BOOK REVIEW
Explaining the debate over US foreign policy
By Rich Barlow, Globe Correspondent, 9/3/2003At War With Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World, By Michael Hirsh, Oxford University Press, 288 pp., $26
Heading into a presidential election that's sure to pivot on foreign policy after 9/11, it's a good time for nonexperts (and that's most of us) to get some guidance in the confusing, rancorous debate.
"Realists" say America should use force only when a vital national interest is threatened: No bleeding-heart humanitarian missions to the Earth's boonies and, by God, no playing footsie with the United Nations, that Denver boot on American sovereignty. Descendants of Woodrow Wilson retort that all peoples deserve the same right of self-determination we claimed. And only by working through the UN and its cousin institutions, which the United States essentially created, can we rout terrorism and make a decent world.
"At War With Ourselves" is a clear-headed referee in this debate. A smart foreign policy, Newsweek diplomatic correspondent Michael Hirsh writes, is "one in which `the yahoos of the right and softies of the left' are once again marginalized," as they were during the Cold War.
Realists take Hirsh's heaviest fire. His thesis is that the international community and its institutions actually serve American interests. Sure, the UN sometimes embarrasses itself; nations like Libya heading human-rights committees is a joke. But if the American president hopes to protect our security and interests, the UN and globalization are "critical to bending other nations to our will" -- offering international money and cover for nation-building in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, blunting militarism in rivals, like China, with the desire for globalism's prosperity. When Bush comes to shove, we need the family of nations.
But those who see the UN as a pacifist debating society won't find Hirsh joining their candlelight vigils. Realists get one thing right: This international system depends on America's superpower wielded effectively. Hirsh says the Clinton administration encouraged terrorists in the 1990s with its ineffectual, cruise-missile tantrums after terrorist attacks. "In a stream of messages sent from his lair in Afghanistan, [Osama bin Laden] mocked the Americans for retreating from conflict in Muslim lands," he writes.
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