Playing defense is seldom a winning strategy in politics or sport. You have to put points on the board. If the election is framed as a choice between taking the fight to the enemy and sitting back and waiting for the terrorists to attack us again, the Democrats will lose. “Offense or defense--that’s the political DNA,” says Jon Cowan of Third Way, the centrist Democratic group.

It’s a completely bogus choice, but unless Democrats take it on frontally and develop an effective offense, they’ll doom themselves in ’08. If it’s Hillary Clinton with all her experience on the Senate Armed Services Committee and in the White House versus Mitt Romney with no national-security experience, “He’ll win if this is the meta frame,” says Cowan. To head off that possibility, Third Way partnered with two veterans of the Clinton era, Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck, who helped rebrand the Democratic Party away from its too-liberal, soft-on-crime image to elect Bill Clinton. Foreign policy was off the table then, in the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 attacks. The challenge for Democrats now as they seek to recapture the White House is to forge a credible and strong foreign policy that can replace what President Bush put in place after 9/11. 

Bush championed the spread of freedom and democracy, even by force if necessary, as the best way to keep America safe. But the failure of his Iraq venture has left a void in national-security policy and a crisis of confidence among the American people that the presidential candidates must address. “Once in a generation there is an opening for a national conversation that in more normal times doesn’t occur,” says Galston, who believes there is a huge political market for someone who can do it, “not in a wonkish way, someone who can talk American.”

Over coffee and pastries Thursday morning at the historic Mayflower Hotel in Washington, Galston and Kamarck laid out the elements of a new foreign policy they hope will provide the basis of a governing philosophy for their party’s presidential candidates, or for any Republican who cares to call. Their study, titled “Security First: A Strategy for Defending America,” identifies the major threats: terrorists armed with nuclear weapons; risky patterns of energy dependence; instability that leads to failed states that then become breeding grounds for terrorists, and threats to what they call the “global commons,” principally climate change but also the need for new international institutions, even a military force, to stop genocide and deal with the Darfurs of the world. “If Harry Truman were alive today, he would recognize this government,” said Kamarck, “and he shouldn’t because we have a fundamentally different set of challenges.” The report calls for stepped-up diplomatic engagement “even with regimes we rightfully detest,” an overhaul of Truman-era government structures, and a massive increase in cultural activities and exchanges to win the war of ideas the way democracy triumphed over communism during the cold war.

With Iraq looming over everything, it seems almost a luxury to pontificate over what happens in a post-Iraq world. Won’t the next president have to deal with Iraq first and foremost?  “Security First” doesn’t duck the implications of Iraq as a disaster, but it assumes the end is in sight when it comes to the nature and scale of U.S. combat involvement. Democrats have so far been unable to stop Bush, but it’s clear that September is crunch time. That’s when Gen. David Petraeus, the troop commander in Iraq, is scheduled to report to Congress on the surge. Republicans will not stick with Bush unless there’s real progress militarily and politically, and that’s not likely. That’s when Plan B kicks in, says Galston, which is to contain the damage and prevent it from spilling over into the region. That requires coping with the flow of refugees and “doing the right thing for the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have cooperated with us and who we can’t leave in the lurch.”