Familiarity, not contempt
Leader
Monday November 13, 2006
The Guardian
In last week's elections American voters handed power on Capitol Hill to a group of politicians who are rooted in a more multilateralist approach to US foreign policy than the Bush administration has ever been. The incoming Democrat chairmen of the Senate foreign relations committee and the House international relations committee, Senator Joe Biden and Congressman Tom Lantos respectively, are advocates of multilateral engagement and friends of Europe. Senator Biden played an important role in encouraging the decisive US interventions in the Balkan wars in the 1990s and rightly stood out for a "patient, resolute and cautious" response to 9/11, while Mr Lantos, born in Budapest and the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the US Congress, probably knows more about central and eastern Europe than most Britons.
The two men take office not merely on a wave of criticism of the Iraq war itself but also at a time when Iraq has helped push American public opinion about foreign policy more generally in a multilateral direction. In a poll last week, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research found 58% of US voters now agree that "America's security depends on building strong ties with other nations", against just 34% believing it depends on America's own military strength. After too many years in which the US foreign policy debate has been dominated by an all too apparent contempt for global agreements and institutions, this is a hopeful sign that the new Democrat-led Congress may feel confident enough to place a more constructive and engaged foreign policy at the heart of its strategy when it takes office in January - and that this approach will carry through and become a serious plank of the party's platform in the 2008 presidential election.
One signal that the new Congress should immediately send to the president and the outside world is the replacement of America's United Nations ambassador John Bolton. Mr Bolton is a unabashed relic of the failed neoconservative era in foreign policy which was so emphatically defeated last week. He has never concealed his contempt for the UN. His presence as the US's chief representative at the most important of international organisations sends a message which is not, and never was, in America's interests. Even timid Downing Street would like to see the back of Mr Bolton so that diplomacy can make a fresh start. Mr Bolton's nomination has never received the congressional confirmation that it ultimately requires; President Bush resubmitted it last week. Senator Biden and his colleagues should ensure that Mr Bolton is rejected, so that the administration is forced to nominate a candidate whose approach is more in tune with the changed times in Washington.
The urgent mood for sensible change that brought the Democrats to power - and which has seen Mr Bush's ratings slump further this weekend - is already influencing the administration on its most important challenge. The disaster of Iraq was underlined again yesterday by typically depressing news of carnage, affecting Britons, Americans and Iraqis. Even before his election defeat Mr Bush faced a growing political imperative to extricate the US with a minimum of casualties and a maximum of salvageable dignity within a defined time-frame. The election has heightened that pressure. It means the Iraq Study Group, headed by the former secretary of state James Baker, which meets in Washington this week, acquires greater significance by the day. Those wishing to see a more realistic and less doctrinaire policy need to exert maximum pressure on the ISG to adopt brave new solutions. That includes Tony Blair, whose proposals to Mr Baker tomorrow should be made public. Like the president, the prime minister has to face the hard fact that the central focus of his foreign policy has failed and that we are in a new era now.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1946159,00.html
