State of the Union 2007: President Bush Faces a New Congress

Transcript

CARLOS PASCUAL: What I would say is from a foreign policy perspective, this was not really a statement on the state of the Union or a way forward on international security issues, and I think it failed to address the systemic and structural security challenges that we face today, that it failed to address convincingly some of the critical crises in which we face ourselves, including Iraq which was really a repetition of the previous week's speech, the Middle East peace process, Iran, North Korea, Lebanon or Darfur. There were lines on each of those issues but really no strategy that was put forward with any of those. It really ignored as well his own promise of bipartisanship where he indicated at the beginning of this that there is a willingness "to cross that aisle when there is work to be done", but in Iraq he basically reiterated my way is the only way to go forward.

Let me come back to a couple of these points. On the systemic questions, let me illustrate this with two paradoxes. We have the strongest military that we have ever seen in history. We have a nuclear arsenal that can destroy any country in the world. Yet, at the same time, our military capability has not been able to achieve our objectives in Iraq or Afghanistan; we have not been able to preclude Iran or North Korea from gaining a nuclear capability or being well on the way toward gaining that capability; terrorism has spread around the world; and the United States is probably the most condemned that we have seen in recent history. In a poll that was released by the BBC yesterday of 25 countries throughout the world, for 19 of those 25 countries, it says that the U.S. is a negative influence on how we are handling Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, North Korea, Guantanamo, and climate change.

From a different perspective, this has been accused of being one of the most unilateralist administrations we have ever seen. Yet, at the same time, this Administration has had to come back to the United Nations for some form of help, whether it is through forces, legitimacy or resources on Iran, North Korea, Lebanon, Congo, Haiti, and Kosovo. Yet that institution itself is deeply flawed in part because the United States has not actually vested the energy that is necessary in order to reform.

If we were really going to have a state of the Union last night, we would have to say, honestly I think, that military power and its unilateral use is not adequate to achieve American foreign policy objectives abroad, that the multilateral institutions that we have today are not designed for the kinds of international and transnational challenges we face and have not been renewed in order to deal with that. We are less secure than we were seven years ago, we are not prepared for the future, and we have, in effect, squandered the moral authority that we had after September 11th to be able to rally the international community.

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