Three Progressive Foreign Policy Proposals That Respond to the Challenges of Our Time

May 30, 2008

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“In the 10 years after World War II we had a burst of institutional creativity […] we’ve reached another point after the end of the Cold War where we need to take a new look, not just at our policies, but at our basic institutions,” William Galston told the audience at an event at the Center for American Progress on Thursday. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, participated in a panel discussion about progressive foreign policy proposals that respond to the challenges of our time.

The debate was moderated by Kenneth Baer, co-editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and included Galston, Economic Policy Institute research and policy director John Irons, and Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb. The panelists presented creative ideas to improve America’s public diplomacy, limit carbon dioxide emissions, and protect America from man-made and natural disasters.

Galston argued that America’s “low standing” in the world is a result of “inept articulation” of its ideals. He proposed a dedicated, cabinet-level Department of Global Information and Communication that would conduct public diplomacy with an annual budget of $10 billion.

The State Department currently conducts public diplomacy with a budget of $1.6 billion, but Galston asserted that, “what we’re doing right now isn’t working, and it isn’t going to work.” A cabinet-level position is necessary for public diplomacy, he said, because “if you’re not at the table, your chances of getting what matters to you on the table are virtually nil.”

Irons proposed an innovative “cap-and-lease” approach to limiting carbon dioxide emissions, in which tradable carbon “leases” for future emissions would be allocated by auction, while still requiring per-emission payments from polluters at a set price. “This idea might be wrong, it might be obvious, or it might be brilliant, but I think that the key insights are going to have to hold true no matter what system we pick,” he said.

He argued that “the two leading ideas” for combating global warming—a carbon tax and a carbon cap-and-trade system—are both flawed. Carbon taxes often fail to achieve emissions reduction targets, while cap-and-trade plans do not provide the price certainty essential to long-term business planning. Additionally, he said, both carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems are vulnerable to political pressure.

By combining elements of the two systems, Irons argued, “the cap-and-lease program really does blend together the best features of what’s out there.” Irons also predicted that, “Whatever we design at home has to be, in the long-run, something that can be integrated into a global system.”

Korb presented his plan for the creation of a “Home Guard,” which would supplement a National Guard stretched thin by deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. “The all-volunteer army was not designed to fight long wars,” said Korb, and as a result the National Guard “becomes not a strategic reserve, they become an operational reserve.”

Korb noted that the response to Hurricane Katrina was hampered by the fact that the Louisiana National Guard was deployed to Iraq at the time of the emergency. Even if the National Guard had been present during the emergency, Korb cautioned, “If I’m training and I’m a specialist in counterinsurgency, I might not have the engineering skills I need to repair a break in the levee.”

The Home Guard would be composed of part-time volunteers under the command of state Adjutants General, and would be trained to respond to natural and man-made disasters in the United States. To finance the Home Guard, Korb said that, “the cost of one month in Iraq would be enough to get people where they need to be.”

He said that the Home Guard would allow citizens to become involved in the war against terrorist networks and would especially appeal to “people who want to do something, but didn’t want to make a military commitment.”

For more on this event, please visit the events page.