A New Realism for a New Century: Presidential Candidate Bill Richardson Outlines His Foreign Policy Agenda

We must repair our alliances. We must restore respect for our allies, and for the democratic values that unite us. The next president needs to make it clear, through words and deeds, that we value our alliances and are committed to strengthening them. We should always prefer multilateral efforts that unite us and share burdens, but if we choose to act alone, we should not accuse our allies of disloyalty or cowardice.

We must engage our adversaries diplomatically. The Bush Administration's refusal to engage obnoxious regimes has only encouraged and strengthened their most paranoid and hard-line tendencies: Iran and North Korea responded to Washington's snubs and threats with intensification of their nuclear programs. We need to talk tough to such regimes, but to do so, we need to talk.

We must engage Russia and China strategically, and systematically. While it is easier to work with countries like India that share our democratic values, we also need to work with Russia and China to solve serious problems. We need to establish our priorities, and to work with these sometimes troublesome partners, recognizing that we can only influence, not control, what they do. With Russia, our first priorities should be securing loose nukes and putting pressure on Iran to halt nuclear enrichment. With China, our priorities should be North Korea, Darfur and trade.

We must renew our commitment to international law and multilateral cooperation. This means expanding the Security Council to include Japan, Germany, India, a country from Latin America and a country from Africa as permanent members. It means increasing aid to poor countries and working with other donors to make sure they meet their Millennium aid commitments. It means more Third World debt relief, and trade agreements that create jobs in all countries, and that seriously address worker rights and the environment. It means an IMF more flexible on social safety nets.

We must respect both the spirit and the letter of the Geneva conventions and we must join the International Criminal Court, and support it enthusiastically, so that those who would violate human rights know that they will be held accountable. The United States once was-and again must be-a human rights example to which others aspire. We must be impeccable in our own behavior, and we should reward countries that respect the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. We must lead international efforts to eradicate slavery, and we must lead on genocide, especially in Africa, where the two most recent genocides have taken place, in Rwanda and now in Darfur. History teaches us that if the United States does not take the lead on genocide, no one else will.

The United States must lead global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This means joining the Kyoto protocol and then going well beyond it, with a man-on-the-moon effort to improve efficiency and to commercialize clean, alternative technologies. We must cut our fossil fuel consumption dramatically and rapidly, and get others, including China and India, to follow us to a sustainable energy future.

We must focus on urgent security threats from which the war in Iraq has diverted our attention-above all nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. We must increase funding for the Nunn-Lugar program, and we need better human and international intelligence and law enforcement coordination to prevent nuclear trafficking. We must do the hard diplomatic work to unite the world, including Russia and China, to stop the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, as we provide these nations with incentives to renounce nuclear weapons. No nation has ever been forced to renounce nuclear weapons, but many have been persuaded to renounce them. The example of Libya shows that even states with terrorist pasts can come out of the cold. Progress is finally being made with North Korea, and we need to stop the saber-rattling and use a similar carrot-and-stick approach with Iran.

Urgently, we must lead comprehensive global negotiations to lock down all of the world's bomb-grade nuclear material and to secure nuclear enrichment, worldwide. As the leading nuclear power, only the United States can lead such a global effort. We should stop new nuclear weapons programs and re-commit to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty long-term goal of a nuclear-weapons-free world. We should begin with an offer to cut our nuclear arsenal to a few hundred weapons (enough to deter any attack) if the other nuclear powers reduce their arsenals. And-most importantly to keep nukes out of the hands of terrorists-we need a global agreement to reduce the amount of highly-enriched uranium and plutonium in the world, and to consolidate enrichment in a limited number of highly-secure facilities, with a fuel-banking arrangement to provide fuel to all countries that need it for peaceful purposes. Because so long as nuclear materials and enrichment are scattered around the world, nuclear terrorism is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Most Muslims oppose terrorism. Even most of those who do not share our western values share our commitment to peace-and we need to work with them to isolate the terrorists. We must work with all moderate Muslims worldwide to present the Muslim world with a better vision than the apocalyptic fantasy of the jihadists. Undoing the damage to our image caused by Bush Administration policies will require a major new public diplomacy effort. But for this to be credible, we also need to change the policies: We need to live up to our own ideals. Prisoner abuse, torture, secret prisons, renditions and evasion of the Geneva conventions must have no place. If we want Muslims to open to us, we should start by closing Guantánamo. And we must re-engage the Middle East peace process, so that we can deprive the jihadists of their most effective propaganda tool. We must use all our sticks and carrots to strengthen Palestinian moderates and to promote a two-state solution that guarantees Israel's security.

We are spending more than $2 billion per week on Iraq, but we are not doing nearly enough to protect our cities, power plants, shipping and ports from terrorist attack. We need to remember that "resilience", the ability to recover from a terrorist attack, undermines the utility of terrorism to the terrorists. As such, it should be a central component of our national security strategy. We must recruit, equip and train more first responders, and we must drastically improve the surge capacity of our public health facilities, which six years after 9/11 are not ready for a biological attack. We need to allocate Homeland Security dollars to where they are needed-to the population centers and facilities that we know Al-Qaeda targets.

The United States also needs to start paying attention to the Americas. We need better border security and comprehensive immigration reform. To reduce both illegal immigration and anti-American populism in Latin America, we must work with reform-minded governments to alleviate poverty, promote equitable development and strengthen energy cooperation.

America needs to lead the global fight against poverty. We must promote equitable trade agreements, and through our example and our diplomacy we must encourage wealthy countries to honor their UN Millennium goal commitments. We should double our aid to poor countries and lead donors on more debt relief and greater focus on primary health care and affordable vaccines. We should encourage expanded use of generic drugs, and we should stimulate public-private partnerships to enhance access to HIV anti-viral and anti-malarial drugs, as well as low-tech but effective methods like bed nets.

America should spearhead a multilateral Marshall Plan to promote development in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa. For a small fraction of the cost of the Iraq War, which has made us so many enemies, we could make many friends. A crucial effort in fighting terrorism must be support for public education in the Muslim world, which is the best way to mitigate the role of those madrasas that foment extremism. Development alleviates the injustice and lack of opportunity that proponents of violence and terrorism exploit.

Shared problems and opportunities drive us toward one another, but fear and myopia can stop us from confronting our challenges successfully. Unilateralist temptations always emerge when people feel threatened. It is up to leaders to understand this impulse, and to diffuse it so that we can resist its call, and instead work together to solve real problems. The simple fact is that in today's interdependent world, unilateralism rarely works.

Throughout my thirty-year career in politics I have met some fearsome characters and have been in many dangerous situations. I have led missions around the world, from Sudan to Azerbaijan, from Vladivostok to Cartajena, from Kabul to Pyongyang-and each trip has taught me that the world is hungry for American leadership, but not American control. I have met with dictators, I have negotiated with warlords, I have dealt with rogue regimes. I always tried to show them all that America wants to make the world safer for everyone. Talking to people is no guarantee of success, but refusing to talk to them is usually a precursor to failure. As President Kennedy said, we should never negotiate out of fear, but we should never fear to negotiate.

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