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Campaign 2000: Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader is the liberal conscience in the 2000 race. With many polls showing the consumer safety advocate running at nearly ten percent of the vote, Nader could emerge as a major factor in November. Nader doesn't have to answer to established interest groups, and with practically no chance of winning in November, he's free to say things that the major parties don't.
His foreign policy is a good case in point. Unlike the major parties, who Nader charges don't discuss "WTO and NAFTA and corporate globalization," Nader takes an almost neo-isolationist view of the world. The Green Party candidate's foreign policy thinking is descended from Wilsonian thought and leavened with a dash of Sixties idealism. Unless the United States can be a force for good in the world, Nader seems to say, it should stay at home.
Of ballots, solar cells, and language
On moral grounds, he may be right. "We seem to always side with the dictators and the oligarchs and never with the peasants and workers," he said in an interview with CNN's Talkback Live.
His policy requires not just the spread of American ideals, but also of American technology. The mixture is a bit, well, odd, and disconcerting to observers used to the sanitized policies of modern presidential candidates. On a statement on his website, Nader asks,
"Don't we need to go on the affirmative and expand the export of democratic processes, of appropriate technology like solar energy, energize the world to move to a utilization of national resources that redefines productivity and efficiency? Then there's the nonmaterial aspect of it all. How much we can, for example, rescue the languages of indigenous peoples, try to rescue a lot of the culture that's becoming lost to them as commercialism and Wester corporatism define their culture."
Share the wealth
It's doubtful that many other politicians in the world have ever thought about rescuing indigenous peoples' languages. But it's policies like that which make up both Nader's appeal to a certain bloc of the electorate and constitute his intellectual value in this election. Perhaps Americans should be more concerned about indigenous cultures. Certainly, the topic has never been discussed before.
Like Gore, Nader wants to make the world more prosperous in an attempt to head off international problems before they arise. No one can deny the American policy in the past has encouraged authoritarian regimes and, to some extent, the exploitation of other countries' workforce. Some foreign policy experts, like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Henry Kissinger, are unapologetic about this. Nader is incensed. On the problem of immigration from Latin America, he comments that "if we had a more decent foreign policy toward Mexico and Central [America] where we sided with the peasants and the workers. . . there wouldn't be such a desparate economic condition for those desparate people to move north."
Conclusion
A Nader presidency, unlikely as it is, would be to some extent in keeping with traditional American idealism. But assuming that any president could live up to Nader's rhetoric, his policies would also certainly erode American power while alienating much of the international community and possibly triggering several wars. Would a President Nader have remained silent in Chechnya? Probably not. Yet there is a time when moral considerations in foreign policy should take a back seat to other concerns, such as the relative balance of nuclear power between Russia and the United States. Indeed, Nader might find it distasteful to continue some of his predecessors' policies, like relying on deterrence to dissuade rogue nations from using weapons of mass destruction against the United States. After all, nuclear policy in this country has never been moral in any sense except for the fact that it has kept the peace. Nader's history as a "No Nukes" advocate adds credence to the view that a Nader administration would be disastrous for American power and thus for global stability. Still, Nader is asking the questions that the United States needs to answer if it is to define its policy for the next century. Certainly, morality will (and should) play a role in American policy, but the extent to which it should dictate American actions is unclear. If nothing else, Nader's candidacy will help the country define the limits of morality in the 21st century world. |
Campaign2000 Nader
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