Warren Rudman and Consensus Foreign Policy

One of my favorite political figures from across the aisle in the last couple of decades has been the former Senator from my home state, Warren Rudman. Since leaving the Senate, Rudman has been at the center of an attempt to bring centrism back to a place of respectability in the political dialogue. I often do not agree with his kind of centrism, but I admire his attempt to tilt at the windmill of blind partisanship, an effort that is increasingly quixotic in the shouting matches that are American politics.

Rudman’s latest effort is something called the Partnership for a Secure America. The Partnership follows on the heels of Rudman’s co-chairing the Hart-Rudman commission on national security and before that his work with the late Paul Tsongas in forming the Concord Coalition, which aimed to attack profligate deficit spending.

Rudman’s new brainchild aims to work toward developing a bipartisan foreign policy free of acrimony, name-calling, and grandstanding. It is an ambitious goal, and possibly an impossible one. But Rudman has shown himself to be as capable of working with those across the aisle as any prominent politician in recent memory, and he has pulled together an impressive lineup: Rudman and Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, are the co-chairs. Its bipartisan board includes two former secretaries of state, Warren Christopher (Clinton) and Lawrence Eagleburger (George H.W. Bush), five former senators in addition to Rudman: Republicans Jack Danforth, Howard Baker, and Nancy Kassebaum Baker, plus Democrats Gary Hart and Sam Nunn; one name that stands out to this New Englander is a former Governor, William Weld, the Republican from Massachusetts whose views were too extreme for Jesse Helms, who refused to allow him to take a position as ambassador to Mexico. The other distinguished members of the board are Samuel R. Berger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Rita Hauser, Carla Hills, Richard Holbrooke, Thomas Kean, Anthony Lake, Robert McFarlane, Donald McHenry, William Perry, Thomas Pickering, Theodore Sorensen, John Whitehead, and Frank Wisner.

It would be a mistake to fetishize bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake, or to assume that centrism is better than what exists to the left or right of it. At the same time, this seems like a noble effort that we all should hope succeeds. One needs look no further back than the last election when actual discussions of foreign policy were subsumed by questions about the personalities of the candidates as they were tangentially related to foreign policy. We must take a longer view – one can only assume that a long-range foreign policy vision will need to endure through Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses. If we could develop a general program during the Cold War, even given some serious partisan differences, surely we can do the same in a world that is equally but differently dangerous.