Rejected

Kelly Shaul, the opinions editor of The Red & Black and a proud ignoramus, has rejected yet another of my submissions. In its stead she printed a series of unrelated fragments and run-ons entitled "Let's leave the Left behind" and a childish column whose titled declared, "Vampires no longer scary, but sensual." I am reminded of what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby: "There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind." What is so awful about it is that everyone but the confused simple mind is aware of it and embarassed by it. The confused, simple-minded Shaul seems not to know what an opinions page in a college newspaper should be or do, yet she is oblivious as her readers feel the shame and ridicule of her work. Shaul should be embarassed, but her obtuseness protects her from reality while the rest of us turn to the opinions page and read with blushed faces and quizzical snickers.

The latest rejection:

Barack Obama punctuated his scintillating victory on Election Day with a stirring speech to 200,000 people at Grant Park in Chicago. I find the following lines his most important: “To those who would tear the world down: we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: we support you.” He proclaimed that “a new dawn of American leadership is at hand” and cited the provenance of American strength as “the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.” These are not the fulminations of a radical, as recent letters to this newspaper have warned. To the contrary, President-elect Obama is uniquely equipped to unite the polarities of American foreign policy and forge a doctrine that is credible, idealistic, and responsive to the world’s desire for American engagement.

There is remarkable consistency in American foreign policy from president to president. Support for engagement and trade with China is a consistent bipartisan policy, as is support for the security and integrity of Israel, the preeminence of the NATO alliance, and our military pacts with countries like Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Yet there are polarities in the foreign policy debate at an intellectual level that need not exist and that an Obama presidency can negate. For example, if one supports the war in Iraq it is assumed he opposes munificent aid to Africa or an international convention on climate change. Similarly, if one supports American accession to the International Criminal Court it is assumed he opposes using force to prevent Iran’s nuclearization or confronting Russia on its backslide into authoritarianism. Though these assumptions are widespread, they are also false.

By juxtaposing these dichotomies I mean to point out that a humanitarian foreign policy and an antitotalitarian foreign policy are congruent, not oppositional. Providing medicine to AIDS patients in Africa is just as important as halting the genocide in Darfur and arraigning the Sudanese leadership on charges of crimes against humanity. Destroying the crazed Iranian theocracy is just as important as rendering a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and providing for a contiguous Palestinian state. Ending our gratuitous agricultural subsidies so poor farmers in the developing world can turn a profit is just as important as supporting dissidents in Burma, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and North Korea. Ending America’s diplomatic isolation by closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and ceasing torture is just as important as demanding equality for women and religious tolerance in the Muslim world and not accepting their self-pitying excuses.

Mr. Obama’s rhetoric calls for a diminution of partisan and ideological fealty. Those on the right and the left should examine their views on foreign policy to see if they really find that solidarity with the exploited and oppressed is in opposition to the forced removal of exploitive, oppressive regimes. I say that an honest assessment of this false dichotomy will be quite illuminating and that it will yield Mr. Obama a mandate for pursuing a foreign policy that is in turns humanitarian and antitotalitarian. American ideals and the world’s approval of them will be better for the fusion, not the exclusion, of these two worthy principles.