By Paul Gessing
Americans are in many ways blessed that they have so many useful outlets for organizing and communicating with their elected officials that are lacking in most other nations. If your interest is in lowering taxes and reducing the size and scope of government, check out National Taxpayers Union. If you want to preserve your civil liberties and keep the government out of your bedroom, talk to the ACLU, and if you want to preserve the environment, there are dozens of groups from Greenpeace to Environmental Defense to choose from.
Unfortunately for Free Liberals, foreign policy – quite possibly the single most important area of public policy – has no consistent, mainstream voice representing them. At last, however, the Coalition for Realistic Foreign Policy, which calls itself “a diverse group of scholars and analysts from across the political spectrum who believe that the move toward empire must be halted immediately” has entered the fray in an effort to actually implement truly “modest” foreign policy goals as President Bush laid out during the 2000 presidential campaign.
As one of the 44 original signees and an American who is deeply concerned about the Nation’s foreign policy, I realize the difficulties the Coalition and its allies face. After all, many of the dominant “anti-war” groups including International A.N.S.W.E.R. and the International Action Center are largely associated with the far left and even totalitarian part of the political spectrum. Both groups have even been affiliated with the Workers World Party and the regime of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. Clearly, although Free Liberals may march in common cause against war with these groups, the Free Liberal outlook is not well represented by either.
Representing a mainstream Free Liberal perspective is really what the Coalition is all about. Its members are respected academics or foreign policy experts who – while they believe in America’s right to self-defense – see America slipping towards empire and want to do something to stop it. Rather than taking to the streets, the Coalition attempts to limit the expansion of the American empire through education and by broadening the policy debate by holding forums and conferences around the country, publishing papers and articles, and representing an anti-imperial viewpoint on television and radio.
The anti-imperial viewpoint – while held by large numbers of Americans including the 58 percent who now say the war in Iraq was a mistake – is not consistently held by either major political party and is often ignored within mainstream policy circles in Washington. These policy debates have traditionally been dominated by either Wilsonian internationalists whose main desire is spreading U.S.-style “democracy” or neo-conservatives whose main objectives are projecting U.S. military strength around the globe and the protection of Israel. Although groups like the Cato Institute, Independent Institute in California, Peace Action, and the Center for Defense Information all act as watchdogs against empire, until the Coalition for Realistic Foreign Policy came along, there was no organized voice in Washington making the intellectual case against empire on a daily basis from such an array of ideological perspectives.
So, who belongs to the Coalition and what exactly do they believe? Well, there are libertarians, anti-interventionist conservatives, academics, and progressives, not to mention a free liberal (me). For a full listing, check out the Coalition’s web site http://www.realisticforeignpolicy.org. Also on the group’s web site is the group’s statement of principles where it explains why it exists and what it is promoting. Although each perspective represented by the group has its own ideas on the proper role of government, all of its members believe that America’s foreign policies have come to resemble those of an empire and that “that the strategy of empire has already begun to erode our fundamental rights and liberties. More and more power is being claimed by the executive branch. And on the economic front, an imperial strategy threatens to weaken us as a nation, overextending and bleeding the economy and straining our military and federal budgets.”
The simple truth is that no matter how conservatives, progressives, and libertarians may differ as to the proper role of government, appropriating tens of billions of dollars annually to slay demons abroad is not a sound foreign policy. The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy is one of the few truly trans-partisan policy groups on Capitol Hill. Hopefully this collection of diverse voices will be effective in transforming the debate from battles over how and where to intervene militarily overseas into one over whether such activity is truly necessary or good for the nation.
Paul J. Gessing is a Senior Editor of The Free Liberal and is a member of its founding committee. His writings have been published in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, and U.S. News & World Report.