Next week Macalester students will get a rare chance to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth with regard to American foreign policy. Michael Ledeen, the low-profile but highly influential Middle East specialist of the neoconservative persuasion, and Niall Ferguson, the suave and unapologetically-Eurocentric imperialist will appear at the International Roundtable. No doubt, students and faculty will cheer on Tariq Ali, the leftist commentator who once earned a dinner invitation with Marlon Brando (after a series of televised debates with Henry Kissinger so impressed the late actor). I suspect Dean Samatar’s decision to invite these particular personalities to Macalester was akin to the Democrat’s placing Senator Patrick Leahy directly in front of Dick “go **** yourself” Cheney during the vice presidential debate—great exchanges arise out of strategic provocation.

What will no doubt be lost in the inevitable denunciations of great Ledeenisms such as “creative destruction is our middle name” and “the time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon” is students’ appreciation of how a dedicated core of intellectuals successfully articulated a coherent forward-looking foreign policy alternative and carried it out. Students will delight in asking pointed questions about the Iraq War and deftly pointing out historical contradictions in speakers’ remarks, which no doubt will have offended our vaunted internationalist sensibilities. Sadly, this will shed light on some fundamental problems with the political left when it comes to United States foreign policy.

An American ambassador recently remarked “we’re not losing the battle for hearts and minds in the Middle East, we’re not even participating.” The same could be said of the Left and the debate over the direction of American foreign policy. This debate has little to do with who is in office, and everything to do with intellectual fuel for the policy fire.

Simply put, the American left has been reduced to arguing issues of process instead of issues of strategy. This is not about Democrats versus Republicans, per se. As Alan Keyes observed during his presidential run, parties are but mere vessels with no intrinsic value. It’s what we do with these parties that matters.

the Left currently suffers from what The Onion diagnosed as “outrage fatigue.” The Patriot Act? Iraq? Family planning policy? Twisted intelligence? Where to start? It is easy to forget that during the Clinton years, most Republicans suffered from the same condition. Republican politicians probed Monicagate and other assorted mini-scandals; these partisan moves were simply designed to remove the president from office. Meanwhile, and more significantly, a small (but not as small as you’ve been lead to believe) group of intellectuals launched the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which, one bright morning in 1998, produced a letter that includes this statement:

“The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.” The long term would turn out to mean five years, one month, and twenty-three days. The signatories of the letter that I quote from above now form the core of President Bush’s foreign policy team.

PNAC’s foreign policy plan did not start and end with Iraq, however. Getting on with national missile defense, revitalizing the nuclear deterrent for countries other than Russia, repositioning troops out of Western Europe and into Southeast Europe and Southeast Asia, dramatically increasing defense spending, and achieving a greater naval presence around East Asia—every item on this laundry list has been checked by the administration. These issues will continue to receive short shrift in the election not because they aren’t tremendously significant, but because the Left has no coherent substitutes to offer. What is the Democrats’ grand response to the end of the Cold War and the threat of global terrorism? “We will equip our soldiers with better body armor!” “We will invade Iran and continue negotiations with North Korea, but we will do it better!”

The failure to articulate a bold alternative vision of America’s role in the world that reaches beyond platitudes about global peace and justice and addresses the major strategic issues of the day is not the fault of Senator Kerry, his advisors, or the Democratic Party. Instead, blame lies with the rising generation of intellectuals raised and educated in the tradition of the political left. This group is afflicted with an acute case of nuance paralysis, effectively shutting them out of the architecture of power before they can even get their foot in the door.

Macalester students are overwhelmingly swayed by the idea that the Left must “put out the fire [Bush] before worrying about remodeling the kitchen [the Democratic Party].” This argument will only be relevant on November 2. Beyond that, however, the left’s task of achieving supremacy over the right in matters of foreign policy will ultimately fall on the shoulders of a small committed core of thinkers in our generation who are willing to move bureaucratic mountains, look forward, not backward, and argue over ideas, not processes. Six points of departure:

1. Use time out of office effectively. Leave outrage to elected politicians and documentary filmmakers. Time inside the penalty box should be spent quietly regrouping, reflecting on past failures, and then aggressively presenting a vision for the future.

2. Establish major foreign policy think tanks that are actually liberal. Washington is filled with conservative think tanks of all stripes: libertarian, traditional right, neoconservative, etc. Besides serving as great retirement homes for prominent bureaucrats, they serve as fantastic shadow governments. The only two prominent think tanks generally described as “liberal-leaning,” Brookings and Carnegie, are filled with conservatives and have no ideological coherence.

3. Spend time thinking about strategic issues. Russia, China, the European Union, universal jurisdiction in international law, the so-called arc of instability, nuclear proliferation, missile defense, and geostrategic control over oil resources (until the magic hybrid cars are delivered) are all long-term issues that require serious consideration. A respect for French culture and a new donors’ summit on Iraq will never overcome the fundamental reality that Europeans and Americans (both Democrats and Republicans) have increasingly different perceptions of threat in the world. Alliances that were forged in the face of Nazism and Soviet communism must obviously be adjusted to the needs of the global war on terror.

4. Don’t be afraid of the words “liberty” and “freedom.” Republicans, especially neoconservatives, repeat this two word mantra with pathological frequency because the words represent powerful concepts that evoke the triumph of the human spirit over totalitarianism and, more importantly, because leftists shy from them. Instead of pointing out the historical contradictions implicit in linking American foreign policy to “liberty” and “freedom,” the Left should convey a new vision for American leadership in the world that embraces these terms.

5. Don’t lionize or demonize the military—it’s just an institution. To the Left, particularly Democrats, the armed forces are either uncontrollable warmongers or paragons of virtue above reproach whose every wish is to be granted at budget time. Only after the Left gets over its love-hate relationship with the military will it be able to credibly address defense issues.

6. Fight idea with idea. The President’s Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative is certainly a noble goal in principle. The Democrats shouldn’t be left playing the part of realist naysayer, arguing that stability trumps instability no matter what and saying that it shouldn’t be done because it doesn’t directly further our immediate “interests.” The Middle East will continue to be a major problem for the foreseeable future. Pulling out of Iraq, not having invaded Iraq, giving American soldiers better body armor (a favorite Kerry campaign rallying cry), or implementing every last one of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations (very du jour!) will not alter this underlying reality.