Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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John Kerry reminds Americans he served in Vietnam, here, in Wisconsin.

Foreign policy is easy for a presidential challenger. Unlike the domestic realm, your ideas exist entirely on paper and in theory. You can paint elaborate pictures of their potential benefits that are hard to disprove, and the risks and drawbacks won't really be known until your policies are put in place. Foreigners can't vote, so you only have to worry about the domestic political appeal of your ideas, not any diplomatic or national-security ramifications. And you can brag about secret endorsements from foreign leaders that you claim to have met in New York restaurants.

Okay, that last one is specific to John Kerry. But otherwise, he's following in the footsteps of both Bush and Clinton in the realm of grand expectations for his foreign-policy ideas.

"As with any presidential campaign, many of the promises and expectations have a slight air of unreality," says Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "You could say the same of Bush in 2000 or Clinton in 1992."

Kerry is getting a reasonably positive but generally lukewarm reception from pundits for Thursday's foreign-policy address, a well-delivered speech full of ideas that sound good. But the upsides of his four cornerstones are considered a bit exaggerated by foreign-policy experts, when they aren't pale copies of current administration plans.

"The first new imperative represents a return to the principle that guided us in peril and victory through the past century — alliances matter, and the United States must lead them," Kerry said from Seattle on Thursday.

Kerry and his international-affairs team ignore the fact that countries like France were already complaining about American power during the Clinton administration, says Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century.

"The problem is much deeper than what Bush has done or not done," Schmitt says. "To really solve it, our allies have to have a sense of common security priorities, and right now that's absent. Try as you might, you can't just wish into existence for our allies to have a greater military capability. They just don't have that right now."

Boot disagrees, suggesting Kerry would get at least a brief honeymoon with currently cranky allies.

"Kerry would probably get a light boost on multilateralism, because the Europeans might want to help him out a bit," Boot says. "But in the long term, the Kerry administration is not that radically different from Bush on its core tenets of foreign policy and the Europeans would be inevitably disappointed. But he would probably have better atmospherics."

John Hillen, director of the Program on National Security at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, accuses Kerry of offering to form international alliances "based on an apology."

"He wants the president to go, 'I need you to be with us in Iraq, we screwed it all up, and it's better that we have more people on board than coherence in our mission,'" Hillen says. "His basic approach for is to apologize for Bush and for American behavior, which is really fundamentally different from Bush, who tries to build alliances in terms of objectives."

KERRY-RUMSFELD 2004?

"[Kerry] said he wants a military that's light, mean and high tech," Schmitt says. "Well, that's almost all Don Rumsfeld has been working on building since he got there."

Hillen sees the issue as an odd choice for Kerry.

"Kerry will have a hard time finding any American who thinks a Kerry administration can more seriously transform the military than Bush and Cheney," he says. "Kerry's jumping on the bandwagon on this issue, and you'll have a hard time finding people who believe in the Democrats on this issue when the party has been essentially anti-military since the 1960s.... [F]or Democrats, is this even an agenda item for them? What member of that party is going to get excited about that as an issue?"

KERRY-CHIRAC 2004

Schmitt thinks Kerry is personalizing anti-American attitudes and lack of cooperation from other countries as anti-Bush.

"Again, he's focused on the idea that somehow Bush, the person, is the problem," he says. "Kerry thinks that by sheer force of his personality, he'll get people to go, 'never mind!'"

"He's been going to town with this foreign-leaders comment," Hillen says. "He's going to try to take advantage of any criticism of America, when the fact of the matter is, we attract criticism and adversaries because of our prominence."

WATERED-DOWN W.

But the president hasn't ignored the country's dependence on foreign oil — he been calling for a national energy policy since his first year in office. One can disagree with the administration policies, Schmitt says, but "Bush's plan is a heck of a lot more realistic than Kerry's, 'Gosh, I hope the technology works out.'"

Perhaps what is most striking about Kerry's outline on foreign affairs is how little it differs from the Bush administration approach in key areas.

"I realize it's a campaign speech, but if you were to lay out the current National Security Strategy alongside the speech of Kerry's, one would see that much of Kerry's speech is an echo of that strategy," Schmitt says. "And Bush's is a lot more sophisticated and nuanced."

"It's sort of like Bush lite," Hillen concludes.