Foreign Policy

American foreign policy has often been described as oscillating between realist and idealist poles. The U.S. presidential election campaign offers an excellent opportunity to subject the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees to a realist-idealist test. Realists see the world through gray and melancholy lenses: humans are selfish and aggressive by nature, and conflict between political entities is inevitable. Diplomacy, backed by military force, can at best moderate state behavior, if favorable balances of power are maintained by coalitions of the privileged and the satisfied.

Watching an old kinescope of the 1960 debates between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, I was reminded of how hard Kennedy attacked on three foreign policy issues. One of them, the so-called missile gap, was a myth. The second, the resoluteness of the Eisenhower administration's stand in defense of the two tiny islands of Quemoy and Matsu, was trivial. The third, the question of the administration's toughness toward Castro, put Nixon in a bind because, as vice president, he couldn't reveal that plans already had been laid for the invasion of the island by Cuban exiles.

LOS ANGELES - Jon Huntsman Jr., far behind in the race for the GOP presidential nomination, outlined his foreign policy Monday, trying to steer a course less hawkish than the party's leader, Mitt Romney, but still forceful enough to attract Republican support. The former U.S. ambassador to China, Huntsman was also critical of President Obama, his former boss, saying the president's foreign policy lacked leadership. "The world needs American leadership now more than ever.

Maybe we all expected too much from Colin Powell. When the the charismatic ex-general was appointed Secretary of State, he seemed the perfect choice to shape a foreign-policy vision for a President who lacked one. He was a glamorous diplomat-warrior. He looked just the ticket to tone down the administration's gung-ho Star Wars crowd, with a dose of realism honed by years of military service. He seemed poised to become the great articulator, to explain why America must remain internationalist.

Surprise! The secretary of state found himself cut out of the loop in important foreign-policy matters. Bureaucrats engaged in infighting and officials waged turf wars. This is like saying wolves hunt or cars collide: certainly true, sometimes deplorable, but hardly unexpected. George Shultz's testimony at the Iran-contra hearing certainly had a real- world flavor, including his earthy choice of language: "guerrilla warfare" among competing factions, a "battle royal" for the President's ear, Ollie North's irregulars getting "taken to the cleaners" in their dealings with the wily Iranians.

It was one of the few testy moments in the lovefest between Secretary of State-designate James A. Baker 3d and a host of admiring senators at his confirmation hearings earlier this week. Why, demanded a skeptical Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., did the Bush team need so much time to review its negotiating positions at nuclear arms reduction talks with the Soviets? Wasn't Bush the guy who ran for the presidency on a pledge of foreign policy expertise? Wasn't this the treaty that the Reagan administration had just about pinned down?

"Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the president's actions in Libya as 'leading from behind.' " - Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker To be precise, leading from behind is a style, not a doctrine. Doctrines involve ideas, but since there are no discernible ones that make sense of Obama's foreign policy - Lizza's painstaking two-year chronicle shows it to be as ad hoc, erratic, and confused as it appears - this will have to do. And it surely is an accurate description, from President Obama's shocking passivity during Iran's 2009 Green Revolution to his dithering on Libya, acting at the very last moment, and then handing off to a bickering coalition, yielding the current bloody stalemate.

As a frequent critic of President Clinton's foreign policy (style and content), I've been trying to figure out whether the Republican landslide in Congress will improve things. Republicans have long prided themselves on their foreign policy smarts, and have stressed how poorly Clinton measures up. And Clinton bobbled his chance to define to the U.S. public how American power ought be used abroad after the Cold War. But the signs already emerging out of this week's political earthquake don't make me optimistic about foreign policy changes.

In all likelihood, President Bush's toughest foreign policy battles will take place not with foreign adversaries, but with Congress. These fights will not only tarnish U.S. standing in the world, but will likely imperil both our security and that of our allies. Obviously, Congress is entitled to its oversight role in evaluating executive branch programs, reviewing treaties, examining the president's nominees, and withholding appropriations from the occasional foreign policy initiative it finds unacceptable.

Foreign policy hasn't played much of a role in the Republican presidential race, and it's easy to see why. GOP candidates' remarks on our role abroad have ranged from the uninformed to the bizarre (with the exception of Jon Huntsman, who served twice as a U.S. ambassador). Front-runner Mitt Romney's foreign-policy speech last week had a Rip Van Winkle quality to it, as though he'd just awakened after a decade and was unaware of how the world had changed since 9/11. This is sad, because the country could use a serious national debate over what our global role should be in a time of economic turmoil and scarcity.

As we approach a pivotal presidential election, it's worth looking back a century to another one. The 1912 contest, which set the stage for the United States' emergence as a world power, bore similarities to the political situation today. At the time, Republicans had long dominated the White House, having held the presidency for all but eight years since the election of Lincoln in 1860. That changed in 1912. A revolt broke out in the Republican Party, partly ideological and partly personal.

MILWAUKEE - President Obama's administration launched a multipronged assault on Mitt Romney's values and foreign policy credentials Sunday, while a fresh set of prominent Republicans rallied behind the GOP front-runner as the odds-on nominee, further signs the general election is overtaking primary season. A defiant Rick Santorum outlined plans to leave Wisconsin the day before the state's contest Tuesday, an indication that the conservative favorite may be in retreat, his chances to stop Romney dwindling.

Former Gov. Ed Rendell says he wouldn't risk his reputation for money, but that is exactly the impression he gave by linking himself to a shady organization that, whether he agrees with it or not, is listed as a terrorist group by the State Department. But Rendell isn't alone. Others who have spoken out in support of the group of Iranian rebels called MEK, short for Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, include former Homeland Security Director and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones, former CIA Director Porter Goss, and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

TEHRAN, Iran - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's name will be nowhere on Friday's ballots. But the voting for parliament seats will be about him and what's left of his final term in office. The races for Iran's 290-member parliament boil down to a contest between conservative groups that have turned against each other after crushing reformists in the upheavals that followed Ahmadinejad's disputed reelection in 2009 - the last major voting in Iran. One bloc seeks further to diminish Ahmadinejad's political stature.

WASHINGTON - America's new ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, assumed his post in Moscow this week and declared on his Twitter account: "This is going to be fun. " At the same time, he came under a scorching attack from state-run Channel One television, which Tuesday questioned his past efforts to promote democracy in the country, and said he was "not an expert on Russia. " McFaul is a well-known Russia scholar from Stanford University, and as a senior White House official helped design the Obama administration's efforts to "reset" U.S.-Russian relations.

When it comes to foreign policy, the current Republican candidates are so incoherent they make George W. Bush look like a savant. I know that what candidates say on foreign affairs on the stump is often abandoned once in office. Yet it certainly looks as if the old guard of Republican foreign-policy experts is obsolete in the age of angry tea party populism. At a time when diplomatic savvy is desperately needed, outrageous remarks get the most cheers from the base. The comments on international affairs at Republican debates are often so clueless they've become grist for satire in foreign capitals.

During a news conference last month, President Obama rebuked Republican critics of his foreign policy: "Ask Osama bin Laden ... whether I engage in appeasement," he said. The president has a point, of course. The special forces raid on bin Laden's compound deep inside Pakistan was an extremely gutsy call. So, too, was the extrajudicial death sentence that Obama imposed on U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki in Yemen. More generally, the president has been a veritable killing machine when it comes to anti-American jihadists, escalating drone attacks against our most fanatical enemies tenfold.

By Gareth Evans Václav Havel, the Czech playwright and dissident turned president, and Kim Jong Il, the North Korean despot, might have lived on different planets, for all their common commitment to human dignity, rights, and democracy. When they died just a day apart this month, the contrast was hard for the global commentariat to resist: Prague's prince of light against Pyongyang's prince of darkness. But it is worth remembering that Manichaean good-vs.-evil typecasting - the kind to which former President George W. Bush and former Prime Minister Tony Blair were famously prone, and of which we have had something of a resurgence in recent days - carries two big risks for international policymakers.

Obama's successes I wonder if any congressional Republican or GOP presidential candidate would dare give credit to President Obama for a foreign policy triumph, finally ending our senseless war in Iraq ("A bipartisan effort doomed misadventure in Iraq," Dec. 18). The war not only inflicted massive casualties on our soldiers and innocent Iraqis, but was fought with hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars. I regret that our withdrawal did not occur sooner, but better late than never.

By Carl Leubsdorf Mitt Romney promises to "repeal" President Obama's health-care plan "on day two" of his presidency, "take military action" if necessary to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, and challenge Chinese currency manipulation in the World Trade Organization. Rep. Ron Paul would scrap five cabinet-level agencies. Gov. Rick Perry would ax three while enacting a flat tax. Perry would also cut congressional salaries in half and limit Supreme Court justices to 18-year terms.