A New Realism

A Realistic and Principled Foreign Policy

Bill Richardson

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008

Summary:  The United States needs a foreign policy that is based on reality and is loyal to American values. The next U.S. president needs to send a clear signal to the world that America has turned the corner and will once again be a leader rather than a unilateralist loner. Getting out of Iraq and restoring our reputation are necessary first steps toward a new strategy of U.S. global engagement and leadership.

BILL RICHARDSON, Governor of New Mexico, is a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

COOL EYES AND ARDENT PRINCIPLES

The United States' reputation as a model of freedom and human dignity is one of our greatest resources. We tarnish it at our peril. In the wake of the Bush administration's violations of our values, a skillful public diplomacy effort will be needed to convince the world that the United States has rediscovered itself. Such public diplomacy should include radio and television broadcasts in local languages, as well as expanded educational and exchange programs.

For such efforts to be credible, however, we really need to live up to our own ideals every day. If we want others to value civil liberties, we need to stop spying on our own citizens. Prisoner abuse, torture, secret prisons, denials of habeas corpus, and evasions of the Geneva Conventions must never again have a place in our policy. We should start by closing our prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and explaining clearly to the world why we have done so.

We must reengage the Middle East peace process with the determination to succeed, so that we can deprive the jihadists of their most effective propaganda tool. We must use all our sticks and carrots to strengthen Palestinian moderates and to achieve a two-state solution that guarantees Israel's security. I would ask Bill Clinton to serve as a high-level full-time envoy to help broker a final settlement. We should also engage discreetly in Kashmir, the tinderbox of Asia.

We are spending more than $2 billion per week on Iraq, but we are not doing nearly enough to protect our cities, nuclear power plants, shipping lanes, and ports from a terrorist attack. We must spend more to recruit, equip, and train more first responders, and we must drastically improve our public health facilities, which more than six years after 9/11 are not ready for a biological attack. And we need to allocate federal homeland security dollars to the places where they are needed -- the population centers and facilities that we know al Qaeda targets.

The United States of America also needs to start paying attention to the Americas. We need better border security and comprehensive immigration reform. And to reduce both illegal immigration and anti-American populism in Latin America, we must work with reform-minded governments there to alleviate poverty and promote equitable development. We need to strengthen energy cooperation in the region and foster democracy and fair trade. Our efforts to promote democracy must include Cuba. We should reverse the Bush administration's policies restricting remittances to and travel to visit loved ones in Cuba, and we should respond to steps toward liberalization there with steps toward ending the embargo.

Finally, the United States should lead the global fight against poverty, which is the basis of so much violence. Through example and diplomacy, we must encourage all developed countries to honor their commitments to the UN Millennium Development Goals. A commission on the implementation of sustainable-development goals, composed of world leaders and prominent experts, should recommend ways of meeting those commitments. The United States should lead donors on debt relief, increase assistance to very poor countries, and focus aid programs more on primary health care and affordable vaccines. We should double our development assistance and encourage other rich nations to do the same. We need a World Bank focused on poverty reduction and an International Monetary Fund that has a more flexible approach to preserving and building social safety nets. We must promote equitable multilateral and bilateral trade agreements that create jobs in all the countries involved and that protect workers and the environment. We should encourage the expanded use of generic drugs in poor countries, and we should stimulate public-private partnerships to reduce the costs of and enhance access to HIV antiretroviral drugs, antimalaria drugs, and bed nets.

Most important, the United States should lead a multilaterally funded Marshall Plan for Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa. For a small fraction of the cost of the Iraq war, which has made us so many enemies, we could make many friends. A crucial effort in fighting terrorism must be support for public education in the Muslim world, which is the best way to mitigate the role of those madrasahs that foment extremism. Development alleviates the injustice and lack of opportunity that proponents of violence and terrorism exploit.

The challenges facing us today are unprecedented. We need to learn from the mistakes of the Bush administration and adopt twenty-first-century strategies to solve twenty-first-century problems. We need to see the world as it really is -- so that we can lead others to make it a better, safer place. This is the New Realist vision of an enlightened and effective policy for the challenges of a new era: a realistic, principled policy that looks at the world through cool eyes but is inspired by ardent principles.