 The New York Times did a long profile of John Kerry in the magazine this weekend. It had an interesting section on Kerry's approach to foreign policy. This section is particularly useful given its claim that Kerry is focused on global guerrillas and not on rogue states (the Bush team's focus). I believe this is a correct approach, however, I can't find any writing/thought from either Kerry or his "policy" team other than sweeping statements to support the claims made in the article. It does appear that there are signs of life from at least one candidate:
...Kerry was among the first policy makers in Washington to begin mapping out a strategy to combat an entirely new kind of enemy. Americans were conditioned, by two world wars and a long standoff with a rival superpower, to see foreign policy as a mix of cooperation and tension between civilized states. Kerry came to believe, however, that Americans were in greater danger from the more shadowy groups he had been investigating -- nonstate actors, armed with cellphones and laptops -- who might detonate suitcase bombs or release lethal chemicals into the subway just to make a point. They lived in remote regions and exploited weak governments. Their goal wasn't to govern states but to destabilize them.
It continues with the correct assertation that global guerrilla activity is not confined to Islamic sources:
The challenge of beating back these nonstate actors -- not just Islamic terrorists but all kinds of rogue forces -- is what Kerry meant by ''the dark side of globalization.'' He came closest to articulating this as an actual foreign-policy vision in a speech he gave at U.C.L.A. last February. ''The war on terror is not a clash of civilizations,'' he said then. ''It is a clash of civilization against chaos, of the best hopes of humanity against dogmatic fears of progress and the future.''
He is also correct that global guerrillas are mounting a direct challenge to the viability of the nation-state system:
Kerry's view, on the other hand, suggests that it is the very premise of civilized states, rather than any one ideology, that is under attack. And no one state, acting alone, can possibly have much impact on the threat, because terrorists will always be able to move around, shelter their money and connect in cyberspace; there are no capitals for a superpower like the United States to bomb, no ambassadors to recall, no economies to sanction. The U.S. military searches for bin Laden, the Russians hunt for the Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev and the Israelis fire missiles at Hamas bomb makers; in Kerry's world, these disparate terrorist elements make up a loosely affiliated network of diabolical villains, more connected to one another by tactics and ideology than they are to any one state sponsor. The conflict, in Kerry's formulation, pits the forces of order versus the forces of chaos, and only a unified community of nations can ensure that order prevails.
However, Kerry makes a crticial error in thinking that global guerrillas are only really dangerous when armed with nuclear weapons (hence his focus on non-proliferation). New tactics/strategies of system disruption makes it possible for guerrillas to win decisive victories against the global system without nukes. He compounds this error with this (which has a kernal of truth: our actions have elevated al Qaeda, but the wrong conclusion):
Such a theory suggests that, in our grief and fury, we have overrated the military threat posed by Al Qaeda, paradoxically elevating what was essentially a criminal enterprise, albeit a devastatingly sophisticated and global one, into the ideological successor to Hitler and Stalin -- and thus conferring on the jihadists a kind of stature that might actually work in their favor, enabling them to attract more donations and more recruits.
While global guerrillas draw on the strength of criminals and criminal methods, it is much more than just a criminal activity. It will be interesting to see where this goes if Kerry is elected. I would like to be hopeful.
8:15:31 AM 
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