Reviving 'the radical center'

Aug 3, 2005
Reviving 'the radical center'
By Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service

WASHINGTON - As US President George W Bush announced the unprecedented recess appointment of ultra-nationalist John Bolton as his next ambassador to the United Nations, a group of diplomatic heavyweights was preparing to launch a bipartisan coalition to promote a return to a more moderate and multilateral foreign policy.

While the group, which calls itself the Partnership for a Secure America, was not explicitly set up to act to oppose the more radical initiatives of the Bush administration, the chief organizers - both Republicans and Democrats - have sometimes been harshly critical of specific Bush policies, especially the decision to go to war in Iraq and innovative policy initiatives such as the promotion of preemptive war against "rogue states".

The group includes top officials who served in the administrations of presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, such as the two presidents' most durable national security advisers - Samuel Berger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, respectively - as well as former secretary of state Warren Christopher; Clinton's first national security adviser, Anthony Lake; former defense secretary William Perry, and former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke.

But it also includes leading Republican moderates, some of whom have even served under Bush. They include former senator Howard Baker, who served until last year as Bush's ambassador to Japan, and, even more significantly, his most recent UN ambassador, former senator John Danforth, who, since his resignation, has been uncharacteristically outspoken about his concerns that the Republican Party has increasingly come under the sway of the Christian Right.

Lawrence Eagleburger, a protege of Henry Kissinger and the number two in the State Department under George H W Bush who also served briefly as acting secretary of state in 1992, as well as one of Ronald Reagan's national security advisers, retired General Robert "Bud" MacFarlane, have also signed up.

Other leading Republicans include former trade representative Carla Hills, former senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker, former New Jersey governor and co-chair of the 9-11 Commission Thomas Kean, and the former deputy secretary of state under Reagan, John Whitehead. Former UN ambassador Thomas Pickering, who served under Bush Sr but, like Eagleburger was a career foreign service officer, has also joined.

The new group will formally launch itself Wednesday at a news conference in Washington conducted by two well-known and respected former lawmakers, Lee Hamilton, a top foreign-policy Democrat during his many years in the House of Representatives, who also co-chaired the 9-11 Commission and currently serves as head of the influential Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Warren Rudman, a prominent Republican moderate and former senator who has served on several bipartisan commission over the past two decades.

"The Partnership for a Secure America (PSA) is dedicated to recreating the bipartisan center in American national security and foreign policy," according to the group's mission statement.

"Although partisan rancor has traditionally stopped 'at the water's edge', this tradition of bipartisan cooperation has eroded significantly in recent years in negative and harmful ways," it said, noting that its goals include "heightening public awareness of and support for a bipartisan national security and foreign policy", and "bringing leading Democrats and Republicans together to seek common ground in national security and foreign policy".

While such statements do not appear on their face to be directed against the Bush administration, the group's organizers and the context in which it was put together belie that impression.

On its website, for example, the new group, which will be run day-to-day by former congressional staffers from both parties, cites a series of public opinion polls that show strong support by both Republicans and Democrats for policies that have been anathema to the administration, including strengthening the UN and other multilateral organizations, a nuclear test-ban treaty, the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse emissions, a more even-handed approach in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and even engaging Iran.

Moreover, in addition to their individually voiced concerns about the administration's unilateralism, global ambitions and its alienation of traditional US allies, many charter PSA members have expressed - albeit privately in the case of some of the Republicans - great unease about Bolton's appointment as UN ambassador.

Bolton's reputation for exaggerating foreign threats, scorn for multilateralism, intimidation of his subordinates, contempt for regional and local expertise, and personal rudeness has made him a symbol of the most extreme tendencies of the administration's hardliners led by Vice President Dick Cheney.

By resorting to a procedural loophole that gives presidents the power to make "recess appointments" whenever Congress is on holiday to get Bolton to New York, Bush is seen by many not only as circumventing normal constitutional requirements that give the Senate the power to advise and consent to ambassadorial posts, but also as delivering a gratuitous slap at the spirit of bipartisanship that has long been seen as essential to the successful conduct of US foreign policy.

Indeed, much of the impetus for the PSA's creation was derived from Bolton's nomination, according to organizers who have spoken with Inter Press Service. They hope that the broad-based opposition to the nominee could help lay the groundwork for a more strategic alliance of "moderates" in both parties - sometimes called "the radical center" - to move US foreign policy back to a more traditional and bipartisan course.

Whether such an ambitious goal can succeed remains very uncertain. While the PSA's charter membership is indeed impressive, some very important players known to be sympathetic to the cause have not yet signed on, at least publicly.

These include George H W Bush's former secretary of state James Baker and national security adviser Brent Scowcroft - the deans of Republican realism - who may feel that joining such a potentially high-profile group risks the loss of whatever moderating influence they retain in the administration, particularly with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick.

Similarly, Bush's first-term secretary of state, Colin Powell, another realist who has made little secret of his disdain for Bolton, has remained aloof.

Another question, most recently raised by the editor of the Nixon Center's "National Interest" journal, Nikolas Gvosdev, is whether the "moderates" in both parties who have agreed to form the PSA are really prepared to challenge their more ideological party comrades at the risk of opening serious internal splits.

"I don't see in either party, as of yet", he wrote last week, "a willingness to 'do battle' with members of their own side of the aisle for the sake of a new bipartisan consensus."

Nonetheless, the fact of the group's creation marks a new stage in what so far has been a largely disjointed and ineffectual effort by independent elites, including foreign policy scholars and analysts, former diplomats and high-ranking military officers, to rally opposition to the more aggressive impulses of the current administration.

The leadership of major political figures from both parties - combined with declining confidence in Bush, particularly with respect to Iraq and his "war on terrorism" - may provide those often-isolated elites with the political heft they have lacked to date.