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144 4 Foreign and Defense Policy Editor’s Note In the U.S. Senate, Paul Simon was a natural fit for the Foreign Relations Committee, and he spent ten of his twelve years in the Senate on that committee. Evidence of his early interest in foreign policy was already available when he took trips to the Middle East while he was still in the Illinois General Assembly, and he wrote his impressions of that area as a trip report to his Illinois constituents as soon as he returned home. Many of them must have been quite startled to learn that their state representative thought they ought to be paying careful attention to Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, but Simon made his case. As several of the articles in this chapter indicate, Paul Simon could make a cogent argument that American citizens need a broader outlook on the rest of the world and should realize how other nations continually impinge on our own fortunes. That argument still needs to be made today. Unless we are in a shooting war with some country, most Americans pay very scant attention to events in other regions and know very little about other nations and cultures. This parochialism is not conducive to the informed citizenship required of our status as the last superpower, a status we attained after the demise of the Soviet Union. The American people are buffeted each day by economic and social winds that originate offshore, and we are often puzzled by the actions and attitudes of the people in other countries, some of whom are our friends and some of whom are our adversaries. If we are going to play the superpower role from anything Editor’s Note 145 like a rational policy position, we must pay more attention to the increasingly interdependent world of which we are a part. Simon’s writings will help us to do just that. Simon was a strong advocate for what would today be called “soft power” (Nye). That is, he believed in the power of America’s ideas and ideals. He was deeply committed to the values expressed in our founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He believed that these were timeless values that expressed the best aspirations of not only the American people but also most of the rest of the world. He thought the most powerful and compelling ideals we project to the rest of the world depend on us living up to our commitments to freedom, democracy, and the rule of law at home and making the opportunity necessary to achieving the American Dream equally available to all. He thought we should lead by example rather than by trying to cram our values down the throats of other nations who often have a vastly different cultural and historic background from what we enjoy in the United States. The quality of our life at home was much more important than the superiority of our military forces projected around the globe. This does not mean that Simon was a pacifist or that he was against all wars or military action. He was a veteran of the U.S. Army who served in Germany early in the 1950s, and he was proud of that service. He was as patriotic as the next public official and turned up regularly for all the Memorial Day and Fourth of July parades. He also proudly flew the flag outside his residence in Makanda. Simon was, however, against wars and military confrontations that did not make sense from a coldly calculated national interest perspective. In the modern parlance of foreign policy doctrine , he was a Realist and not an Idealist (Morgenthau). He did not favor wars fought in pursuit of ideological goals or for the nebulous belief that our way was better than their way. As one of the selections included in this chapter indicates, he was deeply opposed to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, which was just nine months before he died. He would have agreed with then state senator Barack Obama’s declaration against the Iraq invasion when Obama said that he was not against all wars but against “dumb wars.” In fact, Simon’s daughter, Sheila, endorsed Obama for the Senate when he ran in 2004, confident that she was standing in her father’s tradition in doing so. The echoes of that conflict over Iraq and the related but separate conflict over our role in...

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