Hagel can reveal the 'real'
Obama By M K Bhadrakumar
In Spanish, they say Dime con quien
andas y te dire quien eres - "Tell me with
whom you walk and I will tell you who you are."
When United States President Barack Obama
walked into the East Room in the White House on
Monday evening with former Nebraska senator Chuck
Hagel, his nominee for defense secretary, that was
the thought that came to mind. It was a short
walk, which nonetheless had precipitated in its
anticipation much animated debate in the
Washington circuit.
Hagel is an
extraordinary person for the US president to walk
with at this point in America's trajectory as the
world's lone superpower with a military budget
that outstrips the rest of the world combined.
Obama underscored it by saying his choice
of Hagel is "historic", since the former senator
would be the "first from the enlisted
ranks" to serve as secretary
of defense and "one of the few secretaries who
have been wounded in war" who would know "war is
not an abstraction... [he] understands that
sending young Americans to fight and bleed in the
dirt and mud, that's something we only do when
it's absolutely necessary."
Obama said
everything that he thought was needed to be said
about Hagel - that is, almost everything. However,
what he didn't say and what is on everyone's mind
nonetheless is also important to recount: Hagel is
someone who opposed the 2003 Iraq war and in fact
went on to seek an investigation over the reasons
given by the George W Bush administration to
justify the invasion. He is someone who questioned
the "surge" in Afghanistan and drew parallels with
Vietnam, and who is a strong critic of economic
sanctions in general.
He also favors talks
with Hamas.
Here is someone who won't
mistake engagement as "appeasement" but will
regard it as an "opportunity to better understand"
others, and who advocates that great and powerful
nations "must be adults in world affairs".
Here is a future US defense secretary who
believes that the conflicts of the future "are
beyond the control of any great power" and
unlikely to involve unilateral US action"; and who
estimates that the defense department that he is
going to run "in many ways has become bloated" and
"in many ways... the Pentagon needs to be pared
down".
Shedding timidity That
is to say, prima facie, Hagel is an odd choice as
the defense secretary if the conventional wisdom
holds good that US foreign policy is driven by
that country's military-industrial complex and the
pervasive lobbies that work out of Washington, and
is indeed embedded deep within American
imperialism.
So, where is the real
departure - or, is there a departure at all? The
answer to the question lies in Obama's political
personality. Obama has been a proponent of "soft
power", but being a consummate politician, he
proved to be a pragmatic president in his first
term, surrounding himself with advisers such as
Hillary Clinton, Dennis Ross, and Robert Gates,
whom he knew very well to be by no means his soul
mates sharing the beliefs he boldly professed - on
the Iraq war, Guantanamo Bay, and so forth - while
being an aspirant for the Oval Office.
Looking back, Obama picked up the threads
on many issues where Bush left them, and he coolly
abandoned some of his own campaign promises.
Suffice to say, the nomination of Hagel
harks back to the "audacity of hope" that Obama
famously held out in the run up to his
unceremonious entry as an outsider into national
politics in the US. The big question today is: Are
we about to witness the real beginning of the
Obama era in US foreign policy?
A good
case can be made that Obama is breaking out of the
image of timidity that somehow came to be
associated with the foreign policy he pursued in
the first term as president. Of course, to be fair
to him, the lurking suspicion was always there
that as a clever politician he deliberately chose
not to follow his instincts during his first term
as president in order to get re-elected. To be
sure, he ended up disappointing his admirers (home
and abroad) and supporters - and at times
vindicated his detractors - but then, it is never
an easy balance to strike between value-based
politics and the politics of expediency.
Arguably, a combination of the difficult
circumstances within the US and the complexities
of the emerging world order would now enable Obama
to settle on a style of leadership, finally, that
is value-based and accords to his beliefs and
convictions. Meanwhile, liberated from the
exigencies of having to fight for another public
office, he is also largely free to follow his
instincts without inhibitions. Obama being a
gifted intellectual with a strong sense of history
would also have his eyes cast on his presidential
legacy as the helmsman at this defining moment in
his country's future.
Obama is acutely
aware of the rise of other leading states on the
international arena and is conscious of the
growing limits to the US's dominant military might
in the international system. On the other hand, as
he never tires of admitting, he is a great patriot
who is a passionate believer in the ideas of
American exceptionalism, and in the US's destiny
as a world leader. Without doubt, therefore, he
will continue to uphold American interests and
seek to relentlessly perpetuate the US's lead role
in world affairs, although his methods may vary.
A powerful signal However, it
may not necessarily be up to Obama to set his
foreign-policy compass, given the volatility of
the international environment and the forces of
history that are at work today. In sum, he is
going to be as much a "victim" of events overseas
as a navigator.
Take the Iran problem, for
example. Reaching a grand bargain with Iran may
seem a low-hanging fruit (which it is) - ensuring
that Tehran doesn't pursue a nuclear weapon
program in return for Washington lifting the
onerous economic sanctions - but it overlooks that
there are entrenched interest groups on both
sides, including among some of the US's key allies
in the region, who would continue to thwart any
attempts by him to unfreeze US-Iran ties.
Again, ending the crisis is Syria may seem
a deceptively simple matter of working out a deal
with Russia and of the US exercising
self-restraint by refraining from directly
involving in fighting the war. But on the
contrary, the eruption of sectarian schism in that
country may already have let loose demons that
could prove to be difficult to control even with
the best of intentions in Moscow and Washington.
Similarly, the Arab Spring is yet in its
early stages, and already the palpable reality
staring the world in the face is that the US is
barely coping with the treacherous flow of events.
Clearly, the will to end the Afghan war is
undeniably there, but then, the challenge of
reassuring a problematic Pakistan and cajoling it
to relinquish its long-held objective of gaining
"strategic depth" and to give up the support for
the Taliban as a hedge to ward off Indian
influence in Kabul as the US role wanes is a
formidable one, with no clear prospects of an
agreeable end result in view, although the
withdrawal of US combat troops is scheduled to be
completed within the year.
Yet, imagine,
all these troubling questions are also closely
linked one way or another to the US's discourse
with the Muslim world. Moving further on, the
expert opinion happens to be that US relations
with China and Russia may be heading for a rough
patch. The US's "rebalancing" to Asia; its
propensity to get involved in China's territorial
disputes and its support of democratic advances;
Obama's own "Asia Pivot Tour" soon after the
November election - Beijing no doubt sees them all
as provocative.
Similarly, Obama needs to
reinvent the "reset" with Russia, but whether he
feels the urge to strike a productive relationship
with President Vladimir Putin - as he apparently
struck with former president and now prime
minister Dmitry Medvedev - remains in doubt.
The high probability is that although
Obama has promised "more flexibility" with Russia
on the thorny issue of missile defense after his
re-election, the US administration would still
continue to engage Russia only selectively on
pressing issues of concern to the US while
otherwise by and large ignoring Russia. On its
part, Moscow seems to be keeping its fingers
crossed as to the prospects for a real
breakthrough in the increasingly acrimonious
US-Russia discourse during Obama's second term.
Thus, on balance, it all but seems likely
that the more things appear to change, the more
they might remain the same. But that will be a
gross simplification of the powerful signal Obama
has chosen to send by selecting two Vietnam
veterans for the two key cabinet posts of
secretaries of state and defense - John Kerry and
Hagel.
Obama is signaling much more than a
new leadership style of using more carrots than
sticks, more ideas and persuasion than threats and
sanctions, more "soft power" than "smart power".
The bottom line is that now that he won't be
running again, Obama enjoys far greater space and
flexibility than during the past four years to
really test a values-based foreign policy approach
that relies on negotiations.
Monday's
short walk with Hagel is long enough to recall who
Obama used to be - and could still turn out to be.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His
assignments included the Soviet Union, South
Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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