I’m delighted to help inaugurate both the new Connect U.S. Fund website, and the web-based component of our two-year effort to impact the public debate around the presidential transition.  Through the inauguration, we’re planning to ask some key leaders in the foreign policy advocacy and think-tank communities to blog on our site, offering their thoughts on the top two or three national foreign policy and national security priorities for a new administration.  And we’ll ask members of the Connect U.S. community – all of you – to offer reactions.  Advocates from so many issue areas – nuclear weapons, climate change, development, and human rights, as well as regional issues from Iran to Iraq to Afghanistan – are pulling together their “asks” to a new administration.  Through the process we’re starting today, we’ll see whether there are common themes among all these areas that advocates of responsible U.S. global engagement can collectively, and effectively, promote. 
 
That desire – to integrate the perspectives of diverse progressive foreign policy advocacy groups – is at the heart of the Connect U.S. Fund initiative, started by several foundation officials in 2002.  They were all concerned about a go-it-alone U.S. approach to international affairs, which at the time was most clearly reflected in the decision to go to war in Iraq without meaningful international support.  In challenging this unilateralist perspective, we are seeking, -- through both our grant-making and our operations, -- to give life to a long-held but as yet unrealized goal of advocates:  to ensure that the whole of advocacy for responsible U.S. global engagement is greater than the sum of its parts, and that more effective collaborations across issue areas among activists result in more integrated and powerful efforts to influence the policy debate. 
 
As I’ve reflected on foreign policy priorities for a new administration, I’m struck by the proliferation of possibilities -- there are critical regional issues, such as a coherent strategy on redeployment from Iraq, more effective U.S. engagement in Afghanistan and serious diplomacy addressing Iran.  But that’s just the tip of the iceberg:  on nuclear weapons, we need to review U.S. nuclear policy and reliance on nuclear weapons in contingency planning, ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, promote further nuclear arms reductions, and ban the use of space for weapons purposes; on climate change, we need to make national commitments relating to greenhouse gas reduction, diversify our energy sources and address the impact of climate change in the developing world; and on human rights, we need to ensure fair procedures for detainees and strengthen protections against mistreatment in interrogation.  The list goes on and on.
 
So what’s the most important goal, and how to make sense of this dizzying array of objectives?  To answer that question, I think I’ll back up a bit, and suggest that it’s more important that the next president begin with an organizing principle for his engagement with the world.   And he ought to do that with a declaration that the United States is committed to reestablishing a responsible U.S. role and U.S. leadership in the world.  Let  me suggest three conceptual building blocks of such a declaration.  

First, the world problems that preoccupy our friends, allies and much of the rest of the world also matter to us. The new president must affirm that the United States will actively address critical global issues, such as climate change and nuclear weapons, and commit to matching our rhetoric with both our resources and our diplomacy.  All too often over the past many years, the U.S. approach has been to ignore or resist an evolving international consensus on the urgency of concerted action, and then seek to derail responses supported by a majority of stakeholders.  This pattern – reflected most recently in the U.S. strategy on the cluster munitions ban – must come to an end.

Second, U.S. power and U.S. legitimacy go hand in hand.  We can all agree that the United States doesn’t need a permission slip to take action that we deem to be in our critical national interests, but we also must appreciate that a superpower that continually walks away from broad international consensus on key issues cannot long sustain a position of leadership.  In short, we must seek to exercise influence in a manner that emphasizes international cooperation and is responsive to the concerns of major stakeholders in the international community.  International legitimacy is not simply a theoretical concern, as demonstrated by the failure of U.S. efforts to garner meaningful international support for the reconstruction effort in Iraq.

And third, we must recognize that real leadership means accepting for ourselves standards we are demanding of others, whether that involves respect for human rights and the rule of law, accountability for violations of human rights, non-proliferation, UN dues, or any number of other issues.
 
Happily, there seems to be considerable support across the political spectrum for these principles.  But that doesn’t diminish the importance of continued vigilance by advocates.  Despite some discrediting of a unilateralist foreign policy approach in recent years and public sympathy for international “good citizenship,” those instincts do not yet represent effectively mobilized and enduring political support.  Moreover, internationally-induced shocks to our political system could create a fertile environment for purveyors of isolationism and global disengagement.  Although it is not possible to predict the timing and the nature of such shocks, it is almost certain that our society will experience one or more in the years ahead.  Efforts to build broad support for responsible global engagement today could help to ensure the likelihood of reasoned U.S. responses if and when such events transpire.
 
In sum, we must return to the principles that America has long embraced while retaining a foreign policy that recognized that we live in an interdependent world. 
 
But principles only get you so far.  In particular, how do they translate into the most critical policy objectives for a new administration in year one?  There’s no way the next president can tackle all the items on the wish lists of foreign policy advocacy groups.  So let me to issue a challenge to all of you to help shape the debate that we are launching.  Please join the Connect U.S. network and writing me, via the comments section, to let me know what you believe should be the key priorities.  I’ll be checking in daily over the course of the next two weeks to read and respond to your comments.  And on a regular basis, we’ll invite prominent community advocates and experts to use our site to test their ideas with the Connect U.S. community. 
 
Please write us in the comments section below, in whatever capacity (personal or organizational) you like, and tell us about the top two to three policy actions the next president should identify as key priorities.  Why are they so important, how do they lay the groundwork for further progress toward a safer and more prosperous world?  I look forward to starting this dialogue with you.