President Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy is hard to categorise. Some see him as an idealist, others as a realist. To his political opponents, however, Obama is simply an apologist.
‘The politics of self-abasement,’ huffed conservative writer Christopher Caldwell in reviewing the president’s address last month to Muslims at Cairo University. Likewise offended by Obama’s conciliatory tone before foreign audiences, Republican leaders have slammed his ‘global apology tour’. Charles Krauthammer has charged that Obama’s ‘self-flagellation’ posits a false equivalence between America’s sins and the much graver ones of its adversaries.
In the past, accusations of deficient patriotism and moral relativism would have thrown Democrats on the defensive. No longer. A recent Democracy Corp survey found strong public approval for Obama’s handling of foreign affairs, with voters giving him top marks for ‘improving America’s standing in the world’.
Unlike his opponents, the public intuitively grasps the strategic logic behind the president’s attempts to refurbish the American brand. After the shock of 9/11, the Bush administration managed to make US power, or rather its abuses, the central issue of global politics. By acknowledging its mistakes, and taking steps to correct them, Obama morally disarms America’s critics and shifts the onus back where it belongs – to the extremists and rogue regimes responsible for the terrorism, ethno-religious conflict and oppression that afflict today’s world.
Of course, reducing anti-Americanism is a precondition for a more effective US foreign policy, not the policy itself. And sceptics are quick to note that, for Obama’s global popularity, America’s most dangerous adversaries have yet to succumb to his powers of rhetorical enchantment.
North Korea, for example, brushed aside the new president’s diplomatic overtures and conducted its second nuclear test in May. Unfazed by international protests, it then test-fired missiles, abrogated the 1953 Korean armistice and declared it would resume uranium enrichment.
None the less, Kim Jong-il’s paranoid dystopia is hardly a fair test of the US president’s emphasis on diplomacy. After all, his two predecessors tried both engagement and confrontation with North Korea, to no avail. Since war is not an option, the Obama administration has little choice but to seek tougher UN sanctions in hope of nudging Pyongyang back to the bargaining table. However, it seems likely that no combination of threats and blandishments will induce the regime to give up its nuclear weapons. A more realistic goal would be to limit North Korea’s stockpiles of weapons and materials. By not overreacting to Pyongyang’s latest provocations, Obama makes it easier to work with China on a containment strategy. That’s important, because China’s growing trade with North Korea gives it leverage that the US lacks.
In Iran, the apparent re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a setback for Obama’s efforts to ‘turn the page’ on US relations with Tehran. It will be difficult for the administration to engage in direct talks with Ahmadinejad, who thrives on theatrical condemnations of Israel and defiance of international pressure to open Iran’s nuclear facilities to inspection. The result, in fact, probably increases the odds of an Israeli strike on those facilities.
None the less, Obama’s respectful outreach to Iranian society – including admission of America’s role in a 1953 coup, and the acknowledgement of Tehran’s right to develop civilian nuclear power – will prove useful over time. The election revealed widespread opposition, especially among young Iranians, to the regime’s truculent and self-isolating external policies, as well as its internal repression. The Islamic republic has more reason to fear change from within than US-led hectoring. By undercutting the mullahs’ strategy of demonising America, Obama subverts their revolutionary ideology.
If Obama understands the uses of ‘soft power’ better than his GOP critics, he’s shown no reluctance to use the hard variety either. The president has dispatched 17,000 more US troops to Afghanistan, continued Predator missile strikes against terrorists in Pakistan and authorised force against pirates off Somalia.
In fact, what really defines Obama’s foreign policy is pragmatism. That was evident early on as he assembled a top-notch national security team, including Republican Bob Gates, Hilary Clinton and Marine General Jim Jones. Surrounding himself with such heavyweights has helped Obama compensate for his own lack of experience and has provided bipartisan cover for politically difficult decisions, like cutting costly weapons systems.
Pragmatism also marks the president’s plans, detailed in a major speech on 21 May at the National Archives, to bring President Bush’s policies towards terrorist suspects under the rule of law. Also speaking that day at a Washington thinktank, former vice president Dick Cheney defended harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding as vital to preventing terror attacks. The White House could hardly ask for a better foil than Cheney. As Leon Wieseltier quipped, a debate between ‘Vice President Dracula and President Van Helsing’ isn’t really much of a contest.
More troublesome for the president is growing restiveness on his left. Anti-war activists and civil libertarians are part of Obama’s base, yet many complain that he has continued the Bush surveillance program; retained the use of military tribunals; and, most controversially, endorsed indefinite detention for some suspected terrorists. For his part, Obama reminded human rights groups that among his first official acts were a ban on torture and the decision to shut down Guantanamo prison within a year.
The episode underscored Obama’s key political challenge: convincing independent and moderate voters that he can keep Americans safe while at the same time mollifying liberal critics of Bush’s policies. To this end, the steps he outlined were carefully calibrated to combine pragmatism and principles of democratic accountability and transparency. But in a sense, Obama’s progressive critics are right: in some respects, he is winning the wider public’s trust, not by rejecting Bush’s policies wholesale, but by promising to execute them more deftly and with greater awareness of the big picture of American values and interests.
Iraq offers a good example. The president has essentially ratified the troop withdrawal timetable that Bush negotiated (or more precisely was forced to negotiate) with the Iraqi government. That withdrawal won’t be completed until the end of 2010, and even then the US will leave a large force – 50,000 troops – for counterterrorism and training missions. This doesn’t sound much like Obama’s campaign vow to ‘end this war – now’. But two-thirds of Americans approve of Obama’s stance, even as many fear that sectarian violence will flare up again as US combat forces depart.
A 73% majority of the public supports Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan by sending more US troops there. Here again, however, there’s a cleavage between mainstream opinion and the president’s own base. Democrats express strong doubts that the administration has a clear military mission in Afghanistan. Escalating US casualties in Afghanistan could quickly widen this fissure in the centre-left coalition.
Elsewhere, Obama has broken dramatically with the Bush approach. For example, he has outlined an ambitious non-proliferation strategy with the ultimate goal of building ‘a world without nuclear weapons’. He also seems intent on restoring America’s role as an honest broker in Middle East peace negotiations. His forceful criticism of Israel’s policy of expanding settlements signals an even-handedness missing during the Bush years.
So what does it all add up to? Is Obama a hawk or a dove? At this point, he seems a little of both – a ‘dawk’. The truth is, no one knows. Nothing very big has happened yet on President Obama’s watch. When it does, there will be ample opportunity to revise judgments about the polestar of his neo-progressive foreign policy. For now, pragmatism will have to do – and it’s doing pretty well.