Reengaging With the World

A Return to Moral Leadership

John Edwards

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2007

Summary:  In the wake of the Iraq debacle, we must restore America's reputation for moral leadership and reengage with the world. We must move beyond the empty slogan 'war on terror' and create a genuine national security policy that is built on hope, not fear. Only then can America once again become a beacon to the world.

John Edwards, a former U.S. Senator from North Carolina, is a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

At the dawn of a new century and on the brink of a new presidency, the United States today needs to reclaim the moral high ground that defined our foreign policy for much of the last century.

We must move beyond the wreckage created by one of the greatest strategic failures in U.S. history: the war in Iraq. Rather than alienating the rest of the world through assertions of infallibility and demands of obedience, as the current administration has done, U.S. foreign policy must be driven by a strategy of reengagement. We must reengage with our history of courage, liberty, and generosity. We must reengage with our tradition of moral leadership on issues ranging from the killings in Darfur to global poverty and climate change. We must reengage with our allies on critical security issues, including terrorism, the Middle East, and nuclear proliferation. With confidence and resolve, we must reengage with those who pose a security threat to us, from Iran to North Korea. And our government must reengage with the American people to restore our nation's reputation as a moral beacon to the world, tapping into our fundamental hope and optimism and calling on our citizens' commitment and courage to make this possible. We must lead the world by demonstrating the power of our ideals, not by stoking fear about those who do not share them.

The last century saw tremendous advances in the human condition -- from increased economic prosperity to the spread of human rights and the emergence of a truly global community. But the century also brought two devastating world wars, the death of millions, and a Cold War that lasted two generations and risked the end of humanity. The new century, too, will bring both promise and peril. We can look forward to incredible technological advances in communications and medicine and an expanding world economy that will lift millions out of poverty while raising the standards of living for working people at home and abroad.

But we must also prepare for a world filled with new risks: the increasing reach of nonstate actors who reject our very way of life, the consequences of global climate change, and the possibility that dangerous technology will fall into the wrong hands. We can lead the world through these challenges, just as the United States led the world through the challenges of the previous century. But we can only do so if we reclaim the trust and respect of those countries whose cooperation we need but whose will we cannot compel.

RESTORING AMERICA'S REPUTATION

This century's first test of our leadership arrived with terrible force on September 11, 2001. When the United States was attacked, the entire world stood with us. We could have pursued a broad policy of reengagement with the world, yet instead we squandered this broad support through a series of policies that drove away our friends and allies. A recent Pew survey showed the United States' approval ratings plummeting throughout the world between 2000 and 2006. This decline was especially worrisome in Muslim countries of strategic importance to the United States, such as Indonesia, where approval dropped from 75 percent to 30 percent, and Turkey, where it fell from 52 percent to 12 percent. Perceptions of America's efforts to promote democracy have suffered as well. In 33 of the 47 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center, majorities or pluralities expressed dislike for American ideas of democracy.

We need a new path, one that will lead to reengagement with the world and restoration of the United States' moral authority in the community of nations. President Harry Truman once said, "No one nation alone can bring peace. Together, nations can build a strong defense against aggression and combine the energy of free men everywhere in building a better future for all." For 50 years, presidents from Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton built strong alliances and deepened the world's respect for us. We gained that respect by viewing our military strength not as an end in itself but as a means to protect a system of laws and institutions that gave hope to billions across the globe. In avoiding the temptation to rule as an empire, we hastened the fall of a corrupt and evil one in the Soviet Union. The lesson is that we cannot only be warriors; we must be thinkers and leaders as well.

And so as we contemplate a national security policy for a new century, we must ask ourselves far-reaching questions: Are we truly denying our enemies what they seek? Are we doing all we can to win the war not only of weapons but also of ideas? Are we battling the fear our enemies sow by planting seeds of hope instead?

This is about much more than convincing people to like us. There was a time when a president did not speak just to Americans -- he spoke to the world. People thousands of miles away would gather to listen to someone they called, without irony, "the leader of the free world." Men and women in Nazi-occupied Europe would huddle around shortwave radios to listen to President Franklin Roosevelt. Millions cheered in Berlin when President John F. Kennedy stood with them and said, "Ich bin ein Berliner." Millions of people imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain silently cheered the day President Reagan declared, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Even if these ordinary men and women did not always agree with our policies, they looked to our president and saw a person -- and a nation -- they could trust. Today, under the current administration, this is no longer the case. At the dawn of a new century, it is vital that we win the war of ideas in the world. We need to reach out to ordinary men and women from Egypt to Indonesia and convince them, once again, that the United States is a force to be admired.