The Democrats' foreign (policy) wars

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton may be trading salvos over their international credentials, but the Democratic presidential contenders are really a united front.

By Walter Shapiro

Read more: Foreign Policy, Democratic Party, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Iran, Politics, Bill Richardson, News, Walter Shapiro, Iraq War, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Chris Dodd

Reuters images/Salon photo composite

Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama

Nov. 21, 2007 | TAMA, Iowa -- Speaking at the Bluegrass Cafe (right down the street from Crystal's Cowlick Beauty Salon) Monday night, Hillary Clinton promised, "As soon as I'm elected, I'm going to ask distinguished Americans in both parties to travel around the world on my behalf with a very simple message: The era of cowboy diplomacy is over."

Responding to a question at an American Legion hall in Manchester, N.H., Monday afternoon, Bill Richardson declared, "We have to find ways again where American diplomacy is not considered cowboy diplomacy, but is considered diplomacy where we're not the policemen of the world, but the conscience of the world."

Without calling for a formal investigation by the Plagiarism Police, it is safe to conclude that there is an eerie similarity here. But the probable cause is not rhetorical shoplifting, but the nearly unprecedented similarity in the foreign-policy positions of the major Democratic contenders. Seven years of George W. Bush has achieved something thought impossible during the Cold War or even during the 2004 primary campaigns -- he has united the Democrats on national security.

"I don't really know where these Democrats are on foreign policy," said Michael Mandelbaum, professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "I don't know what John Edwards' foreign policy will be. I can't predict Barack Obama's. And the fact that it is so hard for someone like me to find these differences tells you something."

Even as they search for an issue to differentiate themselves from their rivals, members of the Democratic presidential class of '08 will admit, when pressed, that they are all singing from the same hymn book on foreign policy. That leaves them to argue over who is most qualified, like Joe Biden in this Salon interview, or, like Clinton and Obama, who are turning the topic into a blood sport.

"Rhetorically, in terms of what people say they want to do, there probably is not that much difference," conceded Chris Dodd in an interview Saturday in Marshalltown, Iowa. "People certainly agree on diplomacy and certainly agree on utilizing those other tools in our arsenal. But the fault line is experience in foreign policy."

The definition of "experience" became a high-decibel campaign issue Tuesday as Clinton and Obama hurled brickbats at each other across Iowa. The former first lady had sneered at Obama's decision on Monday to stress his childhood years in Indonesia as part of his foreign-policy credentials. In a campaign speech in Shenandoah (ballyhooed in a press release issued by her campaign), Clinton sniped, "Voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big complex international challenges the next president will face."

The Obama campaign quickly issued a response that echoed comments that the first-term Illinois senator has been regularly making on the stump in Iowa. "Two guys named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have the longest résumés in Washington," Obama declared Sunday afternoon in Cedar Falls, "but they led us into the biggest foreign-policy disaster in a generation." Tuesday's press statement from Obama spokesman Bill Burton upped the ante by adding Hillary Clinton's name to the roster of those responsible for the folly of the Iraq war. (Clinton, along with Edwards, Dodd and Joe Biden, voted for the 2002 resolution granting Bush authority to launch the invasion. Obama publicly opposed the conflict.)

More than anything, this flap suggested that the knotted Democratic race in Iowa has entered its mean season with major candidates hurling irresponsible charges on the off chance that they will stick. In truth, it should be hard for an internationalist Democrat to argue that Obama's experience living in Indonesia as a child is irrelevant to understanding the Muslim world. In symbolic terms, no Democrat (in fact, no serious presidential contender in American history) can match Obama's half-Kenya-and-half-Kansas heritage.

In Grundy Center Sunday night, I asked Obama in an interview to sketch out the practical benefits to America in having a president with roots on two other continents (a father from Africa, a childhood partly in Asia). "As president," he said, "I think that means not only do people give me the benefit of the doubt, but it means that I can challenge some of the conventional wisdom in other countries and push for U.S. interests in these other countries in a way that other president cannot do."

Next page: "I've met with countless world leaders and know many of them personally"