America's Foreign Policy Trap

By Peter Beinart

John Edwards wants to ditch the "war on terror." That was the headline out of his big foreign policy speech last month at the Council on Foreign Relations. But it's not the real news. "War on terror" is probably on its way out anyway: our allies can't stand the term. Neither can the military. Even Donald Rumsfeld tried to abandon it a couple of years back. It probably won't survive the next Republican Administration, let alone the next Democratic one.

The real news isn't so much what Edwards said he would do about foreign policy, but where he'd do it. In more than 5,000 words, Edwards mentioned China and India once each. He breezed through Russia in a few paragraphs. His most specific proposal was a "Marshall Corps" to help countries in crisis. And when he listed future missions for the military, he cited the challenge from "weak and failing" states before the challenge from potential great powers.

Barack Obama must have been nodding in agreement. In his own address a few weeks earlier, Obama dwelled on "impoverished, weak and ungoverned states." China came up twice. He did linger over Russia but less as a powerful competitor than as a country too impoverished, weak and ungoverned to safeguard its nukes.

This is a big change. In the century since the U.S. became a world power, relations with other strong nations have dominated our foreign policy. (Even when we went to war in Korea and Vietnam or tried to overthrow regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua, it was mostly to prevent a superpower--the Soviet Union--from extending its reach.) As late as 2000, when Condoleezza Rice laid out Governor George W. Bush's foreign policy vision in an article in Foreign Affairs, she cited Russia 35 times and China 24.

Obviously, 9/11--when the U.S. was attacked from Afghanistan, a terrorist-infested basket case--changed things. But while the Bush Administration turned its attention to the Middle East, it kept the same basic prism seeing terrorism as the product of (allegedly) rising, threatening powers like Iraq and Iran.

Now, as the Bush Administration recedes, leading Democrats are offering a more radical interpretation: 9/11 didn't merely show that the U.S. faces threats from rising powers in a different section of the globe; it heralded a world where rising powers aren't the major threat at all. The real danger, they argue, is from states that are too dysfunctional to educate their people, provide public health or control their territory--and thus export a swarm of pathologies, from jihadist terrorism to loose nukes to bird flu. It's no surprise that Edwards and Obama want to boost foreign aid. They believe the poor world threatens the U.S. more than the rich.

There's a lot to recommend this view. For starters, it gets jihadism right. Al-Qaeda-- style terrorism does stem more from state breakdown than state power. (Compare pre- and post-Saddam Iraq.) The weak-state concept also makes Democratic foreign policy broader than its Republican equivalent. In Bush-esque speeches this spring, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani tried--unconvincingly--to cram virtually all of American foreign policy into the war on terror. Weak states, by contrast, offer Democrats a prism that isn't confined to the Islamic world.

But it's not enough. Great-power competition isn't a historical artifact. The next President will spend countless hours managing China's rising influence in Asia, which threatens to marginalize the U.S. and our close ally, Japan. And he or she will have real problems with Russia, which although domestically weak throws its weight around overseas, jockeying for clout in the former Soviet Union and using its gas exports to bully Western Europe. Dealing with Moscow and Beijing will require strategic judgment, not humanitarian action. And if Democratic candidates avoid it, they risk confirming the stereotype that Democrats see foreign policy as social work and flinch at hard-nosed calculations of national interest.

There's another problem. Even the best-laid U.S. plans to combat transnational threats won't succeed if rising powers like China and India aren't part of the solution. The U.S. doesn't have the power or credibility to design and enforce rules for how other nations should handle public health, weapons proliferation, the environment or almost anything else without other big countries on board. The U.S.'s efforts to help weak states will largely depend on how well we cooperate with strong ones.

In the months to come, the Democratic front runners will make more foreign policy speeches. Let's hope they each devote a whole one to China and large chunks of others to India, Russia and Japan. How the U.S. handles these powers will help determine how dangerous the world becomes in the coming years and whether the U.S. remains its lone superpower. That deserves more than a throwaway line.

Beinart is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations