The New York Times has a look inside John Kerry’s foreign policy positions and finds an image of someone who seems oblivious to the rest of the world. Kerry has never exhibited leadership as a legislator, but his foreign policy views are completely rudderless in a time when foreign policy is more critical than ever. It was often said that partisanship stopped at the water’s edge, but Kerry and the Democrats have nothing but partisan arguments against Bush rather than a substantive and coherent policy. For the Kerry team, common sense stops at the water’s edge.

Kerry first begins by arguing that he would have sent troops to quell the uprising against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. Not only would this position have lead the US into exactly the kind of unilateralism that Kerry has previously called “inept”, “irresponsible”, and “dangerous”, but it would have put the United States in the position of supporting a leader whose “election” had been deemed undemocratic and illegitimate by the UN and the OAS and who was wildly unpopular with his own people.

“I would have been prepared to send troops immediately, period,” Mr. Kerry said on Friday, expressing astonishment that President Bush, who talks of supporting democratically elected leaders, withheld any aid and then helped spirit Mr. Aristide into exile after saying the United States could not protect him.

“Look, Aristide was no picnic, and did a lot of things wrong,” Mr. Kerry said. But Washington “had understandings in the region about the right of a democratic regime to ask for help. And we contravened all of that. I think it’s a terrible message to the region, democracies, and it’s shortsighted.”

In essence, Kerry would have been willing to buck the international system in order to prop up a dictator but wouldn’t be willing to do so to remove a tyrant who presented a clear threat to the region. Such a position is completely untenable and reflects a simpleminded opposition to Bush Administration policy rather than a coherent foreign policy. Such a position would put US troops in support of a crumbling and illegitimate regime, and ensure that the violence in Haiti would only escalate. The international community did the right thing by removing Aristide and beginning to work to ease the suffering of the Haitian people and help them restore a truly democractic system. Yet Kerry is now on the record as opposing that position in a mindlessly partisan repudiation of Bush Administration policy.

This statement is equally troubling:

But in several cases Mr. Kerry declined to say how he would handle some of the stickiest issues: whether to reward Pakistan for its aid against Al Qaeda, for example, or punish it for failing to crack down on what was clearly one of the world’s most dangerous nuclear proliferation networks, based in its own laboratories.

Yet Kerry spend years as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If he can’t make up his mind now, when will he? Kerry’s Clintonesque indecision on such critical matters does not bode well for someone who has to make life-or-death foreign policy decisions in the rapid-fire 21st Century international arena. What is more notable is how Kerry seems completely nonchalant about the war on terrorism. The single most important question of this election is who will continue to prosecute the war on terrorism? By the way in which Kerry has brushed off the war on terrorism, he is showing his personal distate for the issue. It is simply unacceptable for someone wanting to be a wartime Commander in Chief to not directly deal with the most important foreign policy issue of our time. It’s like FDR never mentioning Hitler in 1944 – it’s not only jarring, it shows someone phenomenally disconnected from the issues of the time.

Kerry then proceeds to argue that the war in Iraq had nothing to do with Libya’s voluntary disarmament of its WMD program. Except that argument doesn’t even pass the smell test. A:) Libya started to negotiate only when it was clear Hussein would be removed and B:) Qaddafi himself has stated that the war was the reason for his choice. So either Kerry is living in an ideological bubble, or he’s deliberately lying. Either way it does not reflect well on his character or competence. His arguments on North Korea are similarly unpersuasive. He argues that Iraq was a distraction from the North Korean issue, despite the fact that the ouster of Saddam put the United States in a much better position in regards to our talks with Pyongyang. Would Sen. Kerry care to offer another reason why Kim Jung Il suddenly decided that bilateral talks with the US be replaced by a multilateral exchange with the powers in the region? It is clear that without the knowledge that we were willing to use force, Pyongyang would never have capitulated.

Kerry is a weak candidate on foreign affairs. His foreign policy is a simplistic negation of the Bush Administration’s policy, his positions lack coherence, and he barely mentions the most important issue of this election. The fact that Kerry very rarely mentions foreign policy on the stump, except to use it as a hammer against Bush is equally telling. John Kerry may have been a war hero in Vietnam, but he is not Commander in Chief material, and a Kerry presidency would return the US to the rudderless foreign policy of the Clinton Administration – a foreign policy that directly lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans at the Khobar Towers, our embassies in Africa, the USS Cole, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the fields of Shanksburg, Pennsylvania. It is a price that cannot be afforded, and Kerry is not the kind of President that this country can afford in a time of war against an insidious and ruthless enemy.

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