WASHINGTON - While a president Barack Hussein Obama will present a strikingly
different face of the United States to the rest of the world, how different his
actual foreign policy will be remains unclear.
On the one hand, Obama has repeatedly stressed the importance of
multilateralism and diplomatic re-engagement with the world, including
long-time US adversaries such as Iran, Cuba and North Korea, as a contrast to
the unilateralist and militarized approach of the incumbent, President George W
Bush.
On the other hand, most of his advisers are veterans of the administration of
president Bill Clinton whose own brand of liberal interventionism - including
the circumvention of the United Nations in the Balkans, Sudan and Iraq and
reluctance to press Israel to
make key concessions in negotiations with its Arab neighbors - and the notion
that the US was the "indispensable nation", helped lay the foundation for the
eight years that followed.
"There are lots of Clinton retreads," noted Stephen Clemons, who heads the
American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. He pointed to the
offer to Representative Rahm Emanuel, a former senior Clinton aide, to serve as
Obama's White House chief of staff as one of many hints that a "Clinton-3"
administration may be in the offing.
As the biracial son of a Kenyan father, who spent a formative part of his
childhood in Indonesia and the rest in multi-cultural Hawaii, Obama will
clearly present a far different image of the United States to the rest of the
world than his immediate predecessor, or any other, for that matter. Aside from
his background and physical appearance, his eloquence, equanimity under fire
and intellectual acuity and curiosity will also mark a striking contrast to
Bush.
"The fact that he presents a very different face of America is very important,
because our political capital around the world has been so very badly depleted
over the last eight years," according to Raj Menon, who teaches international
relations at Lehigh University.
But that image, as well as the foreign policy commitments he made during the
campaign - assuming that he holds to them - may not be sufficient to ensure the
kind of sweeping change in course that much of the world and many voters who
cast their ballots for him expect.
Obama will almost certainly make good within a relatively short time on his
promises to close the Guantanamo detention facility, rejoin global efforts to
curb greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming, and open direct
dialogues with Syria and Iran, that will cheer Democrats and Washington's
European allies.
But, despite Democratic gains in Congress, he may be less inclined to expend
political capital on more controversial issues that will require substantial
bipartisan support, such as ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
or the Rome Protocol for the International Criminal Court and amending the
North American Free Trade Agreement to strengthen labor rights and
environmental provisions.
With the US economy engulfed in the worst financial crisis since the Great
Depression, Obama is not likely to have nearly as much time to focus on foreign
policy than he had thought even two months ago. The fact that an overwhelming
majority of Tuesday's voters rated economic issues as more important to them
than the Iraq War or terrorism makes it more likely that the new president will
delegate more foreign policy decisions to his vice president, Senate Foreign
Relations Committee chairman Joseph Biden, and subordinates who have yet to be
named.
The most likely subordinates span a wide range of opinion - from crusading
liberal interventionists, whose Manichean views of the world as a battleground
of good versus evil are not so far removed from those of the more-tribalistic
neo-conservatives around Bush - to "realists", many of whom, like former
secretary of state Colin Powell, have historically identified more with the
Republican Party and are generally more leery of military intervention and
"nation-building" enterprises, particularly in the absence of strong
multilateral support.
Where Obama himself stands within that spectrum remains unclear to most
observers, in part because foreign policy virtually disappeared from the
presidential campaign after the financial crisis broke in mid-September.
The operating assumption is that he stands somewhere in-between. While
consistent with the interventionists like Biden, he has endorsed the imposition
of no-fly zones, unilaterally if necessary, over Darfur in Sudan to stop what
they call the "genocide" there, and his emphasis on engaging enemies
diplomatically, regardless of their human-rights record, reflects a more
realist tendency. In fact, he may well try to achieve a balance between the two
poles in his appointments.
Thus, it is believed that his first choice to head the Pentagon is the
Republican incumbent, Robert Gates, who, along with Powell's successor,
Condoleezza Rice, is given much of the credit for steering US policy on a less
unilateralist and hawkish course since he joined the administration two years
ago.
Despite Gates' public opposition to several positions taken by Obama during the
election campaign, including the president-elect's intention to withdraw all US
combat forces from Iraq over a fixed 16-month timetable and bar the development
of new kinds of nuclear weapons, he is still seen as desirable, both for his
competence and experience and as a way to redeem Obama's promise of an
inclusive administration.
And if he decides against Gates - or if Gates declines the offer - Obama may
very well choose another Republican realist as secretary of state, while opting
for Clinton's former navy secretary, Richard Danzig, for defense secretary.
Three have been mentioned so far - the ranking member of Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Indiana Senator Richard Lugar; outgoing Nebraska Senator
Chuck Hagel; and the former head of the US European Command, General James L
Jones, who backed Senator John McCain for president.
All three are solid realists who, significantly, are considered likely to be
more evenhanded in addressing the Arab-Israeli conflict and less inclined
toward confrontation with Iran than either the current administration or many
liberal interventionists.
If, on the other hand, Gates remains Pentagon chief, Obama is likely to pick a
Democrat for secretary of state. Aside from the three Republicans, the names
most frequently mentioned, according to Clemons, are the 2004 Democratic
presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, who leans more to the liberal side
of the spectrum, and Clinton's former UN ambassador, New Mexico governor Bill
Richardson, whose eagerness to engage US foes puts him more in the realist
camp. Another former Clinton UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a liberal
interventionist par excellence, is also said to be in the running but has
reportedly fallen from favor in recent weeks.
James Steinberg, who served as Clinton's former deputy national security
adviser and reportedly leans more to the interventionist side of the spectrum,
is said to be the front-runner for Obama's national security adviser, while
Clinton's former attorney and Democratic realist, Gregg Craig, is likely to be
considered for deputy secretary of state.
Clinton's former top Africa aide and liberal interventionist, Susan Rice, is
reportedly in the running for deputy national security adviser and UN
ambassador, while three of Obama's closest foreign policy advisers who have not
worked for Clinton, Dennis McDonough, General Scott Gration, and speechwriter
Ben Rhodes, a realist who co-authored the Baker-Hamilton report on US policy in
Iraq and the Middle East two years ago, are likely to get White House posts.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy, and particularly the
neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
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