Something Versus Nothing

At this point, the election is split into two types of people: those who consider domestic policies to be the vital issue, and those who consider foreign policies to be the key issue. The Kerry campaign has been focusing on domestic policy, though their prescriptions here seem very similar to their prescriptions for foreign policy - "we'll do things differently, but we won't tell you how". When they have actually said something about foreign policy, their statements have highlighted the ideological and philosophical differences with the Bush Administration. Lawrence Kaplan in The New Republic, which has of late been displaying their loony left side, reviews Bush's acceptance speech from the foreign policy perspective.

Say what you will about President Bush. But that arrogant, dim-witted cowboy, whom graduate students and editorial boards everywhere loathe so intensely, performed an essential service tonight. He did so by confronting, directly and to no obvious political advantage, a plague that has infected Republicans for the past decade, Democrats for a generation, and this year's Democratic nominee for even longer than that. He repudiated, and quite possibly helped to banish, the twin strains of foreign policy realism and isolationism that emerge whenever America finds itself on its heels.

What Bush made clear through his speech is that while domestic issues are important, none of them matter if we are attacked. The policies of the Republicans and the Democrats have been reversed; it is the Democrats who are now the isolationists, while the Republicans are the forward looking interventionists.

While Kerry wasted his convention speech playing soldier and reminiscing about a war three decades behind us, Bush used his to remind us that we are at war, and it's the only thing that matters. The proposition might seem self-evident, but it stands in sharp contrast to the convention speech we heard last month in Boston. There, Kerry complained about "opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them in the United States" and pledged to "bring the troops home" and thereby "reduce the cost to American taxpayers." He's been singing the same tune ever since, pandering shamelessly to the centuries-old, but no less insidious, temptation to bury our heads in the sand and hope for the best. Kerry makes it all seem so seductive. "What American would not trade the economy we had in the 1990s, the fact that we were not at war and young American soldiers were not deployed?" the Democratic nominee asks us, as if we had a choice in the matter.
[...]
Who, then, is the true foreign policy liberal? The candidate whose campaign advisers ridicule the present administration for its "sloppy neo-Wilsonianism"? Or the candidate who pledges to "bring the hope of democracy to every corner of the world"? And whose foreign policy qualifies as the more realistic? The candidate whose response to a universal war of ideas is to eschew ideas? Or the candidate who employs an idea with universal appeal and relevance? What is true of the global war of ideas is rapidly becoming true of the electoral war of ideas: You can't beat something with nothing.