Has our foreign policy yielded the results we'd hoped for?

Frontiersman editorial board

Envision a national capitol under controlled airspace, complete with anti-aircraft batteries. Picture a remote port guarded by heavily armed law enforcement personnel. Add to those a country refusing international flights and warning its citizens to be especially vigilant to any suspicious behavior.

Just over two years ago all of this would have conjured, in American minds, some place in the Middle East or some civil-war-ravaged Third World country, but now we know these as signs of the times in the United States. We're becoming accustomed to long security lines at our airports, and we turn on the morning news with some trepidation, hoping some unthinkable tragedy has not taken place while we slept.

As the Bush administration touts its successes in foreign policy, we're left to wonder if we're any safer, or any more free, as a new year begins. The debate over the administration's American Patriot Act rages on, but that debate does little to quell our suspicions of one another and our fears that we live in a much more dangerous place that we thought.

It is true that the Taliban has been ousted, and that Osama bin Laden is apparently on the run. It is true that the goals of ousting and capturing Saddam Hussein have been accomplished. Even Muammar al Qadhafi has opened Libya to inspectors and has said he'll destroy weapons of mass destruction located there.

All of this, one would think, would make the world a safer place for Americans -- but it doesn't.

What will it take for the current foreign policy of "Get them before they get us" to be successful? How many despots will have to fall before we can rest easy? Is it possible that our real enemies are poverty and suffering? Is it possible that the rapid Americanization of other nations creates a backlash that cannot be snuffed out with bombs and sanctions? We have heard that our enemies despise our way of life, and that they won't rest until they have eradicated it. It may be possible that it is the wholesale expansion of our way of life to other cultures that creates animosity and discord.

We must also ask whether we can earn our vision of democracy for other nations with the blood of our own soldiers. Western democracy has always been won by those who would embrace it, and it lasts only in places where people value it.

Our foreign policy should, indeed, keep us safe from enemies, but it can not succeed by creating new enemies at every turn. With a new year upon us, perhaps we should ask if we are where we'd hoped to be when we set this course.