The Kerry foreign policy team

Joshua Marshall has an informative piece in The Atlantic about Kerry's foreign policy advisors and the likely direction his policies will take if elected.

A key assumption shared by almost all Democratic foreign-policy hands is that by themselves the violent overthrow of a government and the initiation of radical change from above almost never foster democracy, an expanded civil society, or greater openness. "If you have too much change too quickly," Winer says, "you have violence and repression. We don't want to see violence and repression in [the Middle East]. We want to see a greater zone for civilization -- a greater zone for personal and private-sector activity and for governmental activity that is not an enactment of violence." Bush and his advisers have spoken eloquently about democratization. But in the view of their Democratic counterparts, their means of pursuing it are plainly counterproductive. It is here, Holbrooke says, that the Administration's alleged belief in the stabilizing role of liberal democracy and open society collides with its belief in the need to rule by force and, if necessary, violence: "The neoconservatives and the conservatives -- and they both exist in uneasy tension within this Administration -- shift unpredictably between advocacy of democratization and advocacy of neo-imperialism without any coherent intellectual position, except the importance of the use of force."

The importance of this fall's election cannot be overstated. We have a real choice, between a Bush administration that puts an inflexible Cold War ideology ahead of reality -- one in which if the use of force can't solve the problem (North Korea), then the problem should be ignored -- and a Kerry administration that is carefully thinking through the real dangers facing the U.S., and developing coherent policies on how best to flexibly use negotiation, multilateralism, and, yes, the use of force to advance our interests globally.