Barack Obama has been president for 3 months now. In a few days he will have arrived at the 100 day mark by which all modern Presidents are measured (in the MSM if not by history.) Addressing the economic crisis and changing the tone of our foreign policy have been the focus of the administration in its first 100 days. Hyperventilators on the Right have accused him of multiple failures (cozying up to dictators, blaming America first, etc) which in aggregate amount to endangering our security (as per Dick Cheney.) Hyperventilators on the Left have continued to attack the Right and especially the Tea Party Protests while starting to wonder whether or not the man they invested so much hope in might be just a little too close to Wall Street for their comfort. Perhaps it is time to take a deep breath and recall that whatever Barack Obama's policies and beliefs might be (and they are yet unfolding and until tested in an actual crisis, unknowable) reality will eventually be determinative.
[Please note that I am not a supporter of Barack Obama. I do not support most of his policies. I believe that his approach to health care, for instance, could cause irreparable damage to our system of medical research and care with exponential opportunity costs that will affect all of us. I firmly believe that his enlargement of government will create a drag on our future progress that will have long term deleterious effects on our well being. I believe his foreign policy articulations will embolden our enemies and his support of the radical environmentalist's programs, especially the bizarre notion that we have to treat CO2 as a pollutant (everyone who supports this idea should start holding their breath right now) will have incalculable impact on our current and future economic prospects. With all that stated, I also think it is too soon to tell if Obama will turn out to be a failed, Jimmy Carter, President, or a transformative Ronald Reagan of the Left; further, if he is a transformative President, it is far too early to judge if on balance the changes he facilitates will turn out to be net positives rather than net negatives.]
Jackson Diehl makes the case today that, in foreign affairs, President Obama has not yet started:
New American presidents typically begin by behaving as if most of the world's problems are the fault of their predecessors -- and Barack Obama has been no exception. In his first three months he has quickly taken steps to correct the errors in George W. Bush's foreign policy, as seen by Democrats. He has collected easy dividends from his base, U.S. allies in Europe and a global following for not being "unilateralist" or war-mongering or scornful of dialogue with enemies.
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Obama is not the first president to discover that facile changes in U.S. policy don't crack long-standing problems. Some of his new strategies may produce results with time. Yet the real test of an administration is what it does once it realizes that the quick fixes aren't working -- that, say, North Korea and Iran have no intention of giving up their nuclear programs, with or without dialogue, while Russia remains determined to restore its dominion over Georgia. In other words, what happens when it's no longer George W. Bush's fault? That's what the next 100 days will tell us.
In the long run it doesn't matter if Obama blames Bush, cozies up to Chavez, hits the "reset" button with Russia, downplays human rights transgressions in China, expresses annoyance with Benjamin Netanyahu while ignoring the genocidal ravings from Hamas, appears to dither on Pakistan (where there are no good options), and strives for dialogue with Iran; what matters is whether or not in another 100 days or four years, we have remained safe, the world's economy and international order have begun a reasonable recovery, and the worst villains (North Korea, Iran, et al) have acceded to a more stable balance of relationships. An increase in democratization and greater attention to human rights int he international arena would of course be welcome developments, but ultimately are less significant than whether or not there is a nuclear explosion in an American, European, Israeli, or Indian city.
President Obama is going to be the leader of what was once thought of as the "free world" for the next four years, at minimum. Even for those of us who do not support his approach (which cannot yet be understood of as a policy) we must wish him well and hope that he is successful. Tom Barnett, a long time supporter of Obama (who occasionally betrays his own inconsistency in his comments) notes that Obama is moving toward a policy:
In answer to a question about how he might describe an Obama doctrine, the President offered this response (as presented first on Time.com (HT to Jason Sattler):
[T]here are a couple of principles that I've tried to apply across the board: Number one, that the United States remains the most powerful, wealthiest nation on Earth, but we're only one nation, and that the problems that we confront, whether it's drug cartels, climate change, terrorism, you name it, can't be solved just by one country. And I think if you start with that approach, then you are inclined to listen and not just talk.
And so in all these meetings what I've said is, we have some very clear ideas in terms of where the international community should be moving; we have some very specific national interests, starting with safety and security that we have to attend to; but we recognize that other countries have good ideas, too, and we want to hear them. And the fact that a good idea comes from a small country like a Costa Rica should not somehow diminish the fact that it's a good idea. I think people appreciate that. So that's number one.
Number two, I think that -- I feel very strongly that when we are at our best, the United States represents a set of universal values and ideals -- the idea of democratic practices, the idea of freedom of speech and religion, the idea of a civil society where people are free to pursue their dreams and not be imposed upon constantly by their government. So we've got a set of ideas that I think have broad applicability. But what I also believe is that other countries have different cultures, different perspectives, and are coming out of different histories, and that we do our best to promote our ideals and our values by our example.
And so if we are practicing what we preach and if we occasionally confess to having strayed from our values and our ideals, that strengthens our hand; that allows us to speak with greater moral force and clarity around these issues.
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Countries are going to have interests, and changes in foreign policy approaches by my administration aren't suddenly going to make all those interests that may diverge from ours disappear. What it does mean, though, is, at the margins, they are more likely to want to cooperate than not cooperate. It means that where there is resistance to a particular set of policies that we're pursuing, that resistance may turn out just to be based on old preconceptions or ideological dogmas that, when they're cleared away, it turns out that we can actually solve a problem.
I think this is a great summary of how Obama has changed the tone and execution of U.S. foreign policy.But I don't think it comes anywhere close to resembling a doctrine. The unwinding of the financial crisis may yet produce one. Our renewed effort in AFPAK may produce one.
[Yet another example of Obama's preference for changing the atmospherics without materially changing our policy is described in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by Barry Rubin. His article on The confrontation con game is worth a read as an example of the so far yet undefined Obama policy.]
One does not have to agree with all the things that Obama has done to recognize that if he understands that we are living in a complex interconnected world in which there are many competing interests and that the United States cannot, and should not, be solely responsible for upholding an international rule set, his actions thus far can be understood as efforts to influence our enemies to claim a stake in the global economy and international community.
This suggests that in the long run the most important question facing the Obama administration will be the degree to which the most unstable and dangerous actors can be pressed to behave in their rational self-interest, and whether we can nudge their self interest in a less confrontational direction. The theory, as per Iran, that has been pressed form the Left is that the Iranian Mullahs are rational actors who believe, with good reason, that possessing a nuclear weapon will preserve their rule; there is much that is accurate about this yet it leaves unanswered the question of how Obama will proceed if he cannot persuade them that their self-interest lies in a relatively peaceful coexistence rather than a path toward nuclear confrontation.
Today is the coincidental syzygy of Yom HaShoah, the opening of Durban II, and the anniversary of Adolph Hitler's birth. In the 1930s Adolph Hitler was thought to be a rational actor. His successes, and his anti-Semitic pathology, led him to take irrational, grandiose steps and the results were catastrophic. With the world under significant economic stress, the old evil of anti-Semitism ascendant, and the Islamic world always close to chaos (with Pakistan and Iran leading the way toward a potential future of loose nukes available to paranoid religious fanatics who embrace martyrdom) it is a good time to take advantage of an opportunity to pause for breath; soon enough Barack Obama will face a genuine test and only then will we gain clarity.
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