Richard Gowan is a research associate and program coordinator of International Security Institutions at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University where he works on peacekeeping and multilateral security arrangements. He recently served as the keynote speaker at a Young Global Leaders Summit at the University of Denver cosponsored by the Stanley Foundation and Americans for Informed Democracy.

One of the most worrying trends in current American political debate is a creeping isolationism. This is not the isolationism of the 1930s—the principled, if misguided, belief that the US should cut itself off from European power politics—but a weary sense that international engagement just isn’t working. The leading presidential candidates outbid one another with promises to bring troops home from Iraq and set firm limits on free trade.

Yet this trend is balanced by a residual sense that the US has global commitments it cannot desert yet—and these demand a better mix of American soft and hard power. One of the most prominent foreign policy themes of pre-presidential debates has been the need to get UN troops to Darfur. Hillary Clinton has “an aggressive plan to support public schools in developing countries” while Mitt Romney’s anti-jihad strategy centers on a “Special Partnership Force” that will win over foreign communities and leaders through “humanitarian and development assistance and rule of law capacity building.”

Such proposals leave outside observers scratching their heads. Ask the average anti-American to name the pillars of US international policy, and they’ll pick two: military power and unbridled capitalism. But the country’s leaders-in-waiting are talking about troop withdrawals and economic protectionism—and promoting social democratic goods like public schooling and development aid. Is the US turning into a gigantic Sweden?

Well, no, not really. But in the wake of the Iraqi debacle, the country’s leading politicians and policy intellectuals are turning toward a concept that wouldn’t have got a hearing in Washington in 2003. This is “human security”—the idea that a country’s foreign policy should not just be about defending its national interests but also protecting vulnerable people worldwide from the risks of poverty, disease, natural disasters, and mass slaughter.

It’s a very broad idea and one that’s too often dismissed as naïve. For security hawks, it doesn’t help that the concept has been advocated by countries like Japan (pacifist), Switzerland (neutralist), and Canada (Canadian). And if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s become a popular theme in the EU’s foreign policy dialogue. In 2004, a high-level European panel proposed an EU “Human Security Force” of 15,000 troops, police, and humanitarian workers—could Romney’s team have looked across the Atlantic for ideas?

But human security isn’t just tripe. The reality is that there is a hardheaded case for the idea, and it is one that may prove increasingly urgent in the years ahead. International risk analysts agree that some of the most dangerous crises of the near future will not involve traditional state-on-state warfare, but a mixture of unpredictable threats.

An avian flu pandemic could not only kill millions in its own right, but undermine weak states and threaten to shut down global trade networks. Basic resource shortages—such as the lack of water that plagues Darfur, potentially obstructing any peace settlement—stimulate conflicts that cannot be managed through diplomatic or military means alone.

These challenges demand a vast variety of responses. They range from increasing international capacity for humanitarian aid—including, in the case of major disease, huge medical efforts—to building up fragile economies and governments. “Human security forces” have the potential to grab headlines, but if a society is to survive a pandemic, drought, or famine, it needs resilient local authorities and a robust economic infrastructure.

When you start this “to-do” list for human security, the concrete reasons for concern are immediately obvious—yet the scale of the tasks involved also looks overwhelming. It’s one thing for a presidential candidate to promise a major schools program for the poor, or even urge the UN to send non-American troops to Darfur. But it would be electoral suicide to lay out frankly the litany of current global challenges, the costs involved in confronting them, and the difficulties in predicting which risks will turn into real crises.

Yet the next US president will still be in a position to create momentum on human security in three ways. Firstly, she or he could make a series of targeted investments aimed at areas of particular urgency. One example would be making up for chronic international under-investment in influenza vaccines, thereby reassuring the international community that the US is ready to take the lead in tackling oncoming pandemics.

Secondly, such displays of US leadership should be balanced by closer cooperation on planning for future crises (and bearing their costs) with other players like the EU. Washington may find it has friends in unexpected places on human security—the Chinese military has been quietly talking to its US counterparts in the Pacific about avian flu.

Thirdly, the US needs to ground this international cooperation in a sense of mutual trust based on effective diplomacy through the UN and other international organizations—not least because the UN’s own assets include essential agencies involved in resolving human security issues, from the World Food Programme to the World Health Organization.

Investing political and financial capital in such cooperation won’t be easy—some version of isolationism may seem cheaper and easier to sell to the voters. But the challenges involved are inescapable: human security needs to move up the US political agenda.

—Richard Gowan