One could be forgiven during the Democratic presidential debate sponsored by the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations Tuesday for keeping an eye out for the ghosts of Lane Kirkland. But not so much as a “boo” was heard, as one candidate after another quarreled for the honor of undercutting the war effort and abandoning the kind of fight of which big labor was once in the vanguard.

In the old days when the AFL-CIO was led by giants — and we speak not only of Kirkland but of his predecessor, George Meany, and his successor, Thomas Donahue — the labor movement hewed to a hawkish foreign policy. Many labor leaders and their rank and file members served in World War II and the Korean War and were committed to fighting Communism and fascism. Labor leaders supported the Vietnam War to the end, and it was rank and file union members that clashed with the anti-war activists that tried to overrun the 1968 Democratic presidential convention.

Even though they disagreed on economic issues, both Meany and Kirkland fostered relationships with Presidents Nixon and Reagan. And at the deciding hour of the Cold War, it was the free trade union movement that was at the center of the victorious strategy, culminating in the accession in Warsaw of the free Polish government led by Solidarity. It was a struggle in which Lane Kirkland stood to the right of Reagan, and it was no coincidence that Reagan awarded the Medal of Freedom to Irving Brown, a labor hero of the anti-communist struggle.

Today, the American labor movement is firmly on the left and opposed to the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s approach to defeating terrorism. On Tuesday the audience of union members gave their loudest applause of the evening to Senator Obama, who characterized Iraq as “the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation.” Under the dispensation of John Sweeney, a union member who believes in a strong foreign policy is out of luck. Mr. Sweeney’s biggest rival is the leader of the Service Employees, Andrew Stern, and he is even further to the left than Mr. Sweeney.

Is this why union membership stands at but 12% of the private workforce today? We haven’t done any kind of double-blind study. But to gain new members, labor unions must first convince workers that unionization is in their best interest. Our sense of the situation leaves us with little doubt that many rank and file, blue-collar, patriotic working men and women believe in a strong foreign policy. It wouldn’t surprise us were they to consider labor’s dovish tendencies a deal-breaker.

What Meany and Kirkland comprehended so clearly — often more clearly than the big corporations and banks — is that a strong foreign policy was indispensable to long-term economic security and jobs. They saw that the Soviet was no friend of organized labor. They would have seen today the same of Al Qaeda. America’s labor movement could be an important ally in the war in Iraq and the larger war against terrorism, in the Kirkland and Meany mold. The AFL-CIO debate showed that America can not count on it any time soon.