Foreign Policy

Neo-conservatives claim that the US and Europe are diverging in their values and interests. Atlanticists claim that on both counts, the US and Europe remain closely aligned. Both schools are wrong.

To understand the most pressing crisis facing the future of the Middle East, place a job advertisement in a local newspaper. In Tehran, an ad seeking a clerk for a Western company prompted more than 1,000 applications. Included among them: a PhD in economics, a medical doctor, dozens of software engineers and hundreds of Iran's top university graduates. In Cairo, a senior accountant told me he was shocked at the highly educated who applied for a low-level position with his company.

John Kerry, tough-talking war hero, cut an impressive figure at last week's convention, maybe impressive enough to threaten the Republicans' time-honored dominance of the manliness issue -- that is, national security. But you can already hear the Republican reply taking shape: O.K., you've shown us your muscles, but where's the beef? What exactly is your strategy for the war on terrorism?

India's failures are legion and impossible to ignore. Poverty and desperation abound. Infant mortality is unacceptably high. Schools and healthcare are substandard -- if available at all. Roads and other infrastructure are primitive or in poor repair. The Indian government seems unable to adequately protect the country's Muslim minority (about 12% of the population) from periodic pogroms, and violence against lower castes erupts regularly. Conflicts with Pakistan over Kashmir continue, made more alarming by the fact that both countries now possess nuclear weapons.

President Bush's May 2003 announcement aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations" had ended in Iraq has been replayed endlessly. What is less well remembered is just what the president claimed the United States had accomplished. "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001," he declared.

I. Plehve's Ghost

In 1904 the Romanov dynasty was in trouble. Russia's industrialization had accelerated in the last decades of the 19th century but could not forestall the widening of the economic and military gap between Russia and Europe's other powers. To save the regime, Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve reportedly recommended a "small victorious war." But Russia's rout in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese war fueled a revolution. The Romanovs, who had reigned for almost 300 years, would soon fall. In 1904 Plehve himself was assassinated by a revolutionary.

The debacle in Iraq has discredited the American neoconservative dream of a benevolent US empire, freed from the petty restraints of multilateral diplomacy and international law. But the neoconservative vision is not the only dream that has died in the rubble of Falluja and torture cells of Abu Ghraib prison. What until recently was the alternative endorsed by many Democrats and some centrist Republicans -- US world leadership exercised through multilateral security institutions -- can also now be included in the collateral damage done by George W. Bush's war in Iraq.

Even if their applications are rejected, citizens of developing nations must pay $100 for a non-immigrant visa to the United States. Not only is this policy unfair and counterproductive, but it is also unpatriotic.

The unfairness is obvious: people should not be charged for something -- in this case, a visa to the United States -- that they do not receive. And $100 is a huge sum in nations like India, with an annual per capita income estimated at $2,600 in 2002, or even Poland, where it is $9,700.