Senator Obama is on a vist to the Middle East and Europe.   Senator McCain went to visit Colombia earlier in July.   These trips suggest a seriousness of purpose that American presidential candidates often lack.    They offer us hope that the candidates want to learn how to do the job well.   Furthermore, they offer a hyper-attentive world grounds for hope that the next president will have a higher level of interest in other countries than did his predecessor.

So far as I know, it is unprecedented for the two party candidates to do foreign policy trips before the election.    I can think of three reasons why we are seeing this now.    First, because the primary elections started early this year, there is a hiatus between the end of the primaries and the party conventions.   Thus the candidates can spare the time to go abroad.   Second, foreign policy has risen much higher on the agenda of concerns of typical American voters, since September 11, 2001, and since the invasion of Iraq.   (And of course Obama wants to put to rest McCain’s past jibes about not having visited Afghanistan and Iraq.)   Third, Barack Obama and John McCain are not the usual inward-looking, domestically-oriented parochial governors that we all too often get as presidential candidates.    Both are US Senators, and both in their youths had very formative adventures in foreign countries (both in Southeast Asia, as it happens).    Thus both, if nothing else, have the cosmopolitan outlook that a world leader needs.

Traditionally new presidential candidates do not think much about foreign policy during their campaigns.  This is especially true of governors who have only domestic experience.   But, regardless of the candidates, in most election years the American public cares little for international affairs, and is far more concerned about domestic issues.

Once new presidents take office they ften have to go through a period of “breaking in” in the area of foreign policy.   International events often take them by surprise and disrupt all their fine platforms and plans.  This period can be very costly to the country.   Think of John Kennedy’s first-year failures in his initial summit meeting with Premier Khrushchev and in the Bay of Pigs invasion.   Think of George W. Bush’s first-year failures in ignoring warnings that Al Qaeda would strike in the US or that an invasion of Iraq would be fraught with danger.    A little international exposure before they took office would have served them well.  So perhaps the excessive length of this election cycle has a silver lining after all !

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Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times today, “Better Roses than Cocaine,” says it all. There is no good reason for the US Congress to continue to hold up the free trade agreement that the Administration has negotiated with Colombia.

Free trade with Colombia can’t have anything to do with loss of US jobs: Colombia’s exports already enter the US duty-free. Rather, the Free Trade Agreement would reduce remaining Colombian barriers to imports from the US. It could contribute (a bit) to a surge in US exports worldwide, which in turn could once again become the engine of US growth that it was in the 1990s.

Nor would free trade with Colombia be bad for human rights in that violent country. No government is perfect. But the Uribe government offers the best hope of bringing some measure of peace, prosperity and justice to Colombia. It is fighting against the guerillas and drugs. It wants to give farmers some security, for example, so that they know they have an assured US export market in cut flowers to replace the risky business of growing coca for cocaine. It deserves our support.

American labor unions raise the issue of killings of Colombian union leaders. But this is a weak reason to oppose the FTA. For one thing, the odds of being killed if you are a union leader in Colombia are now less than the odds of being killed if you are a regular citizen.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the main reason Congressmen are opposing the Colombian free trade agreement is to pander to ill-informed American public opinon. (Of course the White House would have been better-advised to concentrate its energies and political capital on the multilateral level, the WTO, rather than on the negotiation of myriad bilateral FTAs with small countries. But this is an argument of economists and policy wonks. No politicians are opposing the Colombian agreement on these grounds.)

Kristof concludes with a challenge to Democrats. “Democrats instinctively criticize Bush when he harms America’s standing in the world.” I assume he has in mind Kyoto, Guantanamo, Abu Graib, land mines treaty, International Criminal Court, nuclear weapons policy, energy policy, steel tariffs, and other economic missteps I could list (see The International Economy). He continues, “But a test of intellectual honesty is your willingness to hold your own side to the same standard and to point out pandering in those politicians you normally admire.”

He is right. Hillary and Barack: if you are listening, SUPPORT THE COLOMBIAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT! Everybody else: read Kristof.