Democratic Foreign Policy

Claudia Rosett looks for the foreign policy of the Democratic Party, as shown by the Convention, and doesn't find much.

A Democratic foreign policy is what I was looking for when I switched on the TV Monday to watch the opening lineup at the Democratic Convention. I sat through Jimmy Carter ("Brezhnev lied to me"), Al Gore ("no controlling legal authority"), Hillary Clinton (the "woulda coulda shoulda" commodities trader) and then, at last, there he was, Big Bill (ol' "what the meaning of 'is' is") telling us that sending Sen. John Kerry to the White House would make America safer, smarter, stronger--just the way it was by the time Mr. Clinton left office (a March Rich pardon on his lips and state silverware in his luggage--or did Sandy Berger pack that in his pants?).

"By the only test that matters--were people better off when we finished than when we started--our way worked better," said Mr. Clinton.

Mr. Clinton finished, of course, in January, 2001, by which time al Qaeda's training camps, on Mr. Clinton's watch, had already churned out thousands of terrorists we've been trying to catch ever since. By that time, the Sept. 11 plot was just eight months from completion; our intelligence community was if possible even dumber than it is now; Iran had already been working for at least half a decade toward its nuclear bomb; North Korea had already been cheating for years on Mr. Clinton's "Agreed Framework" nuclear freeze; Arafat's intifada had crowned the Clinton photo-op forays into the Middle East; and Saddam Hussein, having kicked out the United Nations weapons inspectors in 1998, was busy cashing in bigtime on the Clinton-launched United Nations Oil-for-Food program, buying influence and blackmail opportunities among our allies, some of them the very same allies Mr. Bush has alienated, pushed away, burned his bridges to . . .