.
And when one looks at how much George W. Bush has done to spread democracy in Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Morocco or Jordan, compared to -- particularly recently, compared to what Bill Clinton did you're basically talking about a couple of -- a few maybe some more higher profile speeches and maybe a little bit more money. The big difference is the decision to spread democracy through the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And that I think is quite a profound difference.
If you believe that Iraq was a war launched to spread democracy, which I don't -- I suspect Matt probably doesn't either -- but if you believe it was, it would be a radical -- I think it would be a significant break even from the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo which were not justified on spreading democracy; they were justified in terms of stopping an ongoing ethnic cleansing or genocide. Even that I think is quite different.
I think the democratic policies on trade would have been quite different because the democrats were really -- because Clinton was really focused on trade deals that had stronger environmental and labor standards. Many people think, though, that that was a bad idea, but that was quite different than the trade deals that Bush tried to put into place.
And when you talk about the idealistic strain that exists amongst neo-conservatives, it's true, there is an idealistic strain. But the question is, what is the content of that idealism? For liberals, and I think this is true of people like Dick Holbrook and it certainly goes back to liberal Presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and to some degree John F. Kennedy, the idealistic strain partly has to do with America's engagement in international institutions not the idea that America is idealistic but the international institutions are essentially cynical and we can best express our idealism by avoiding them and diminishing their power.
And liberal foreign policy has traditionally also believed that economic development was at the heart. Questions of global economic justice were at the heart of America's idealistic mission, which is also something that you really do not hear very much of in neo-conservative foreign policy.
So while I think that Max is absolutely right that there are themes of -- that there are continuities in American foreign policy, people have to respond to events. I think the difference is, particularly as they become expressed in the Bush era as opposed to what the democrats might do, are more significant than he does.
MODERATOR: We'll take one more question here and then we'll go to New York.
QUESTION: Hi, I'm Reymer Kluever from the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Peter, I've just got a question to the differences between Obama and Clinton. Is it only that Obama might be a little bit more doggish, a little bit more idealistic, and Clinton, through her experience be a little bit more exposed to real politics, or are there more profound differences between those two?
MR. BEINART: Well, I think it's a little bit difficult to say. One thing that one has to acknowledge is that there would be a lot of the same people would probably be in either administration.
Max talked about how we have kind of center-left people who come in and center-right people. There was a time when you genuinely had more of a bipartisan foreign policy elite where you had a group of kind of eastern establishment figures who could have served in either democratic or republican administration, but I think those days are really gone. So there are different -- the differences of -- the characters are different in a democratic and republican administration, but the differences in the Obama people versus the Hillary people, a lot of them would be the same people.
However, if you're looking hard for differences, you can -- it is true that more of the Obama advisors I think than the Hillary Clinton advisors were against the war in Iraq, as of course he was against the war in Iraq. And I think that one thing that is striking when you think about Barack Obama's personal experience, which is what makes him such a fascinating figure, you see most American Presidents, if they've had any experience in the rest of the world at all, that experience has tended to usually be in Europe. That was the kind of the classic pattern of American if they've had any foreign exposure. Think of Franklin Roosevelt. It had basically been by spending time in Europe. Occasionally you had someone who had spent some time -- you know, Herbert Hoover spent a lot of time looking for gold in Australia and other parts of the world, but that was kind of the exception.
The fascinating thing about Obama is how much personal life experience he has in the developing world. You see the connection to his father from Kenya, the time he spent growing up in Indonesia. And it's interesting that some of Obama's key advisors also have had as their major focus the developing world. Susan Rice is an Africa specialist. Samantha Power focused a lot on genocide in the developing world. Even Anthony Lake really was an Africa specialist to begin with.
And I think that one could hypothesize, although it's easier to do guess work, that Obama's natural inclination might be to see American foreign policy a little bit more as dealing with questions of development and the kind of -- the nexus of failed states and globalization related challenges and a little bit less on the kind of traditional great power management, you know, how you deal with Russia, how you deal with China, how you deal with Germany and France perhaps that has been a little bit more the focus for past American Presidents and could be more the focus of Hillary Clinton.
But again, as Max said, this could be completely wrong, but this is kind of just reading the tea leaves by looking at what people say and looking at the kind of experience they have and the kind of people around them.
MR. BOOT: Now I guess if you listen to what Obama says, what he wants to suggest is that the big difference between Hillary and him is that he is in some ways kind of a more attractive face of America, that he's going to put all of our past squabbling behind us both domestically and internationally and all of a sudden he will announce, here I am, you know, we love you guys; love us back. Let's get beyond all these difficulties we've had I years past. I am a wonderful person and I will make America much more endearing to the world than we have been up until now.
And, in fact, he may be a wonderful person. He's certainly a good speaker. He's certainly an attractive guy. But I have serious doubts as to whether that strategy is actually terribly realistic and will bear much in the way of results. And I say this as somebody who has actually been critical of President Bush for some of his mishandling of diplomacy, especially public diplomacy, and I think he could have done a much better job of dealing with our allies.
But I think there is so many structural problems built into the American relationship with the rest of the world in the disparity of power that we have that there is going to be a fairly high degree of resentment no matter what we do. And we can mitigate maybe at the margins, but this notion that Obama has and, in particular some of the other democrats have it to some extent as well, that all these problems that we've had in the last eight years are really due to President Bush because he's really not a nice guy, and I'm a nice person, so put me in office and I will handle all these diplomatic difficulties much better than anybody else has in the past eight years, I don't think that's terribly realistic.
In fact, I think it's pretty naïve, and I think events will very quickly bear out how naïve that is because in fact, as I seem to recall, and you don't have to think back too far, even in the Clinton years when Bill Clinton was about as charming a President as you can imagine, I seem to recall we had a lot of tensions with our European allies and a lot of other folks around the world.
And I suspect that will be the case even more today because -- I mean Peter is right to stress that there are certainly some differences between candidates, and I don't want to suggest that there aren't, but I think a lot of these differences pale by comparison with the United States versus the rest of the world.
And he's absolutely right that, yes, democrats are more interested in working with he U.N. and other international organizations than republicans are. But you know what, democrats still pay a lot less heed to the United Nations than anybody in Europe does. Democrats are still much more "unilateralists," willing to act without United Nations sanctions as Bill Clinton did in the case of Kosovo, for example, than most people in Europe are comfortable with, although they will go along with it under certain circumstances.
So yeah, there are differences but I think what unites the American candidates and the political parties is also what tends to set them apart from the rest of the world whether it's a republican or a democrat.
MODERATOR: Okay, we have a question from New York.
QUESTION: This is Widad Franco for NHK Japan Broadcasting. I just wanted to know how much is all this conflict will weight in the next election especially for all American ultra (inaudible) voters.
MR. BEINART: I think for Jewish-American and Arab and maybe Muslim-American voters, I think the (inaudible) of the conflict will be a significant issue. I think more generally I don't think it's a key voting issue in the way that Iraq is or maybe even Iran could be.
It's interesting. My understanding is that actually Arab and Muslim voters historically were more republican than actually the Bush Administration courted them in the 2000 race. But I think that my strong suspicion is now we will see a big seat change in which democrats -- and I would guess this was true in 2004 -- would win the overwhelming majority of those votes partly because they believe the democrats will be more engaged in trying to broker a deal between Israel and the Palestinians, although the Bush Administration has become more involved in that.
With Jewish-Americans, Jewish-Americans have voted democratic in every President election going back at least to 1928. Before that they tended to vote socialist a lot actually. And it's very rarely even close. So one of the pretty safe predictions you can make is that a democrat will win at least probably 70 percent of the Jewish vote.
Rudy Giuliani would be a republican candidate because he's from New York and because he's more culturally liberal who do better with Jewish voters than another republican. And maybe if he really did well, he could win maybe 35 percent of the Jewish vote. He would particularly win -- there is a big split which has emerged in the Jewish community, if you look at the polls between more observant and more secular Jews, so that Giuliani would probably win a strong majority of orthodox Jews who tend to be more likely to be single issue Israel voters and tend to be further to the right in their definition of what is good for Israel.
George W. Bush won 69 percent of them in the 2004 vote even though he only won I think 23 percent of the Jewish vote overall. But orthodox Jews are only about 10 percent of the American Jewish population. So for most Jewish-Americans, democrats will be considered perfectly acceptable on the question of Israel. And since Jews tend to lean quite strongly to the left on economic and politically cultural issues, I think they'll probably support whoever the democratic nominee is pretty strongly.
QUESTION: Ricardo Balthazar from Valor Economico, Brazilian Newspaper. I would like to see if you could expand on trade. Everyone seems to agree that the democratic candidates are becoming even more protectionist on trade issues, but at the same time you don't see republicans claiming for the Doha Trade deal or anything like this. It seems they are also becoming more protectionist in their views on trade or at least not so enthusiastic as they were in the past.
Do you really think that there's a big difference between the two parties in this election on trade or not?
MR. BOOT: Well, this has been an area of strong bipartisan agreement going back many decades in supporting free trade, which is something that was pushed by Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and pretty much every President going back to 1945. I think you're seeing a little bit more of a split develop now, as you alluded to, with democrats buckling under the union pressure, turning a little bit more protectionist. And I find it a little bit ironic because, of course, the big charge that democrats have against the Bush Administration is that it's been too unilateralist; it's not been willing to work through international institutions; it's not willing to cut deals with the rest of the world; it's turning the rest of the world away. And of course the first thing democrats want to do is turn the rest of the world away by scuttling trade talks, by imposing these strict conditions on the circumstances under which we will trade. I think that is certainly a strong impetus within the Democratic Party and you see a lot of democrats in Congress voting against free trade agreements.
You also see a fair number -- I think a smaller number, but a fair number of republicans who are suspicious of free trade as well. I think free trade still is a little bit more dominant within the Republican Party and -- I think you've certainly heard candidates like John McCain speak up very strongly and kind of defend kind of a traditional free trade case and denounce protectionism very strongly.
But I think you're right that you don't hear republican candidates making too much of the issue, and you also don't hear them on a related issue, which is immigration, which is another issue where I think there is a little bit of a xenophobic term among some parts of the electorate. And I think there is actually a fair amount of agreement on both immigration and trade between the leading moderates in both parties, but their voices are muted during election time because what you're hearing from are some of the most passionate extremes, and the passionate extremes are those who oppose free trade and those who oppose immigration.
But that's not necessarily the way policy is going to get made, because when you deal with these issues in office you realize, wait a second, we can't just load up every free trade agreement with every condition in the world. We're never going to have any free trade agreements. And guess what, free trade agreements actually benefit the United States too. Or, you know, guess what, we can't suddenly round up 12 million illegal immigrants and ship them home. That's not a realist policy. And that's the kind of thing you hear on the campaign trail.
So I think reality will intrude. But I think it is a little bit distressing to see some of these more (inaudible) and xenophobic sentiments making their way into the political discourse, and it's unfortunate to see candidates pandering to them to some extent, which they feel they have to do, because you know those kind of sentiments, while they may not constitute a majority nationally, can be an important constituency that you have to deal with in key primary or caucus states early on.
QUESTION: Marco Bardazzi, Italian News Agency, ANSA. How big an issue do you think it will be in the campaign the relationship with Russia? And how much do you think it will change the relationship with the democrat administration, for example, in the future?
MR. BEINART: I don't think it will be a very big issue. I think the basic reality is that when Americans -- Americans tend to focus on foreign policy if American lives are at stake, if American troops are involved or if they feel like a country poses a serious imminent threat the United States, and Russia fits neither of those categories.
My guess will be that there will be tough rhetoric about Russia. Max mentioned the way in which Bill Clinton talked quite harshly about China. There's no political cost in a Presidential election to denouncing a government that is committing human rights abuses and being very anti-democratic. That's always going to be the smart thing to say politically. But then when you get into office, you realize that America's leverage over Russian domestic affairs is quite limited and that America has a whole series of concerns of Russia that we have to prioritize.
Russia is a very big player on the Iran issue. We have issues with Iran in Kosovo and other issues having to do with Eastern Europe. I think the reality will be that America will have to have a working relationship with Russia, as frustrated and upset as we may be about the kind of prudent destruction of kind of democratic institutions in that country. And I think that is an area I would suspect, as Max said, where I don't think there would be that much difference between the democrat and the republican.
QUESTION: I am Nathan Guttman with the Israeli T.V. Channel. One, I'd like to know how two see the Annapolis conference playing out in the election cycle now. Do you think republicans can use it to improve their foreign policy credentials? Do you think the democrats are going to be more supportive or less critical of Bush now in the campaign?
MR. BOOT: I think this will be a huge boon for President Bush and Secretary Rice because they will conclude peace in the Middle East before the 2008 election and they will reap all the electoral benefits of that. I'm being sarcastic.
I'm guessing that probably will not be the case. In fact, I suspect this will go down like pretty much every other Middle Eastern peace conference that I'm familiar with, with a handful of exceptions like Camp David, the original one, that it won't achieve very much and this is more like grinding of the gears.
And this is another issue where I think you see some bipartisan agreement because foreign policy experts in both the Republican and Democratic Party agree that we need to have lots of conferences with Israelis and Palestinians where very little gets accomplished. But just having conferences is a great idea.
Now I actually -- I'm not quite sure I understand the logic of this, and I thought President Bush descended from the logic of it, too, as he did for the first six years in office, that going back to what I was suggesting earlier about all these differences disappearing, all of a sudden Condoleezza Rice, who I thought was pretty much on board with the well-deserved I thought Bush disdain for endless chit-chat which accomplishes nothing has now made trying to broker Middle Eastern peace the top priority of her remaining time in office which, you know, oddly enough has been the top priority of pretty much every other Secretary of State going back to the formation of the State of Israel. And none of them have achieved very much with a handful of exceptions.
So again, I just think she's not going to be very successful. I don't think voters care very much one way or the other. I mean if there's -- this was kind of an issue where foreign policy intellectuals care about, you know, places like the Council on Foreign Relations, people talked about the importance of the peace process.
I don't think many Americans care about the so called peace process. What they're interested in is a democracy safe in the State of Israel. They want us to be strongly supportive of our embattled democratic allies. They're worried about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. They're worried, of course, about the war in Iraq. They're worried about the war in Afghanistan. They're worried about are terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah gaining power. Those are the issues that concern them. This kind of theoretical peace process, let's talk for the sake of talking I think is one of these huge disconnects between foreign policy elites and ordinary people.
I'm not always going to side with ordinary people on these disconnects because I think, as I was suggesting earlier, I think a lot of this ordinary anti-trade, anti-immigrant is wrong, but in this case I think there's a lot of wisdom in folk opinion.
MODERATOR: We have time for one more question.
QUESTION: I have a -- sorry. I'm Wei Wang from Xinhua News Agency of China, and I have a question for Max. Yesterday the White House presented us, you know, a new version or story about Iran nuclear program. Do you think it's more or less related to campaign? And what kind of impact do you think this report will impose on the candidates and the campaign?
And I have another question for Mr. Peter Beinart. Which part of -- kind of foreign policies do you think will undergo the most dramatic change if democratic come into power after 2008, like Sino-American relations or a developing nuclear program or (inaudible)? So I would like you comment on this. Thank you.
MR. BOOT: Well, you're actually right that the National Intelligence Estimate released yesterday presents a new story about Iran, because just two years ago the previous NEI that was released on Iran said that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons program and now this one says they have not been pursuing a nuclear weapons program since 2003. But, in fact, the differences I think are more apparent than real because if you read this one carefully, it does say that Iran is still pursuing their enrichment facilities, trying to enrich uranium, which is of course what you need to create a nuclear weapon. And they're doing that, of course, in violation fo the United Nations sanctions.
And the differences between a civilian and a nuclear program I think are very slight. And the product of this so called civilian Iranian nuclear program could very easily be converted into a nuclear weapon in -- whenever they get enough fissile material which, according to the NIE, could be as soon as two years from now or even less time.
Now I don't have a lot of confidence in terms of anything that the U.S. intelligence community says about Iran. I don't think most people do because I think there's an understanding that we don't really know what's going on in this kind of closed society. But this certainly is the best guess.
Now I think regardless of that analysis which I just presented to you, I think the political impact is going to be very real, and I think it's going to take the issue of Iran a little bit off the table in the way that Iraq is already being taken off the table for different reasons. But I think this kind of -- it's going to be interpreted, and I think wrongly interpreted, to suggest that Iran is not an urgent issue that we have to deal. And this is something that Rudy Giuliani and John McCain in particular were talking a lot about, whereas Barack Obama in particular was trying to play down the Iranians. So think this to some extent helps candidates like Obama who are trying to take an approach of placating Iran rather than confronting it. And again, I don't think that's necessarily warranted by the facts and evidence of the NEI, but I think that's going to be the political impact.
And you asked is it related to the campaign? I don't think so. I mean it's hard to read motives into anything that the intelligence community does. But if anything, it's related to the fact that a lot of people in the intelligence community opposed the war in Iraq and they don't like being "blamed" for the supposed rush to war that we had in Iraq. And so they want to make sure that they're not going to be blamed for the supposed rush to war in the case of Iran, and they want to make clear that a lot of people in the intelligence community are not on board with the idea of military action against Iran. So I think if there's politics involved, it's of the internal administrative politics not related to the campaign in terms of what the administration is doing politically.
MR. BEINART: I think my question had to do with what would change if a democrat was elected. How Bush policies would change; is that right?
QUESTION: Yeah, which (inaudible) -- foreign policy (inaudible). I mean the current foreign policies will undergo the most dramatic change if democratic government is formed?
MR. BEINART: I would start with global warming or I think -- which is something I think would be very high on the democrats' agenda, to try to do something quite significant to try to put America kind of back in the lead in terms of action on global warming.
It's conceivable a republican, maybe McCain -- it's conceivable McCain or maybe even Romney might do something, but I think it's much more likely the democrat would. It's also I think that, although Max is right that events will have an impact, I think one -- it's quite likely the democrat would be inclined to withdraw troops from Iraq more quickly. Although democrats have not promised to have all their troops out by the end of their term, but they have basically pledged -- all of them in very different ways -- to start pretty significant troop withdrawals which is not I think something the republicans have pledged to do. And I think they will be under a lot of pressure, again, unless events change in quite significant ways, under a lot of pressure from the people that elected them to do that given that the war remains unpopular and is particularly unpopular amongst democrats.
I think on trade you will see differences in policies not necessarily that democrats will oppose all trade deals, but I think that the model for trade deals the democrats will have will be trade deals that involve considerably more in the way of labor and environmental standards than republicans do.
The democratic -- there is a clearly a tradition of free trade in the United States. There is also a tradition, if you look at the institutions that were created at the end of World War II, about global economic management. And I think that the democratic perspective will be more that the two have to go together where I think the republican view is a more -- a bit more laissez faire. You can see that if you look at kind of conservative -- kind of hostility to even the existence of the IMF, for instance, and the World Bank you saw a bit in the 1990s.
I think a democrat would make -- you know, Mitt Romney has said he wants to double the size of Guantanamo Bay if we're to believe him. I think a democrat will probably try to work significantly to try to get rid of Guantanamo Bay. It might not be easy, but I think a democrat would probably have that as their goal.
And I do think on Iran, I think that a democrat is more likely to look favorably on some kind of deal with Iran than a republican. That's not to say that you couldn't have a kind of Nixon and China kind of experience with a republican making a deal with Iran. One might even say that a republican made deal with Iran would be more politically sustainable than a democratic one because a democratic (inaudible) a lot of criticisms from conservatives as the North Korea deal in 1994.
When Bush made his own deal with North Korea recently, in some way he was more politically inoculated because he was a President from the right. But I think that there is a very, very strong predisposition on the American political right to always believe that America's enemies are stronger than we think they are to a very strong (inaudible) that the balance is tipping against us, which is a very strong kind of theme in conservative rhetoric during the Cold War, a strong theme in conservative rhetoric about China in the 1990s and about -- and of course about Iraq and now also about Iran. I don't think it's not quite as strong amongst democrats than it is amongst republicans.
On China, I don't think much is likely to change unless there is some big event in which any President would be forced to respond if something happened between China and Taiwan for instance.
And on North Korea, my suspicion is that a President of either party would probably try to continue with the framework that we now have established by George W. Bush.
MODERATOR: Thank you all for coming. Max and Peter, we appreciate you being with us. Thank you.
