Toward a progressive foreign policy

From Rand Beers, U.S. counterterrorism adviser and current president of the National Security Network. Beers quit the NSC in protest in March 2003 five days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Progressives have a tremendous opportunity — and a real challenge — on national security this cycle. The public has decisively rejected the Bush administration's national security framework. But nothing in the public discourse gives non-expert Americans a clear understanding of what the alternatives might look like. [...]

One way to fill that gap is for progressives to begin setting out the core ideas that underlie our theory of national security — and then share specific policy positions and critiques that show what those core ideas would mean, and how they would produce results different from what we have seen in recent years. The thinking behind this two-part approach is simple: there's a crying need for sophisticated, pragmatic, deep policy thinking that returns serious, non-hyped discussions of security issues to the public eye.

The challenges we face — Afghanistan, Pakistan, energy, to name just three — have no magic solutions and will be with us for years to come. Yet there's also a need for clear-sighted, unadorned talk about why we make the choices we do and what kind of nation we want to be. That is a debate that is much less technical, but no less important, than the details of our policy in Pakistan's borderlands or how many gallons of alternative fuels we can produce by 2015. Everybody, however much or little time their lives give them to think about national security, can join a debate about what kind of country we want to be.