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ELLEN TAUSCHER, Representative, 10th Congressional District of California
STEVEN KULL, Director, Program on Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland
DANIEL SNEIDER, National/Foreign Editor, San Jose Mercury News
JANE WALES, President and CEO, World Affairs Council of Northern California
Moderated by ELIZABETH SHERWOOD-RANDALL, Former U.S.Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense; Senior Research Scholar, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University
Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall: In a democracy, public participation in the policy-making process is essential. In order to participate fully and effectively, the public must be well informed. Foreign policy was, for decades, the purview of “the club of wise men,” but that has changed considerably. Yet there are still big questions about how the public can play a meaningful role on complex international issues, and how it can inform itself when the government makes decisions that are often based on classified information.
First, what are the most important issues to be considered as we think about the role of the public in foreign and defense policy-making? Second, what are the best examples in which the public has played a constructive role in shaping foreign and defense policies since the end of the Cold War? Are there examples in which a failure of public engagement has been detrimental to the national interest? Third, what concrete steps can be taken to improve the process of interaction between the public and our elected officials as our officials seek to make national security decisions affecting our future?
Jane Wales: The role of the non-governmental sector in foreign policy-making is large and growing, and it needs to grow deeper still. Imagine you are in government and have been assigned the problem of global climate change. What do you do? Check to see what the president has said on the campaign on the issue. Because it’s highly technical, you reach out to universities and private think tanks; turn to national laboratories; reach deep into the bureaucracy to get comments from multiple agencies. You turn to Congress, which turns to its sources of knowledge and ideas. Go to the energy industry and to the business roundtable. Go to the best scientists in the country and perhaps in the world to find out what they know about climate, and even to the president’s rather annoyingly independent committee on science and technology policy for their views.
You will then be ready to devise a position that you will take to other countries for negotiation. You do that in the United Nations forum, and there you will be joined by environmental groups that work alongside you developing treaty language and offering such radical policy innovations as emissions trading, rolling compliance and fluid treaties. The Senate will then hold hearings before ratifying, the Mercury News will provide the information the public needs to develop its own choices and The Commonwealth Club will provide one of the few truly neutral forums for public discussion, debate, and deliberation, which are essential to democratic decision-making.
The role of the public in policy-making, the role of non-governmental players and the institutions we support and join is very large. It needs to be larger still for two reasons: First, we are facing an increasingly complex set of problems, like cyber terror, bioterror and emerging infectious diseases that require a great deal of technical expertise that is deep in our society, but not necessarily resident in government. Second, the president is making a series of policy choices in response to the threat of terror and other transnational dangers that, taken together, have the effect of redefining our role in the world. We all have a stake. For those policies to succeed, they will need to accurately reflect what we stand for as a country, otherwise they won’t be sustainable over time and they will not succeed in the central goal of the war on terror: the goal of persuasion.
The toughest issue for the president and for governmental policy-makers is distinguishing important from unimportant. Put on your hat as citizen and devise a list of what is important to you and what should be important for the president as he prosecutes the war on terror. Here’s my list: First, knowledge matters. In a democracy we rely on one another to listen, to learn, to choose wisely; our security depends on it. Second, relationships matter. The alliances we form are going to be more important than the forces we deploy in the war on terror. In order to keep those alliances together, we will need to define leadership in a way that involves shared decision-making as well as shared sacrifice. Third, values matter. Alliances can only stand if you have a common understanding of what each actor is willing to stand for, fight for, pay for.
Words also matter. We have seen the barbs going back and forth across the Atlantic and found them less than helpful. I am also worried about our latching onto words that might distort our own understanding of what our options and purposes are. The war on terror is called a war. That ’s a metaphor. Metaphors can be helpful, but they can also be limiting. The problem with the word war is that it raises the status of criminals, the people who committed those acts on September 11, to the status of warriors. That’s wrong. It leads us to believe that the best response is a military one. Force has a role, but it has the perverse effect that success on the battlefield could raise the risk of terror rather than reduce it. So we cannot limit ourselves to that tool.
The use of the word war leads us to believe that the primary protagonists are states, when this all began when a band of stateless individuals changed our world. This leads me to the final thing on my list, which is that people matter. The best antidote to a highly networked transnational criminal society like Al Qaeda may just well be an equally resourceful transnational civil society composed of people committed to positive change. This is where you come in, where The Commonwealth Club comes in. It draws together people who define their neighborhood very broadly, people with international reach and an international role and a willingness to assume that role responsibly.
Ellen Tauscher: We have to be a world leader in a very difficult time and embrace the values that make us the strong democracy that we are in the U.S. Maybe we have to remind ourselves of what those values are, because we find ourselves increasingly in a time when we have broken so much glass with our allies, and made gleeful the opportunities for our adversaries. I’m not sure whose side anyone is on anymore. Who thought that in the 21st century our children would be facing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and that we would not be the benevolent superpower finding a way to level the playing field for all working families in our own country?
As a centrist Democrat, I went to Washington in 2001 hopeful that, with the new administration, we would find a way to work together on many issues, but the phone didn’t ring. As a senior Bay Area member on the Armed Services Committee and on the Transportation Committee, I have spent a lot of my time working on nonproliferation issues. I’ve got Travis Air Force Base in my district. I have been a member of delegations that traveled to the security conferences both in Verkunde and Singapore and I’ve spent a lot of time talking to our NATO allies. I thought that we were in a place where we could credibly persuade; that we, as a country, prior to September 11, had clearly defined ourselves as a country of benevolence, but a country that believed we had a burden as blessed to share, and to lead. We had a strong economy at the end of the 1990s; we had strong alliances in the Atlantic, new relationships with China. We were making good friends with the Russians. There was lots of optimism. The wheels came off sometime prior to September 11, but we all focus on September 11 as being that galvanizing event.
What could we have done differently post-September 11 that would not get us into a situation where we’re kicking treaties in the teeth every chance we get, where we have broken glass between our allies, where we’re buying down our risk by basically having eBay auctions for foreign aid for countries like Turkey, to figure out how to get troops there? What do we do about the fact that we can’t credibly persuade even our own people that it was the intention of this government to peacefully disarm Saddam Hussein? If we can’t convince ourselves, we’re never going to convince anybody else – even if we buy our way into their good graces.
No one would have believed on September 10 that NATO would ever invoke Article V for our benefit. We were dragged kicking and screaming to have an Article V where the U.S. would have to go to mutually defend our European allies. Everyone believed for decades that they would call on us and off we would go. Who thought that the first time Article V was invoked it would be for us. In return we turned them down when they wanted to go to Afghanistan to help in nation building, which we don’t do well and they do. We could have used their help. We have now Hamid Karzai – a very nice man on the endangered species list – who is the mayor of Kabul, not the leader of a country. You can’t leave that little enclave Kabul because the country is back to what it was – a warlord-driven, poppy-growing wasteland, where the women are still wearing their burqas and children are not going to school, and there’s no clean water nor electricity because we decided that we were going to do a military operation, but we didn’t want to deal with the other stuff. We left our friends on the outside who were willing to help us.
How do we persuade ourselves and the world community that we were intending to disarm Saddam Hussein in a peaceable way? I would have gone to the UN in December 2001 and indicted Saddam Hussein for war crimes. I would have kept the world community together on the most important thing that we have to fight – the asymmetrical war on terrorism – which is difficult to define, impossible to predict and very expensive. If we had indicted Saddam Hussein, and put him in the dock next to Slobodan Milosevic, we could have tried to get the Arab League, who have been sitting on their hands, and said, Look, the world community is united. You are our friends, too. We’re going to work this war on terrorism, but we want you to deliver him to The Hague. We all would have had something to do other than kill him to get him out of power. Is my 11-year-old daughter meant to believe that the only solution that I have to get rid of a bad guy is to kill him?
We still have to find our way to influence and to persuade. The test can no longer be, Were you with us or not on September 12? That was easy. That’s the coalition of the willing the president talks about. I want the coalition of the capable – the people who think, the people who make choices, hard choices to stand for peace, principled peace that says we’re going to find a way to adjudicate the criminals. We’re going to work with our allies, including the Germans, who have bent themselves into pretzels internally to work on the war on terrorism, against their own best interests in many cases.
If we make this into a war, it becomes a holy war against our country, and that is the biggest mistake we could ever make. It is a crime, and we are people who believe in laws. Let’s hold our government officials accountable – not for making up their minds and telling us about it later, but for being able to persuade. But the speed bumps we put out there were only able to work because we have you with us. So keep the dialogue going. It is about public policy, and you are the public.
Daniel Sneider:I grew up the son of an American diplomat and spent much of my childhood living outside this country. Somewhere along the line I got the idea that I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. The model I always had in my mind was William Shirer in Germany in the 1930s. I had this image that the role of foreign correspondents was to be reporting from distant lands that people couldn’t see, and be an avenue by which Americans could understand the world beyond them. We live in a much different environment now, but I still believe that the media has a critical role to play.
First, the obvious role of the media is to inform. Traditionally the American media has interpreted that injunction to mean that we should provide the information in a very narrow, “just the facts ma'am ” sense. In recent years, we’ve come to rightfully change our understanding of what we need to do. Yes, we need to provide information; we need to provide news that readers and viewers believe to be accurate, fair and balanced. But we also need to provide two other things that we don’t do enough of. One is critical thinking: When we are confronted with a complex world, it’s not enough to simply put in front of people a narrow sense of “here’s what happened today.” Governments of all kinds tend to drive that news agenda. The second thing you have to do is provide context. Good journalists and good foreign correspondents are constantly being challenged to put events in a broader historical, cultural and social context. If we don’t do that it’s hard to understand what the meaning is of particular events.
The second role of the media is that in some sense we are the substitute for government for many people. When people can’t reach government, they try to reach them through us. People’s anger and frustrations over policy issues are often expressed to us directly; sometimes they are trying to murder the messenger. The Middle East is probably for every foreign editor of any major newspaper in this country the subject on which they hear the most from their readers. We have a responsibility to assist our readers to speak to government, not necessarily by reflecting their personal views or group views, but by giving them a way to feel that there’s some responsiveness to their interests and to be able to see to some degree a reflection of their concerns in the pages of the newspaper. There is an implicit understanding on our part that when we put something in the newspaper or put it on an evening broadcast we know it has an impact beyond ourselves.
What are the obstacles to that role? The first is commercialism. I had the pleasure of working for 12 years for The Christian Science Monitor, which is a paper not driven by a profit motive but is subsidized by a church with a sence of mission about what it does. But I understand the pressures that the marketplace brings on all news organizations. When it comes to foreign coverage, those pressures are always felt acutely. One, because it’s extremely expensive. For me to put a correspondent in Tokyo I could have four correspondents someplace else in the U.S. So when news organizations make choices about resources and the space devoted to subjects in the newspaper they have to make difficult decisions. Second, there is in some sense a mistaken belief that readers and viewers are predominately interested in local news. Of course people are – I want to find out what’s going on in the school system that my children attend – but in my experience, people have a passionate interest in what is going on outside our borders and how our public policy is made. If 42 million people are watching the last episode of “Joe Millionaire” it doesn’t mean that they want to read about “Joe Millionaire” in the newspaper.
The second obstacle is the crisis mentality. News organizations are driven by crisis, the same way governments are. When there’s a war on we will pour resources in; we’ll cover it intensely. But in between those moments of crisis we tend to drop off dramatically. Afghanistan never appeared on the front pages of our newspaper before 9/11 and it hasn’t appeared much in the last year or so. We are not doing our readers a service because we are not telling them very important things about what happened after the focus left that place.
The third obstacle is parochialism. News organizations, and to some degree our readers, are focused on the things that are in front of us. Unless you can connect events to the immediate impact upon people right here then they are not going to be interested. There is a certain truth to that, but I sometimes wonder whether the people who run news organizations aren’t far more parochial than the consumers.
The last obstacle is government control: We have to fight our way through the reality that the government largely controls the flow of information. As much as we may want to take a critical approach towards government, often despite ourselves they are shaping the agenda of what we cover. They are determining what goes on the front page of the newspapers, including The New York Times, every day. If Secretary Powell says this is a big issue then it goes onto the front page. North Korea is a good example. I’ve insisted that we put it as a very serious issue facing our country consistently on the front pages of our newspaper. The government has done everything possible to take it off the front page. We’ll see this in the coverage of this war.
The Pentagon’s rules on access for journalists, while they are an improvement over what we experienced in the Gulf War, are in many ways very troubling to me. We are still going to be extremely restricted in what we can do, and in some ways they are designed to induce a sense of comradeship between the correspondents and journalists who are out there in the field and troops in battle. Journalists are like everybody else: We are patriots. We want to look favorably upon the actions of the men and women who are in service, but we also have another obligation, which is again to be critical observers. The people above me see it as well; they are very much concerned about what readers think and how readers respond to our coverage. They are very much concerned about issues of fairness and balance. I keep saying to audiences, “You need to express yourself directly – as you would to your elected representatives – to media organizations that you feel should be responsive to you.” The more people do that the easier it will be for me to do my job.
Steven Kull: I’m not sure that citizen participation in efforts to influence U.S. foreign policy has always had a positive effect on U.S. foreign policy. A few years ago I did a study where I interviewed congressional staffers and executive branch officials on their assumptions about public opinion on foreign policy and America's role in the world. There was a widespread image of the public that runs something like this: Now that the Cold War is over we don’t really care about the rest of the world. We just want to turn inward and focus on problems at home. For the most part we don’t want to deal with things like the United Nations because that interferes with our freedom of action. We don’t want to participate in UN peacekeeping operations because those aren’t our problems. And we definitely don’t like foreign aid; we want to spend the money here at home.
What’s interesting is that the images they had and still have are mistaken. It’s not what people say in polls and in focus groups. The public is not isolationist. They think that the U.S. should be engaged in the world. They do think that the U.S. does too much, in the sense that it’s too domineering, too assertive, but that doesn’t mean that they want the U.S. to completely pull back. Instead, they want the U.S. to work in a more multilateral fashion, to work together with other countries. They would like the United Nations to become stronger – a strong majority said the U.S. should have UN approval before taking military action in Iraq. They like multilateral approaches to all kind of problems. They like the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court, the landmine treaty and the Kyoto treaty. They even support foreign aid in principle. They do tremendously overestimate, though, how much goes to foreign aid: the median estimate was that 20 percent of the federal budget goes toward foreign aid, when it’s really only one percent.
If policy-makers thought the public was different they might actually behave differently. The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations recently interviewed 66 congressional officials – mostly staffers, some members – and 34 executive branch officials and it was bizarre how much they expressed views that were at odds with their official positions. They said that they too supported the CTBT, the landmine treaty, the ICC and so on. They thought they we should spend more on foreign aid. A clear majority said the U.S. should not go into Iraq without UN approval. The Spratt amendment and the Levin amendment called for that, but they were voted down in Congress. They think the public wants them to be very strongly behind the president.
So what’s going on here? I asked policy-makers how they got their ideas about the public. Polls play a pretty small role, particularly with members of Congress; they primarily get their images based on people who call, write and go to town hall meetings. Congressional staffers don’t complain that the public is not engaged in foreign policy; they hear a lot from the public. What’s key here is that the distribution of attitudes among those who are stepping forward and speaking is not the same distribution of attitudes as in the general public. Take the United Nations. Some segment of the public feels very intensely about the United Nations, like there is some kind of conspiracy emanating from it. Those who are uncomfortable with the UN are much more vocal than those who aren’t. Most Americans say, “United Nations, yes that’s a good idea.” That’s not the kind of sentiment that gets them to write an intense letter and say, “I think we should pay our United Nation dues!”
But there are other parts of the public policy process for the public to be involved in. The critical element is the process of deliberation in groups. Sometimes people need to get organized, to get into a dialectical relationship; they need to hear both sides. But if that’s all that happens then those discourses tend to be entirely dominated by a polarized process and it leads to a partisan process in Congress as well. The truth is that when most Americans hear a debate they do not tend to identify with one side or the other; they feel resonance with both sides and try to find some way to synthesize both values into something coherent. Many Americans shrink back from being involved in the policy process if it means simply having to take one side or another.
What is needed, and something that Americans are drawn to, is a deliberative process whereby they hear multiple perspectives and can seek solutions that incorporate multiple values. Clearly the success of The Commonwealth Club over the last 100 years is a testament to that. But it’s important for the public sensibilities to be reported back to policy-makers. There is little question that in the realm of foreign policy and other policy areas, public policy is out of step with majority opinion. There is evidence that this is becoming more so and that Americans are aware of this discrepancy, which is one of the reasons why they don’t feel as much confidence in government and why they are less engaged. The public has a lot to offer in foreign policy and the public policy process overall. If Americans feel that their voice is having an impact, and in fact it is, they will have more confidence in the policies our government pursues.
Marwan Muasher
Arianna Huffington
Ben Stein