points (I suppose) for actually reading all this tripe. bonus question: what relationship, if any, do you think there will be between what the candidates say her and what they do once in office? direct? inverse? none at all?

lc

Documents written by committee are always heavy going, and these are not exceptions.

Sen. McCain's sounded as if it were designed as a repository for a fairly large number of ideas, not all of them closely related to one another but most of them originating with the candidate himself. It is pretty heavy with proposals to create new institutions -- a new OSS, a new USIA, some kind of military civil society corps. I agree with Dan that McCain's is the best statement of all the candidates' on trade.

It recognizes mistakes of and some problems arising from the approach the Bush administration has taken to foreign policy, but breathes no word of criticism of Bush himself. This is not, unfortunately, a mere campaign expedient, for the core of McCain's document is a commitment to continue Bush's policy in Iraq, apparently in perpetuity, because unimaginable disasters are certain to happen if America does not maintain a large army in that country. This commitment vitiates most of the other ideas McCain proposes, for with Iraq still commanding vast resources as well as most of the attention of the White House, Pentagon and State Department there will be little money and less time to make them a reality.

Except for the Iraq section, McCain's manifesto would have been a very good statement to have emerged from his 2000 campaign. It's 2007, though, and with McCain committed to staying George Bush's course in Iraq a President McCain would have mostly talk with which to address the other subjects this document discusses.

Sen. Clinton's statement does not give one the impression that the ideas in it originated with her, though one expects she either has already or is able to memorize all the talking points in their favor. She proposes a lot of initiatives, but does not promise to create as many institutions as McCain's statement does. Her statement does not lack for criticisms of President Bush's policies; they are expressed in a notably bloodless tone, and one would never remember any of them without having the relevant phrases repeated over and over (this is probably the key element in Clinton's election strategy), but they are still criticisms.

Clinton more than McCain uses the statement in Foreign Affairs to comment on the performance of other governments and international organizations -- the governments of Malawi and Mauritania are doing this or that, the African Union has a long way to go, and so forth. The reasoning behind this escapes me. Much more curious is the fact that a candidate who is only considered a potential President because she is Bill Clinton's wife has nothing to say about Clinton administration foreign policy. I suppose there is sound reasoning behind that, and I can guess as to what some of it is (e.g. if you're calling for more and better public diplomacy you don't want to step on your message by mentioning that your husband was the one who presided over the dismantling of the agency that did public diplomacy ten years ago), but you don't have to listen long to hear Republicans still talking about the foreign policy successes of the two-term President who preceeded Clinton, and none of them are named Reagan.

The tightrope Clinton is walking on Iraq has been much discussed already. She is for withdrawal from Iraq, but she wants to be sure nothing bad happens there while we are leaving or after we are gone. This represents gestures being made at the same time to antiwar Democratic primary voters and...someone else, or maybe to something else, namely the perceived political nightmare that a second President Clinton would face if any of the disasters John McCain predicts would follow an American withdrawal actually happen. Can withdrawal happen without leaving some pretty bad things in its wake? No. Can we prevent all those bad things, with an intensive diplomatic initiative and talking to our adversaries? No. But we haven't withdrawn yet, and the bad things haven't happened yet, so we can talk about them, which Sen. Clinton's statement does.

McCain and Clinton are as one on an important though currently obscure point: they each propose lots of new initiatives, and they each do not propose any way to pay for them. No new revenue, no reductions in the vast Pentagon procurement budget, and no cuts anywhere else in the government. Sen. Clinton at least mentions the huge ongoing cost of the Iraq war and the needs left unmet because of it. But it isn't clear that those costs will be going anywhere soon if she becomes President, though she promises to get a committee talking about withdrawal right away.

Campaign statements like these are valuable from my point of view if they provide a window into the candidate's thinking -- not just what the candidate thinks about foreign policy, but how much he thinks about it and whether the thinking is his own or just borrowed from someone else to get through the campaign. Clinton's statements suggests mostly borrowed thinking, and most of her other public statements suggest someone who would prefer to spend time thinking about something else, perhaps education, health care or fundraising. I'm more prepared to believe McCain's statement represents his own thinking. I'd be more admiring of that were that thinking not so completely wrong on the salient foreign policy issue of the day.

Sorry, Zathras, but one of the few things McCain is right about is Iraq. Repeating the phrase "Bush's policy" over and over to make victory in Iraq sound like a bad idea is not an argument. (Incidentally, a bigger commitment now probably speeds the day we can get out on favorable terms.)

In any case, I have yet to hear anyone suggest a better or more important place for us to defeat and discredit al Qaeda and its epigones. What would you do with resources allegedly "freed up" by a withdrawal from Iraq?

Zathras: Whether these essays are "by committee" is irrelevant, as you yourself note they represent the key proposals of the respective campaigns.

In this respect, Hillary's piece is a disaster. It's not that she walking "a tightrope." She simply can't find any footing at all - flippity-floppity is her game. Wrong again on Hillary not endorsing her husband's administration's foreign policy: The names are changed (it's not Bosnia or Haiti today), but the basic thrust remains the same: Foreign policy as social work. Every item possibly under the global sun is a matter for America's rectification, and especially on the humanitarian side, since she's so resistant to the assertion of American hard power (she's all about restoring U.S. moral legitimacy after Iraq, blah, blah...).

Of all the candidates who've written in the Foreign Affairs series, McCain's clearest on the new challenges to America's national interests. He particularly good on how to rebuild the military and on the need for alliances over hokum-pokem "multilateralism." Yes, he overdoes it on proposing new international bodies, though some of the ideas are good. He needs to back off the rhetoric about rebuilding international trust, etc. He sounds more like the Dems on that score.