Stephen Morris, the Australian:
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Many have correctly pointed out that Kerry is, for now, proposing an Iraq policy not very different from that of President Bush. Yet there are vital issues other than Iraq. Kerry's 34-year record in public life indicates that he never understood what the Cold War was about and that he does not understand the nature of the US's rogue-state or Islamist terrorist enemies now. Those who see in him a moderate realist replacing the idealists of the Bush administration will be disappointed. For Kerry has a world view that is also idealist, but of a different kind.
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The Bush administration and Kerry have taken different aspects of Wilsonian thinking. While the administration favours the spread of democracy not only as an inherent moral good but also as a means of eradicating conflicts, it abhors any excessive reliance on the UN for solving disputes that affect the national interest of the US.
Kerry, by contrast, abhors the idea of promoting democracy as a moral responsibility of the US but places great faith in the UN and other international institutions, including international courts and formal alliance structures, as vehicles for resolving conflicts that involve the US.
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Kerry is also motivated by a strand of Left-liberal ideology that makes him a moral relativist. Unlike many American liberals, Kerry has often expressed his discomfort with the US criticising other nations for their repressive domestic policies. Thus a Kerry administration will be one that not only does not promote democracy, it will be one in which gross human rights abroad are given little attention.
Kerry was ignorant of both the facts and the genesis of the Cold War. In his 1971 speech before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he spoke about how the US was still reacting in "the 1945 mood" with our "paranoia about the Russians".
But it was the Vietnam War that has obsessed Kerry and brought out the leftist strands of his foreign policy views. In 1970, while still a reserve officer in the US Navy, Kerry undertook private contacts with the Vietnamese communist delegation in Paris. In his 1971 speech he is remembered and reviled by many veterans for accusing all American soldiers of committing atrocities and war crimes. What has been overlooked in his 1971 speech is that he also supported the Vietnamese communist cause, mouthing every plank of their political platform as his own. Were these extreme left-wing views merely the misadventures of a war-embittered youth? Hardly.
Kerry continued to pursue Hanoi's foreign policy interests in the Senate, even at the expense of his often-stated preference for the UN. In 1990, in a rare act of post-Cold War political unity, the UN Security Council approved a plan to end the war in Cambodia with a UN temporary administration to organise elections in the country. This was the plan, remember, that the Australian government and then Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans were deeply involved in realising. Yet Kerry opposed it. Instead, he wanted the Vietnamese-installed Hun Sen, formerly of the Khmer Rouge, to organise elections.
It seems that Kerry's preference for a UN role in conflict resolution is mainly to shackle American power, but not the power of his favourite little dictatorships.
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Kerry's soft spot for the dictators of Third World countries was not confined to Vietnam and Cambodia. During the Cold War Kerry was opposed to using force against all adversaries. This was especially so in the case of Nicaragua, where Kerry began his diplomatic showboating with the Sandinistas in 1985, but also in Grenada and the 1991 Gulf War to evict Saddam from Kuwait.
KERRY'S benign attitude towards dictators will affect one of the US's two greatest contemporary security threats: the nuclear arming of North Korea and Iran. Kerry's strategy towards North Korea and Iran will be: engage but never intimidate. His policies on Southeast Asia and Central America were thus. Bush will be more cautious about deploying the military than he was in 2003, but will do so if he needs to. Kerry, by contrast, will only deploy force against North Korea if it invades the South.
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