A quick and easy prescription is to do the opposite of the Bush Administration.
First, some basic tenets. One of the things that I noticed during the run-up to the Iraq War was the lack of any reference to the concept of the national interest. Neoconservative foreign policy is not a foreign policy of realism. As stated by such realists as Hans Morgenthau, a realist foreign policy should pursue only goals that are in a nation's national interest. We should be unconcerned with things like the nature of a regime or the promotion of ideals and more concerned with things like geography, natural resources, real (and not imagined) threats to our security, and building alliances and/or coalitions to advance our interests or inhibit the efforts of our adversaries. It requires a hard-headed analysis of the international system and the real, relative power of the states in the system. Realistic cost/benefit analyses should be part of foreign policy decisions (even if Iraq turns out successfully, it is not worth the cost of the war, for example). Maybe one existed, but prior to the Iraq War I never saw a realistic appraisal of the threat that Iraq posed to the United States. Even had Iraq possessed WMD's, they had no method of delivery and no history of working with Al-Qaeda. Also, as we know now (see the book Cobra II), Saddam Hussein was mostly concerned with internal revolt and Iran and did not really pay much attention to the U.S. until two weeks before our invasion. Another striking thing about the Bush Administration is that ignorance was prized. The more you knew about Iraq or the Middle East, the less likely you were to be involved in the post-war running/reconstruction of Iraq (see Losing Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Fiasco, and any number of other accounts). We need to restore realism (with some modifications) to our foreign policy. Fortunately, Obama seems to be much more of a realist than the neocons or than John McCain.
We also need to remember basic tenets of a successful foreign policy. As British Lord Palmerston famously said, a nation doesn't have friends, it has interests. Foreign policy should not be personalized, as when Bush said he could see into Putin's soul. A major power should not allow itself to be put into a position where its policy is determined by the actions of a minor power. McCain's statement that "we are all Georgians now" was a horrible foreign policy blunder. There is more than one type of power, commonly called hard power (military) and soft power (cultural economic, etc.) and a successful foreign policy does not rely only on one or the other. As Churchill famously said, it is always better to jaw, jaw, jaw, than to war, war, war. In other words, diplomacy should always be pursued whenever possible and military force should be a last resort, used only when a vital national interest is at stake. Robert Asprey in his book War in the Shadows differentiates between "wars of necessity" and "wars of convenience." We should only engage in wars of necessity. It should be recognized that diplomacy does not bring success overnight and that successful negotiations are not a zero sum game. That is, like a trade in baseball, both sides should get something they want. We should recognize and allow for the fact that other nations have legitimate national interests. Diplomacy is best done when it is non-public and oblique so that involved parties can maintain flexibility. When they are public and direct, this results in domestic interests intervening and positions that may be hard to change. For example, President Bush's Axis of Evil speech was a bad mistake because it named specific countries and then made it harder to negotiate with them in the future. Contrast that with FDR's Quarantine the Aggressor speech where he didn't even use that term and never called any specific country an aggressor. Foreign policy goals must be reasonably achievable. Again the Bush Administration provides wonderful examples of what not to do. When President Bush called for a war against terror he did not limit it in any way (something I noticed immediately, but that was largely uncommented on by pundits at the time). Thus, we were at war with terror everywhere in the world, whether it affected us or not. Do we really care about the ETA (Basque separatists) in Spain or the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka? We shouldn't but under the Bush Doctrine we will be fighting all terror anywhere for who knows how long. Finally, foreign policy should take the long view. The neocons were concerned about preserving American dominance for the next decade or two. What we should be doing is using our preeminent position to set up an international system that will be to our benefit when we are no longer dominant. We should recognize the brilliance of George Kennan who foresaw that communism would eventually collapse because of its weaknesses and internal contradictions. Had we taken this longer view that he had, we could have avoided numerous foreign policy blunders during the Cold War. Similarly, Al-Qaeda is basically a nihilistic movement and its terrorism, while dangerous, is a transitory threat.
Specifics about the Middle East to follow.
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