Perhaps it's unfair to say so, but Obama has to date come across as sharing some of his liberal predecessors’ problems when it comes to foreign policy, much of it relating to that old “vision thing”. The simple fact is that a blinkered, ideological and stupid foreign policy is easy to sell to the public, whereas complexity is, well, complex. Few people had much doubt about what the Bush administration wanted to do after 9/11, even if they hated it. By contrast, Obama is trying to juggle a number of balls at the same time: to undercut America’s imperialistic image in the rest of the world; strengthen ties with the great powers of the twenty first century, Russia, China and India; deliver demonstrable progress in the effort to destroy Al Qaeda and, secondarily, the Taliban; yet not get bogged down in another Vietnam in the process. Necessarily, all these juggling balls whirling around makes the strategy less clear in the selling.
But there is also some evidence to suggest that the strategy is simply less clear per se, that the administration is still trying to figure out exactly what it wants to do with many of these issues well into its first year in power, and which of the many foreign policy issues facing him are the priorities. This is somewhat reminiscent of the Clinton administration, which also focused primarily on domestic matters upon taking office, and took too long to figure out what it was actually trying to achieve in its relations with the rest of the world. And it’s not exactly reassuring.
Nevertheless, some general tendencies to seem to be emerging, and we will have to watch them over the coming months to see how they resolve themselves.
Firstly, the Obama administration has shown less interest in playing nice with the traditional allies – Britain, Israel, Colombia, Saudi Arabia – than his predecessor. (See, for instance, the hoo-ha in the UK about the apparent “snub” of Brown at the UN this week, here, here and here.) Less revealing than the substance – Obama’s a busy man, why should he waste his political capital bailing out a PM before his party conference when he's most likely going to be out of a job next year, anyway? – is the fear that this seems to have generated amongst a bored section of the British media. Diplomatic sensitivities should never be underestimated, especially if the best present you can think of for a head of state is a boxed set of DVDs. It may be that these relationship are being taken for granted at a time when others need cultivation; it may be a product of ideology; it may be a conscious attempt to assert the difference between the Obama approach and his predecessor’s. In truth, Obama’s probably right that he can afford to cool things a little, but the question remains: to what end?
The administration has certainly struggled to find alternative allies to take up the slack. The president has appealed to Europe for additional support in Afghanistan, for instance, but has made little progress with nations who see no vital interest in sending their troops to that region. There are tentative signs that Russia might be giving a little over Iran. But there has been little progress in Palestine so far, especially on the settlement issue. Speeches to the United Nations and the Muslim world, and overtures to Iran, have been generally welcome, but are more a question of changing the atmosphere than shifting the substance of US foreign policy. These may ultimately end up in a Nixonian triumph, whereby the exit strategy is built upon the reshaping of relations with wider regional power brokers. But this will not become clear for a good while, and it still takes two to tango. Moreover, this approach is sometimes difficult to mesh with a democracy-promotion strategy, especially given the complex and fractious politics in Iran, where efforts to seek rapprochement with Ahmedinejad and the revolutionary leadership will naturally strengthen them against the more pro-Western reformists.
Secondly, we have seen the administration, copied by the Brown government in the UK, trumpet nuclear arms reduction as part of a broader effort to get a new non-proliferation agreement on the table. Sounds good. But the problem is that nuclear decommissioning in the Anglo-American world is patently being driven by domestic budget concerns, and only secondarily by a desire to feed into arms control negotiations. This is best shown by the fact that Brown is making a big deal out of his offer to reduce the UK arsenal from four submarines to three, while simultaneously trying to neutralize nationalist opposition at home by pointing out that in practice this need not make any difference to the capacity of the Royal Navy to strike the enemy, or necessarily reduce the total number of warheads available for delivery. Obama has sought to square a similar circle, presenting the movement away from missile defence in Eastern Europe and toward a seaborne alternative as a way of defusing tensions with Russia, a way of saving money, and a more effective deterrent.
Right or wrong as a policy, this rhetoric doesn’t convince. Necessarily, the decision to reduce a nuclear deterrent is also a decision to increase a nation's vulnerability. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been a meaningful deterrent in the first place. As such, genuine reduction in deterrence must be accompanied by an increased reliance on ties of trust and mutual assistance between nations, positive incentives for cooperation to replace the negative incentive of mutual fear.
More importantly, no-one will be fooled by the rhetoric. Everyone will know this is about the exigencies of deficit reduction. And because of that, we can presumably expect these offers to produce comparatively weaker responses from other powers. The same thing happened in the 1980s when the dire financial straits of the Soviet Union allowed Reagan to insist upon a deal for arms reduction (the “zero option”) that was far more aggressive than most professional nuclear negotiators had ever considered possible.
At the same time, there is a worrying lack of clarity about Afghanistan. In recent weeks we have seen internal disagreements in the administration bubble out into the public, as supporters of McChrystal have leaked their demands for a major surge in troop numbers, and the White House responding by playing up a Biden plan that involves a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan and invokes memories of older, truly appalling suggestions by him to orchestrate a partition in Iraq. No-one can seriously believe that a Biden plan is on the table, but circulating the idea in the public domain is an attempt by the White House to assert ownership over the negotiations with the Joint Chiefs. It's the political equivalent of saying that the politicians, not the generals, will decide strategy in Afghanistan. It may do so, but it also points out that, in October 2009, there is still no clear strategy on the table.
To some extent, Obama is haunted by the ghost of Johnson, and has no wish to have his domestic agenda derailed by a war on the other side of the world. But he knows that a withdrawal which creates space for the Taliban to retake power would be even more disastrous for his chances of reelection. The most obvious third way is to try and shift the war onto Afghan shoulders, promoting local puppets, building up an army and leaving it to them to do the dying. This strategy has been applied in Iraq, not to mention dozens of places around the world during the Cold War. But the recent elections in Afghanistan have shown that US allies in Afghanistan are far from the perfect working partners one would like, making such a policy appear close to accepting that democracy is not a policy goal for the administration. Karzai’s need to knit together local warlords and power-brokers ultimately makes any kind of liberal regime virtually unimaginable under his rule. The pursuit of a Afghanization policy followed by a rapid withdrawal of US troops is most likely to produce a military dictatorship of some sort, as it has in most cases where this has been done in the past. Whether Obama can bear this kind of non-democratic solution may come to be the defining question of his foreign policy there.
Taken together, it is very hard to figure out exactly what the Obama administration is trying to achieve in its foreign policy, and in particular where the lines in the sand are. It seems to be driven as much by general instincts as specific calculations. Many of these big issues he’s plunging into will take time, and better that he is considered than foolhardy in his approach. We can't expect crises that have sometimes been decades in the making to all be sorted out in a matter of months. But sooner or later some tough choices are going to be inevitable. Until these arrive, many of us will be left scratching our heads.
Think Of the Children
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