"No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America. But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons."
- John Kerry, 30 September 2004

According to John Kerry, the United States has the "right" to launch a preemptive strike on an enemy, yet we "have to" do it in a way that meets international approval afterwards. That's not a right -- that's tentative permission pending a review board, with hell to pay if they conclude you made a wrong decision. Under those conditions, we would hardly be able to act at all, hamstrung by the need to please other countries, none of which would place our interests above their own. If we don't act to protect and even advance our own interests, no one else will, unless the action happens to be in their interest as well. No proposal or threat by the United States would ever be taken seriously again; fear of disapproval by "the world" would keep us on a tight leash. This is the stuff of which Liberal dreams are made, of course.

John Kerry specifically spoke of a "global test" that America needs to pass whenever we defend ourselves proactively. According to him, we have to prove that we acted "for legitimate reasons" in the estimation of "the world." Does he mean that every other country must always agree with our actions, or only certain countries -- and if so, which countries? Who, precisely, gets to grade this test? What if even one of those countries disagrees with us -- should we not act at all, even if America's leaders deem action necessary? Since when is "the world" anything like a single body of stern, yet wise and fair elders (as opposed to a squabbling group of selfish children)? Who are these wise elders we need to report to, and what gives them any right to judge us? America's actions are to be judged by the American people alone; our leaders are accountable to us before anyone else.

It seems that Kerry has held the same position his entire political career on one issue, after all. His statement about a global test is in lockstep with his 1970 declaration to the Harvard Crimson that he'd "like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations." Kerry's insistence that he only voted to give President Bush the authority to go to the United Nations to discuss Iraq, not to use military force against Iraq, is also in line with this idea that America must never deploy troops outside our borders without international approval. "The vote for authorization is interpreted by a lot of people as a vote to go to war," Kerry told the Washington Times in September 2004. "It wasn't a vote to go that day. It was a vote to go through the process of going to the U.N., building the allies and then making a judgment of whether we had to go." President Bush did, in fact, do all of this... even giving Saddam three months longer than the UN specified before imposing "serious consequences" for Iraq's non-compliance. The bill on which Kerry voted Yes in October 2002, the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq (Public Law 107-243), contains no provision that UN approval must be sought before using that force. It should be noted that the Authorization contained in a single document every one of the reasons the Bush administration has ever given for using military force against Iraq, which proves Kerry's claim that President Bush changed the rationale for war in Iraq after the fact to be a lie.

Kerry's position on international approval for US foreign policy decisions also explains why Kerry constantly pressed President Bush to give the UN more authority in Iraq, even after the UN abandoned the country when Sergio De Mello, the UN envoy to Iraq, was killed in a terrorist attack. Hans Von Sponeck, a former administrator for the UN oil-for-food program that had been hopelessly corrupted by Saddam, used the pullout as a demand for more UN power over Iraq. "Having lost the ability to improve the security situation for the time being, the US must now concede in the Security Council immediate responsibility on authority to the United Nations," Von Sponeck told Radio Netherlands in September 2003. In April 2004, Senator Kerry complained on 'Meet the Press' that President Bush "won’t transfer to the U.N. the real authority for determining how the government emerges, how we will do the reconstruction of Iraq."

"I'm an internationalist," John Kerry told the Harvard Crimson over thirty years ago, and certainly seems to have been faithful to that doctrine, if few others. That may be a qualification for Secretary-General of the United Nations, but not for President of the United States, to whom the welfare of the United States must always -- always -- come first.