Over the last three issues, Foreign Affairs, the influential journal on international relations, has featured articles by the top 2008 U.S. Presidential candidates on their foreign policy agendas. Anatomizing the differences is enlightening.
Democratic Candidates:
Republican Candidates:
Inter-party, divergences are minor, particularly on the Democratic side. If pressed, I'd give the winning Democratic essay award to Senator Clinton, who manages to sound essentially indistinguishable from her primary competitors but, to those looking closely, sends plenty of signals that she is more hawkish than Senators Edwards or Obama.
One nit from all of the essays, but the democrats in particular, is that they throw around all sorts of terms and unleash levels of rhetoric without defining the phrases or substantiating their prescriptions. For example, from Senator Clinton's piece, you have to ask, what vital interests?
As president, I will never hesitate to use force to protect Americans or to defend our territory and our vital interests. [...] The United States must be prepared to act on its own to defend its vital interests
Of course, these are the passages meant for mass consumption, and not for parsing by the intelligentsia, but natch the President reserves the use of force for vital interests—the campaign's foreign policy promises should be exactly about defining what those interests are.
Among GOP candidates, Mayor Giuliani and Governor Romney sound the most alike, hawkish and, particularly in the case of Giuliani's work, demagogic, appealing to populism and fear and not rationalism.
Senator McCain's article wins on the Republican side: pragmatic and realist.
Unlike domestic pledges, Presidential candidate's foreign policy promises tend to have only a weak correlation to practice once elected—partly, I think, because foreign policy is more subjective and discretionary than other facets of being the chief executive, but also because rhetoric and reality can be disjoint when the US populace understands the issues so poorly (probably second only to economics). You know, an enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic and all that.
Let's not forget this line from the 2000 Presidential debates:
If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us; if we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us. And our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that's why we've got to be humble, and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom.
Or this paragraph, from Secretary Rice's foreign policy prescription in Foreign Affairs during the 2000 campaign:
The president must remember that the military is a special instrument. It is lethal, and it is meant to be. It is not a civilian police force. It is not a political referee. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society. Military force is best used to support clear political goals, whether limited, such as expelling Saddam from Kuwait, or comprehensive, such as demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan and Germany during World War II. It is one thing to have a limited political goal and to fight decisively for it; it is quite another to apply military force incrementally, hoping to find a political solution somewhere along the way. A president entering these situations must ask whether decisive force is possible and is likely to be effective and must know how and when to get out.
Sadly, Secretary Rice's opus likely mirror the policies she, a realist, hoped that the administration would implement.