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[snip] ....The sales job is a myth. In reality, a McCain presidency would promise an entirely conventional, center-left, multilateralism. If you liked the second Bush term, if you liked Clintonian foreign policy, you will find much to admire in a Commander-in-Chief McCain. There would be the same agonizing over European and Islamic perceptions of America; the same doctrinaire commitment to the alchemy of democracy promotion; and the same fondness for heaping more unaccountable bureaucratic sprawl atop the already counter-productive agencies and multinational institutions that frustrate the United States at every turn. Don’t take my word for it. Read McCain’s own...

American foreign policy has been nothing like as interventionist as its critics like to think. Critics of George W. Bush's Middle East policy are hoping for a change in direction once America's 43rd President has left the White House. The foreign offices of Europe all hope for more multilateralism. More realpolitik. Less sabre-rattling. The critics have a problem, however. In reality, Team Bush has largely been following European approaches to foreign policy for most of the world's troublespot nations. Take Pakistan. The “realist school” couldn't honestly disapprove of any aspect of Bush's dealings with Islamabad. American taxpayers have financed a...

Foreign policy was expected to be at the center of this year's duel between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry. Kerry, in accepting the Democratic nomination on Thursday, raised expectations by admitting that America was "a nation at war." Nevertheless, Kerry's speech of more that 5,200 words devoted only around 500 words to foreign-policy in general and the war against terrorism in particular. Even then, Kerry used those words for sloganeering. Kerry's speech revealed a man who, though vaguely conscious that the world has changed, prefers to assume that it has not. "The world tonight is very different from the...

Current Issue: February 21, 2002 News     HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES 'The paradox of American power': Despite its dominance, U.S. can't go it alone, says KSG's Nye By Alvin Powell Gazette Staff Kennedy School Dean Joseph S. Nye Jr. says that the United States today wields two kinds of power, 'hard' and 'soft,' both of which are critical to america's predominance on the world stage. The United States is at a pinnacle of world power comparable to that reached by the British and Roman Empires, yet in today's world its military might, economic power, and cultural sway aren't enough to...