The Audacity of Hope

Of course, whether in Africa or elsewhere, we can’t expect to tackle such dire problems
alone. For that reason, we should be spending more time and money trying to strengthen
the capacity of international institutions so that they can do some of this work for us.
Instead, we’ve been doing the opposite. For years, conservatives in the United States
have been making political hay over problems at the UN: the hypocrisy of resolutions
singling out Israel for condemnation, the Kafkaesque election of nations like Zimbabwe
and Libya to the UN Commission on Human Rights, and most recently the kickbacks
that plagued the oil-for-food program.
These critics are right. For every UN agency like UNICEF that functions well, there are
other agencies that seem to do nothing more than hold conferences, produce reports, and
provide sinecures for third-rate international civil servants. But these failures aren’t an
argument for reducing our involvement in international organizations, nor are they an
excuse for U.S. unilateralism. The more effective UN peacekeeping forces are in
handling civil wars and sectarian conflicts, the less global policing we have to do in
areas that we’d like to see stabilized. The more credible the information that the
International Atomic Energy Agency provides, the more likely we are to mobilize allies
against the efforts of rogue states to obtain nuclear weapons. The greater the capacity of
the World Health Organization, the less likely we are to have to deal with a flu
pandemic in our own country. No country has a bigger stake than we do in
strengthening international institutions—which is why we pushed for their creation in
the first place, and why we need to take the lead in improving them.
Finally, for those who chafe at the prospect of working with our allies to solve the
pressing global challenges we face, let me suggest at least one area where we can act
unilaterally and improve our standing in the world—by perfecting our own democracy
and leading by example. When we continue to spend tens of billions of dollars on
weapons systems of dubious value but are unwilling to spend the money to protect
highly vulnerable chemical plants in major urban centers, it becomes more difficult to
get other countries to safeguard their nuclear power plants. When we detain suspects
indefinitely without trial or ship them off in the dead of night to countries where we
know they’ll be tortured, we weaken our ability to press for human rights and the rule of
law in despotic regimes. When we, the richest country on earth and the consumer of 25
percent of the world’s fossil fuels, can’t bring ourselves to raise fuel-efficiency
standards by even a small fraction so as to weaken our dependence on Saudi oil fields
and slow global warming, we should expect to have a hard time convincing China not to
deal with oil suppliers like Iran or Sudan—and shouldn’t count on much cooperation in
getting them to address environmental problems that visit our shores.
This unwillingness to make hard choices and live up to our own ideals doesn’t just
undermine U.S. credibility in the eyes of the world. It undermines the U.S.
government’s credibility with the American people. Ultimately, it is how we manage
that most precious resource—the American people, and the system of self-government
we inherited from our Founders—that will determine the success of any foreign policy.
The world out there is dangerous and complex; the work of remaking it will be long and
hard, and will require some sacrifice. Such sacrifice comes about because the American
people understand fully the choices before them; it is born of the confidence we have in
our democracy. FDR understood this when he said, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, that
“[t]his Government will put its trust in the stamina of the American people.” Truman
understood this, which is why he worked with Dean Acheson to establish the