Word: terrorisms
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John Edwards wants to ditch the "war on terror." That was the headline out of his big foreign policy speech last month at the Council on Foreign Relations. But it's not the real news. "War on terror" is probably on its way out anyway: our allies can't stand the term. Neither can the military. Even Donald Rumsfeld tried to abandon it a couple of years back. It probably won't survive the next Republican Administration, let alone the next Democratic...
There's a lot to recommend this view. For starters, it gets jihadism right. Al-Qaeda-- style terrorism does stem more from state breakdown than state power. (Compare pre- and post-Saddam Iraq.) The weak-state concept also makes Democratic foreign policy broader than its Republican equivalent. In Bush-esque speeches this spring, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani tried--unconvincingly--to cram virtually all of American foreign policy into the war on terror. Weak states, by contrast, offer Democrats a prism that isn't confined to the Islamic world...
...program has to be negotiated with the Congress. There's no guarantee a President won't change his priorities or be forced by events into a whole new way of looking at things. Bush promised a humble foreign policy, but after Sept. 11, his "war on terror" was anything...
...Whether or not that's true, the President seems once again to have jeopardized his "war on terror" with an inflated notion of his own power...
...inaugural oratory seems, at the very least, a tragic overreach. It was foolishly messianic. It didn't reflect the reality on the ground, or even the reality of U.S. policy, which still supports oppressive regimes around the world. It came after years of grandiloquent sloganeering: "the war on terror," "the axis of evil," wanton talk of crusades and evildoers and an ill-conceived war with Iraq. Furthermore, the President's speech was based on a simplistic vision of America's role in the world, one firmly rooted in American infallibility. And finally, there was a fundamental mismatch between the grandness...