Foreign policy is domestic policy

Delhi

“The Dance of Democracy” goes The Times of India’s slogan for the balloting that began this week in this stupendous country’s national elections.

The dance, if it is a dance, is no frolic, no jubilation jig, but thankfully neither is it a lockstep march nor a mosh-pit pogo routine. Actually “dance” is rather wishful (in keeping with the ruling BJP’s feel-good campaign). Turnout in the one-third of the country that’s voted so far seems to be little more than 50 percent, not far above the unenviable American standard of non-participation.

However, it seems to remain true that, in India – as opposed to the US – it’s the upper classes, not the lower, who most disdain the vote. They’ll make out handily whoever wins, thank you very much. It’s the poor who best know the difference, care about it, suffer it, and turn out in droves.

This week, I’ve given two talks at the University of Delhi Political Science Department, courtesy of openDemocracy co-editor Rajeev Bhargava: one on Bush’s foreign policy, the other on multiculturalism and universalism. Discussions, chiefly with faculty, were vigorous, engaged, and in the best sense collegial. When we expressed differences about just what the Enlightenment was good for, about what was tonic and what was toxic in American exceptionalism, and so forth, the differences were mutually intelligible (I think).

I had the feeling of membership in a common intellectual culture: whatever the differences, there’s deep understanding of historic predicaments and a shared fate. India is obviously not the United States but our moral and political questions about nationalism, the poor, group rights, business prerogatives, Islamic-non-Islamic relations, the proper approach to terrorism, ecology and so on – all these questions emerge in terms which, if not identical, overlap substantially. For America’s powers that be to tell such people that they’re either “with us or against us” is profoundly insulting and stupid.

Not surprisingly, I’ve encountered scarcely a good word about George W. Bush and his Iraq venture. India will not be volunteering peace-keeping troops anytime soon. Given Hindu-Muslim tensions, it would scarcely suit the nationalist BJP to join the occupation, however transitional or multinational it may prove to be. Even an influential American-educated businessman of my acquaintance – no religious zealot, no hypernationalist – winced and moaned at the mention of Bush’s Iraq operation.

American bases ringing the region feed measured, rational doubt that they amount – as C. Wright Mills called NATO bases almost 50 years ago – “gay little outposts of American civilization.”

This takes me to what I sense to be Indian intellectuals’ primary concern about what’s at stake in the American election: namely, what is at stake in the American election? That is, they want to know what difference John Kerry would make in foreign policy – not just in the Middle East (“West Asia,” as the Indian press sensibly calls it), but overall. One question repeats over and over: Is there a Kerry foreign policy?

Good question. I argued that Kerry represents the Atlanticist, internationalist wing of the Democrats, in the vein of Bill Clinton – probably. I say “probably” because from the evidence available across the internet, Kerry has not yet declared himself much beyond pieties. You can understand why he’s held back. On every side, costs seem to outweigh benefits. Left, right, sideways, and upside down, there lie constituencies – traditional Democratic constituencies, for that matter – ready to be offended.

The Israeli lobby – the Sharon lobby, really – exercises its usual unsubtle hammerlock on the Democrats. Latinos await Kerry’s proposals on immigration. Workers in industrial states want the Democrats to trash outsourcing – which would not make them friends in call-centre-heavy India, let me tell you.

In the 1980s, Kerry battled bravely against Reagan’s reckless Central American policies. But Presidential ambitions soften rough edges in the race toward the centre. Kerry slogged into a quagmire of his own on Iraq, taking the position that, while voting for war authorization, he opposed the actual war. Maybe. This stance hurt him with Deaniacs and other antiwar Democrats during the primaries, but it was only marginally – if at all – different from what Howard Dean said himself.

Yet foreign policy is unusually salient in this campaign, and Kerry, having cleared away his opponents, has work to do on this front. He needs a lot more than a laundry list, more than even a whole emporium of positions. He needs an angle of vision. Pragmatism and principle more or less converge. For all America’s defiant parochialism, the country has discovered that it lives in the world. Mohammad Atta and Osama bin Laden delivered the news. So does Sheikh al-Sadr and a cast of Iraqi thousands. So do the Saudi rulers and their crude oil politics. Foreign policy is domestic policy.

It’s nice for Kerry to have the Vietnam card to play against empty suit – make that, empty uniform – Bush. Campaigning, Kerry comes to life amid his entourage of supportive vets – they certify that he’s been under fire, been commanding under fire, and that security, for him, is more than an afterthought. Kerry has not yet begun to fight on this front, but with the revelations pouring out of Congress’s 9/11 commission, he ought to embarrass Bush if not humiliate him altogether.

But it won’t do for Kerry to play a whole deck of Vietnam cards. In fact it’s not possible – there aren’t enough to fill a whole deck. He needs to fill out his hand. He needs to tell his country where America ought to stand in the world. He needs to put the Democratic Party on the side of freedom and equality, while offering better vehicles than the Bush bulldozer.

If ever there were an occasion for a bell-ringing speech, this is it.