A PERSONAL NOTE. After over a year of living in Egypt, studying Arabic, and working for an Egyptian NGO, I am finally back in the good old US of A. I had an incredible experience, but I am happy to be back in a country where everything works, where people are accustomed to standing in line, and where you don't have to haggle nearly every time you want to buy something. So, America: it's great! Alas, its current foreign policy is making Americans less safe and the world a more dangerous place. Now that I'm back here, I want to touch briefly on how the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress have engineered this disastrous situation. A lot of smart people have said a lot of smart things about this (for example), but I want to keep it simple for now. The basic problem with Bush foreign policy is that rather than expanding the infrastructure of peace and prosperity, his team has focused on a handful of bad actors, and they have failed miserably at their own approach. Saddam is gone from power in Iraq, but he has been replaced by an ongoing anti-American insurgency and an exploding sectarian civil war. A cocky, aggressive Iran has become a major, even dominant player in Iraq and to a lesser extent Afghanistan. North Korea just detonated a nuclear weapon. After some early defeats, al-Qaeda has experienced a resurgence and seen its message of a "clash of civilizations" gaining currency in the Islamic world. Meanwhile, almost no progress has been made on free trade and building liberal institutions. UN reforms have stalled, the Doha round of trade talks has gone nowhere, and no work has been done on a new security structure for a changing Asia. This is, simply put, not a good record, and the Republicans should be ashamed to run on it.
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Blake Hounshell
