Atlantic Council

Editor's note: We polled several friends of the Atlantic Council last week on the question What are the top foreign policy priorities for the next president?   We'll be running their responses all week.

During one of the worst weeks of capital markets turbulence, the Pew Center polled 2,600 registered voters on the key issues confronting the next U.S. president. The responses, in descending order of importance, were: The Economy, Jobs, Taxes, Health Care, Energy and Terrorism. Neither “Foreign policy” nor “Foreign” anything else was mentioned by those polled. Trade policy and Immigration did make the list, near the bottom, along with Abortion and Gay Marriage.

Like the prospect of being hanged in the morning, the mind of those polled was wonderfully and quite understandably concentrated on the ongoing financial upheaval.  But, their designated priorities point towards five important foreign policy opportunities for the new U.S. president both for specific action and, more importantly, to act as a great national educator and build a national consensus in support of an enduring and effective U.S. foreign policy.

1.  Build on the unifying power of the banking crisis.   

As the world’s banks unraveled, national leaders and finance ministers unanimously and repeatedly cleared their calendars to meet and address the crisis.  The depth and extent of the unraveling of savings, home ownership — indeed credit-creation itself — elicited a rare urgency and intensity of focus.

The new U.S. president needs to nurture this international momentum, to continue to join his peers in correcting the failings which led to the crisis: opacity of financial market information; misdirection of regulatory focus; crudeness of risk vs capital adequacy measures—and to devise and implement solutions congruent with the borderless world markets, rather than the borders of financially outflanked nation-states.

2. Redress trade flow imbalances. 

America’s long-standing role as the world’s champion importer has resulted in current account deficits that have moved beyond the financially unsustainable and are now ominously political. The U.S. can no longer pay the bill. New trade arrangements must join new banking arrangements to redress the problem. Such arrangements must reduce the weight of agriculture and increase that of manufacturing in American trade policy. Specifically, it must consider the role of manufacturing jobs in adding economic and intellectual value to national development, for both the United States and its trade partners.

3. Reinforce the values of nuclear non-proliferation in the context of energy policy.

Reversing fifty years of de-legitimizing nuclear weapons for military use while failing to solve the problems of safety and security of highly dangerous nuclear power reactor waste, the outgoing administration has sponsored the development of tactical nuclear weapons, overridden the constraints of NPT and joined corporate interests in urging a world-wide “explosion” in the number of new nuclear power reactors. Stopping this madness must figure among the new president’s highest foreign policy priorities, starting with setting the proper example at home.

4. Reject terrorism’s claims to religious legitimacy.  

The dramatic increase in the role of religion in the U.S. political debate is an unsettling one to many observers, including this writer. However, as it moves religious values into the realm of public discourse, it may offer the new president a splendid opportunity, one that Bush grasped immediately after September 11, 2001 but then let slip,  to speak clearly about the fraudulent garments of religious legitimacy that the proponents of terrorism assume to recruit their deluded actors and rationalize their murders.

Bush’s post-September 11 recognition of Islam as a religion of peace with a commitment to freedom were among his finest statements. They did him honor. His successor needs to pick up this fallen standard, hold it high and carry it forward more consistently and more forthrightly.

5. Defend the frontier between national sovereignty and universal human rights.

In recent decades, the principle of national sovereignty has repeatedly given way to the emerging norm of outside military intervention to prevent gross violations of human rights. Some of these interventions have been approved by the UN Security Council, some have not.

In launching its pre-emptive war on Iraq, the U.S., failing to achieve Article 42 Security Council support, claimed self-defense under Article 51, declaring a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. This link has not since been confirmed and the intervention has been almost universally condemned. The burden of proof in the international court of opinion for future American interventions will be a high one.

The new president’s priority against this backdrop should, of course, embrace the Security Council’s primary international authority for humanitarian intervention. But, he should also explicitly endorse time-honored principles of customary international law when a host government is responsible for a humanitarian crisis which poses a threat to international security.

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In summary, the new US president will confront foreign policy challenges enough to fill several administrations. The foregoing priorities should command his early attention.
 

Ronald Freeman, Treasurer of the Atlantic Council Board of Directors, retired in 2000 as managing director and co-chief executive of Salomon Smith Barney and now serves on the board of directors of Troika Dialog. Debate word cloud from Flickr user EricaJoy, used under Creative Commons license.