Democrats United in Policy Slam

With a unified approach that is rare in the party’s recent history, congressional Democrats are accusing President Bush of pursuing a go-it-alone foreign policy that alienates allies and blunts U.S. power.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) weighed in Thursday, complaining that in its first six months, the administration has turned its back on six international agreements supported by much of the world.

“Instead of asserting our leadership, we are abdicating it,” Daschle said in a speech to the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think tank. “Instead of shaping international agreements to serve our interests, we have removed ourselves from a position to shape them at all.”

Daschle’s speech came a week after House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said the administration was ignoring “a simple yet profound fact of international relations: One nation, acting alone, cannot possibly build a lasting strategic framework to which all other nations submit.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and other lawmakers have made similar points.

So far, the Bush administration has ignored most of the criticism, limiting itself to general assertions that it is engaged throughout the world and denying that it has isolationist tendencies. As for treaties and other agreements, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice have argued that the United States has no obligation to sign or adhere to flawed treaties.

“Just because they are multilateral doesn’t mean they are good,” Powell said recently.

Daschle cited the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a measure to create an international criminal court, a biological weapons protocol, a global agreement to curb illicit sales of small arms and other light weapons and the Antiballistic Missile Treaty as pacts the administration has either refused to sign or indicated it is prepared to abrogate.

“Reasonable people can disagree about the merits of each of these individual agreements. I don’t think reasonable people can ignore the consequences of tearing each one up,” Daschle said.

“If we continue down this path,” he added, “our allies will be forced to fill the void we leave, not necessarily with our interests uppermost in their minds.”

Later, Daschle acknowledged that Democrats in Congress “are coordinating our thoughts and coordinating our message to a certain extent. . . . I believe that you will see more of our leadership expressing themselves in similar ways in the future.”

Political strategists agreed that peacetime elections are seldom won or lost as a result of foreign policy debates. But they said the Democrats clearly hope to use such issues to raise questions about the administration’s competence and general approach.

“The Bush administration is out of touch with the views and values of the American public,” said Mark Mellman, a pollster who has Daschle and Gephardt as clients. “The public is in a very different place than the administration on things like global warming and missile defense.”

Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton administration National Security Council staff member, said the Democrats’ rhetorical offensive is unlikely to have much immediate impact.

“Speeches made in August are there to be ignored,” said Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “The administration is likely to ignore these speeches.”

At the same time, he said, the administration’s argument that it is merely rejecting bad treaties is not enough.

“The question is how bad treaties become good treaties,” he said. “You can’t make treaties better by standing on the sidelines. If you engage in negotiations, you may get a better treaty.”

Lawrence Korb, director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, agreed.

“This is the debate we ought to have,” said Korb, a senior Pentagon official during the Reagan administration. “Since the end of the Cold War, you have had a lot more multilateral ways of doing things than you ever did before.”

But he said the debate could backfire on the Democrats because a substantial segment of public opinion is suspicious of international programs that seem to challenge U.S. sovereignty.

“We’re the country that wouldn’t ratify the League of Nations,” he said.