Nation building

Sidney Callahan longs for the "humble" foreign policy that George W. Bush promised in 2000 and now believes that John Kerry is the best hope for such a policy. She may be right, but not in the way she suspects. What Bush meant by "humble" was not humbly listening and working with other countries but rather no nation building and no humanitarian intervention--in other words, "humility" about our responsibility to the rest of the world. This was going to be a return to the "realist" foreign policy of Nixon and Kissinger, and of Bush's father, which supported stability and the balance of power over liberal values, even if it meant keeping in power the worst dictators. In the case of the first Bush administration, that meant keeping Saddam Hussein in power after the Gulf War, leaving the Shiites and Kurds to their fate, and looking the other way as crisis erupted in Bosnia.

As Joshua Micah Marshall recently wrote in the Atlantic Monthly (July / August 2004), Kerry's projected foreign policy will be closer to Bush I than Bush II. Of course Bush II's idealism has been clumsy, and Kerry supposedly will be more "multilateral." But that will be easy considering amoral "realism" is already the policy of France, Russia, and China. This has been true since at least the mid-1990s. (Remember the Kosovo War? The UN Security Council didn't support that war either.) Callahan says she is looking for a foreign policy of "international cooperation aimed at peacemaking," but that would be "peace" at the expense of justice.

MATTHEW SHADLE

Dayton, Ohio

The author replies:

All right, I have repented and made public confession so I have little defense against accusations such as "You should have known better in the first place, stupid." But I can remind my "disappointed" critics that intelligent people make mistakes and often differ among themselves.

Joseph P. Spampinato chides me for saying that Kerry or anyone else is really "proabortion." This comes down to what we mean by "pro." If I defend as right and good laws that allow millions of people to opt for abortion, isn't it a comforting dodge to say that personally "I am not for abortion"?

Matthew Shadle's analysis of recent foreign policy makes him leary of my endorsement of Kerry as the next national leader. He commends Bush's idealism, but I surely made it clear that I see Bush as a true believer. My problem is that I see his religious and patriotic ideals as simplistic, skewed, and dangerously destructive to both justice and peace. It is a measure of our present plight that even "amoral realism" can look good.

SIDNEY CALLAHAN

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