An Outlook for U.S. Foreign Policy

Richard Haass, the former director of Policy Planning in the U. S. State Department, and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, proposes a realistic yet optimistic foreign policy to turn the dangers of today into a new and promising era of cooperation, without abandoning vital American policies. With some changes of emphasis, he argues, present hazards offer an opportunity to define a more realistic, integrated balance not only of power but also of the forces of order and the forces of disorder. The Opportunity, a deeply informed and levelheaded assessment of the raging firestorms in a globalized world community, evaluates the political, military, and economic forces that define the current Zeitgeist, and proposes ways to harness them in a more stabilized order. In sum, Haass supports the Bush Doctrine, but suggests less trust in transplanting democracy and more trust in multilateral efforts to promote international security and comity. The burden of his argument, however, rests on a variation of American goals and policies.

The Opportunity, moreover, provides a guidebook for alert non-specialists subjected to a cacophony of sound bites and distracting partisan yipping. Haass examines geopolitical circumstances, issues, historical backgrounds, economic pressures, and evolving major power relations lucidly and convincingly. If his policies have a pedigree, they would descend from George Kennan and Henry Kissinger,

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cedes that Haass has written "an admirably dispassionate, incisive and comprehensive" work (Times 29). The points Haass raises and the goals he embraces read like a glossary of international terms, warning what is at stake. Noncooperation seems starker in Iraq and the Middle East than most observers ever imagined. The consequences of noncooperation with the American-British expeditionary forces in Iraq not only alienate erstwhile allies but also persuade other nations and partisans in the United States that their form of noncooperation is somehow legitimized. This kind of "passive resistance," Haass predicts, will drain and divide the United States and create greater peril. It is a myopic form of opposition. Integration is the answer to isolationism and noncooperation. It would require a change of circumstances and a change of heart to obtain integration in the immediate future, it seems, because the financial stakes of France and Germany in Iraq and the Muslim turmoil in those countries passed with little exposure. Haass himself seems to think the United States might receive more cooperation from Russia and possibly even China than from old Europe. Containment of the expansionist Soviet Union after World War II failed only
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Approximate Word count = 1536
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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