WASHINGTON — John F. Kerry is assembling a network of foreign policy advisers more hawkish than most Democrats but more skeptical of military solutions in the struggle against terrorism than the team surrounding President Bush.
The experts being consulted span a broad ideological range of Democratic opinion — to the point where some party thinkers worry that Kerry is not defining a sufficiently distinctive vision of how America should pursue its goals in the world.
But insiders believe those with the most influence on the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee tend to be advisors who support the forceful use of military power, including in Iraq, yet place a much higher priority than Bush and his team on maintaining support among allies.
Early speculation about who might serve as Kerry's secretary of State centers mostly on candidates who fit that description: Richard Holbrooke and Sandy Berger, former top officials in the Clinton administration; Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee; and more distantly, Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., whose commitment to traditional alliances now place him much closer to the center of thinking in the Democratic than the Republican Party.
"I think the mantra of the Democratic thinkers is 'Together if possible, alone if absolutely necessary,' " said James P. Rubin, a former senior Clinton official who is joining the Kerry campaign as a top foreign policy adviser.
"That's a key difference between the Bush foreign policy and the Democratic foreign policy: Do you get enough benefit out of the (the argument for) international legitimacy and burden sharing in order to justify adjustments in tactics and timing in what you are trying to achieve? More often than not, (Democrats think) the answer is yes. Clearly in Iraq, the answer should have been yes."
The common assumptions among the Democrats advising Kerry contrast with the dominant views in the Bush team, not just on the value of alliances, but on many other fronts. One of the most important distinctions involves the risks America now faces.
While the Bush team tends to see the greatest danger in "rogue regimes" like the three nations the president identified in his "axis of evil," many Democrats place more emphasis on problems rooted in forces beyond the control of any state or government, such as the spread of militant Islamic ideology or the growth of al-Qaida.
The foreign policy team coalescing around the Massachusetts senator has drawn little attention but could shape the interactions between a President Kerry and the world as much as the candidate's own pronouncements on the campaign trail.
Surrounded by a team mostly committed to the aggressive projection of American power, Bush, for instance, has pursued a far more confrontational approach than he indicated in the 2000 campaign when he called for a "humble" foreign policy.
For all the shared foreign policy views among the Democrats Kerry has consulted, many questions remain about how he would fill in the details — and whom he would ask to do so if he wins. While many believe he listens most to the tough-minded internationalists such as Biden and Holbrooke, he hasn't formally identified an inner-circle of advisers considered favorites for the top foreign policy jobs.
The roster of senior national security advisers his campaign touts — names such as Madeleine Albright and William Perry, secretary of State and Defense, respectively, under Clinton — strikes many Democratic experts as largely generic.
Some insiders say many names in the group have had little role in the campaign. Only a few, such as former Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., have long-standing ties to Kerry himself.
Adding to the uncertainty over his direction, the campaign has effectively delegated the process of defining foreign policy alternatives on many issues to the Alliance for American Leadership, a Democratic group that organizes task forces of party thinkers on world affairs.
Kerry, after serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 19 years, has placed much less emphasis on identifying a formal team of foreign policy gurus than candidates Bill Clinton in 1992 or George W. Bush in 2000.
As governors with limited experience in world affairs, both men wanted to buttress their foreign policy credentials by conspicuously associating themselves with experienced and reassuring figures.
At the outset of his campaign, Clinton met with Democratic foreign policy thinkers in a series of dinners organized partly by Berger, who went on to serve as his national security advisor. Beginning in early 1999, nearly two years before he was elected, Bush convened regularly with a group assembled by Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz. Almost everyone in the group, which dubbed itself the "Vulcans," obtained senior foreign policy positions in his administration.
Probably the closest analogue to Bush's Vulcans have been a group of Kerry advisers who hold a weekly conference call directed by Rand Beers, the campaign's "national security and homeland security coordinator."
That group has included Lee Feinstein, the former deputy director of policy planning at the State Department, and Joe Wilson, the former diplomat whose report to the CIA challenged Bush's claim that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa.
Most observers considered the Kerry campaign's signing of Beers last May a major coup: Beers had served every president since Richard M. Nixon and had resigned only weeks before from the White House's top counter-terrorism job under Bush (the same position earlier held by Richard Clarke). Beers quit in protest over the war in Iraq, which he believed would weaken the struggle against al-Qaida.
But Beers says he had never met or even spoken with Kerry before accepting his position as the campaign's top foreign policy official.
"I met him the end of May, the beginning of June," Beers said. He came to the campaign largely through a contact with a former Kerry aide who served under Beers in the Clinton State Department.
Another measure of the campaign's unusually unstructured foreign policy process is the decision to enlist the Alliance for American Leadership to develop potential ideas on international affairs, rather than assembling its own teams. That group, founded by Marc Ginsberg, a centrist Democrat and former Clinton ambassador to Morocco, has organized party foreign policy thinkers to advise Democratic candidates since the 2000 election.
"We came to the view that we would rather have a range of opinion from which to select without having it identified as 'Kerry thinking,' " said Beers.
History suggests that "range of opinion" can shape a new president's foreign policy as much as the specific ideas the candidate advances during the campaign.
One key reason Bush has pursued a more conservative foreign policy than his father, George H.W. Bush, is that the framework of debate within the Republican Party on international issues has moved to the right over the past decade with the rise of neo-conservatives like Wolfowitz.
Kerry's foreign policy team is also operating in an environment of intellectual change that would inevitably shape his presidency if he wins.
Even though the party divided over invading Iraq, most of the Democrats likely to fill key positions in a Kerry administration are comfortable using American force than their equivalents a decade, or certainly two decades ago. In that sense they continue an evolution, already apparent during the Clinton years, beyond the reluctance to commit American forces abroad common among Democrats for years after Vietnam.
Potential secretaries of State Biden and Holbrooke, for instance, were leading advocates of military intervention against Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic during the 1990s. Biden and Holbrooke were also far more forceful than most Democrats, arguing that Bush had authority to invade Iraq last year without a second U.N. resolution explicitly authorizing an attack.
Yet each, like Berger, have repeatedly argued that Bush made a critical miscalculation by failing to build more international support for the Iraq invasion—and for America's international policies more generally.
Like Kerry, many leading Democratic foreign policy thinkers insist the United States now needs a network of allies more than ever because it faces so many challenges that are themselves decentralized and diffuse: environmental change, disease, and especially terrorism.
That conviction highlights the tendency of the analysts clustering around Kerry to place somewhat less emphasis than the Bush team on "outlaw regimes" and greater priority on "stateless" threats beyond the control of any government.
Democrats who supported the Iraq invasion, for instance, view it as tangential to the war on terror, while Bush and his advisors consider it a centerpiece.
Biden says most Democrats Kerry consults "believe international terrorist organizations are capable of existing without state sponsorship" while most administration officials believe al-Qaida "cannot survive" without help from rogue regimes.
Still, even if many of the distinctions between the Bush and Kerry teams are matters of degree, the differences remain wide enough to guarantee clearly contrasting approaches to the world.