Front matter
- Chapter 1. A Post-American Foreign Policy for the Post-American World
- Chapter 2. The “Human Ink-Blot” : Obama, Foreign Policy and the 2008 Election
- Chapter 3. The Obama Doctrine : “Leading From Behind”
- Chapter 4. Afghanistan, Pakistan and the War on Terror
- Chapter 5. Iran
- Chapter 6. Israel, Palestine and the Arab Spring
- Chapter 7. China
- Chapter 8. Russia
- Chapter 9. Continuity We Can Believe In : Keep the Change
Back matter
Barack Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy
The Limits of Engagement
Bloomsbury Academic 2012
Bloomsbury Open Access
[48]As
a rooted cosmopolitan who has seen the US from the outside, Obama
has the potential to renew US foreign policy for the Post-American
Century.
[49]The
truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the
traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father,
of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan.
—Barack
Obama, presidential election campaign event in Pennsylvania
[50]Not
to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing
about Mr Obama's Senate record, or state legislature record,
or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the
presidency one gets ... what? Not much.
The received academic wisdom on the 2008 US presidential election described it,
in John Kenneth White's words, as “The
Foreign Policy Election That Wasn't.”[51] In a collection of academic essays on the 2008 campaign, The Year Of Obama: How Barack Obama Won the White House,
edited by the distinguished American political scientist Larry J.
Sabato, foreign affairs barely merited even a passing mention, much less a separate chapter of its own.[52]
After three
successive post-9/11 national elections – 2002, 2004 and 2006 – in
which foreign policy figured prominently, with
the on-going wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the wider war on
terror dominating many voter concerns, international affairs
proved to be the “dog that didn't bark” in 2008. Eclipsed by the
deepening recession from 2007, the financial
shocks of September-October 2008 that saw the Dow Jones Industrial
Average fall 6,000 points from its peak of 14,000 one year
earlier, and a loss of more than $8 trillion
in stock value in a matter of weeks, the 2008 election was – far more so even than that of 1992, a mild recession then
also assisting the Democratic candidate for president – a question of “It's the economy, stupid.” In a year
during which all the key indicators reliably favored Obama for president, John
McCain's fate was decisively sealed by the collapse of Lehman
Brothers bank and all the convulsions that then ensued in the
Great Recession.
It
would be foolish to directly contest this interpretation (although the scholarly consensus points to economic developments
prior to the autumn, rather than the financial collapse, as being determinative in the election[53]). But this orthodox
view nonetheless requires some modest qualification, for three reasons.
First,
as a growing body of influential academic literature argues, the
relationship
between domestic politics and US foreign policy is far more
important, complex and subtle than many analysts of American politics
and foreign policy either acknowledge or appreciate.[54] As Robert
Saldin pointedly argues, “the elections literature is incomplete
because it does not take foreign affairs seriously.”[55]
While much of the best political
science is centered on voting behavior analyses, especially in the
US, relatively little attention is generally devoted to
the importance not just of international events, but also of
public perceptions of the readiness of rival candidates to take
up the unique burden of being Commander-in-Chief of the world's
sole superpower. As Kurt Campbell and Michael O'Hanlon argued
compellingly in relation to the 2000 presidential election between
George W. Bush and Al Gore:
Advisers to Vice President Al Gore, referring to public-opinion polls, counselled their candidate to avoid the defense issue. In so doing, they failed to appreciate what seems a truism to us: that when Americans choose a president, even when the polls do not predict or reveal it, they always [authors' emphasis] rate defense matters high. Even if Americans' security does not seem imminently imperilled, they understand the special place of America in the world as well as the special national-security powers entrusted by the Constitution to the chief executive. They also look to discussion of defense issues, which have a certain gravity and concreteness, as a way to assess the character and steadfastness of any would-be commander in chief.[56]
Second, despite the obvious dominance of economic concerns in the campaign and presidential
vote, foreign policy did matter in 2008 – albeit in more subtle ways than many analysts conventionally conceded. In
particular, foreign policy was crucial to Barack Obama's ultimately securing the Democratic Party nomination for president
over the early frontrunner, Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY); to his selection of Senator Joe
Biden (D-DE) as his vice-presidential running mate; and also, in
ironic ways, to effectively neutering traditional Republican
advantages – and the obvious fact of Obama's own inexperience – on
questions of national security in the general
election. While McCain still held an edge over Obama on certain
key foreign policy questions
among American voters – most notably, dealing with the threat of terrorism
– the proportion of voters who cast their ballot with
international affairs as an important voting cue was modest. Critically,
this was not simply a matter of the overwhelming salience of
economic concerns, but also was a function of Obama's managing
to convey sufficient strength on foreign affairs – despite the
lightness of his resume and the political and media controversies
over his relationships with William Ayers and Reverend Jeremiah Wright – that, even if he was without doubt untested, he could
not plausibly be described to most US voters as “weak” on national security.
The third reason for qualifying the orthodox view of 2008 is perhaps even more subtle
and extends far beyond the election itself. Obama's foreign policy platform, such as it was, not only helped to neutralize
traditional Republican strengths on national security; more than this, it established a formidable set of expectations –
in America and around the globe – as to what kind of innovative global leadership Obama would provide for a post-American
world. Crucially, the Obama campaign deliberately raised public expectations extraordinarily – indeed, unrealistically
– high. To take but one of multiple examples, Obama's peroration at St Paul, Minnesota after he had effectively won
the Democratic nomination, memorably concluded:
Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless ... this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal ... this was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment, this was the time when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.[57]
Moreover,
Obama's commitment to changing US foreign policy, and thereby altering
the dynamics of international politics, exhibited a uniquely
personal stamp. Aspirant presidential candidates inevitably promise
much to their prospective voters. Who, after all, is rationally
going to run on a platform of “elect me and nothing
much will change”? But in Obama's case, the personalization was an
inextricable and especially important aspect of his
widespread appeal at home and, at least as significantly, abroad.
As the Princeton historian, Sean
Wilentz, later reflected, “There's something about a campaign that
can lead to unreal expectations ... He had this among
his supporters who, before he had even been sworn in, were already
comparing him to Abe Lincoln and FDR. Some of his supporters
thought he could transform the real world, but no one can
transform the real world.”[58]
The
significance of this was sometimes obscured by the historic symbolism
of Obama's
candidacy and the sheer novelty of some of the campaign's
developments. For example, never before had a US presidential candidate
– note, not an incumbent president, nor
a former president, but a then junior US senator and a neophyte aspirant to the office – addressed a mass gathering
in a foreign nation's capital, as part of his own American election campaign: Obama's Berlin
rally in June 2008 was entirely without precedent. Rarely in recent US history, moreover, had a candidate of either major
party openly declared that he would meet with the leaders of noxious authoritarian US adversaries such as Iran, Venezuela,
Cuba, and Myanmar “without preconditions”; Obama's commitment to do so during the Democratic Party internal debates
– though it earned him trenchant criticism – was striking and novel. Never had a US presidential candidate openly
described himself not simply as a US citizen, but also as a proud “citizen of the world”; Obama's cosmopolitanism
was simply unheard-of in an American campaign for the highest office in
the land. In short, too myopic a focus on the 2008 election itself
obscures the more lasting political significance of one
of the most historic and unprecedented campaigns for president
that any candidate has mounted across the entire sweep of American
history. Part of the explanation for the widespread disappointment
felt about Obama's tenure in office also stems directly
from the transformative undertakings that Obama promised to
pursue.
What
is additionally significant here – and, once more, somewhat neglected
in most academic accounts of the election – is that exactly what
an Obama foreign policy would look like remained essentially
in the eye of the beholder even through Election Day 2008 and the
inauguration of 2009. To some extent, this was a familiar
and even reassuring feature of US presidential campaigns of both
major parties. Few policy specifics are generally given,
concrete commitments are mostly to be avoided, and broad thematic
and rhetorical devices invariably prove preferable to policy
minutiae, extensive detail, and premature undertakings. The
historical record of broken presidential foreign policy promises
– from FDR and LBJ pledging not to send American “boys” to war, in
1940 and 1964 respectively, through Bill
Clinton's 1992 refusal to “coddle” dictators “from Baghdad to
Beijing,” to George W. Bush's 2000 commitment
to lead America as a “humble,” not an arrogant, nation – generally
augurs well for candidate caution on
the campaign trail. But the markedly opaque nature of the Obama
grand strategy was arguably, in part at least, a function
of this particular candidate's unprecedented distinctiveness. That
is, the nature of the campaign that Obama ran, first to
secure his party's nomination and then to win the general
election, reflected and reinforced the opacity of his ideas about
America's future course in the world. And that, in turn, was
partly an artefact of the very cosmopolitan character that he
deliberately, fully and skilfully embodied.
Contrary to conventional academic and popular interpretations that typically, and
rightly, regard race as a powerful hindrance to the political fortunes
of a prospective black presidential candidate, Obama wore – or rather, subverted – the burden(s) of racial politics
relatively lightly in 2008. As far as foreign
policy was concerned, especially, Obama's identity – or better,
multiple overlapping identities – served as a
perfect symbol for a newly cosmopolitan and transnational approach
to America's evolving world role. Such an approach resonated
powerfully with the knowledge class in the US and elsewhere. The
approach can eschew specifics in favor of themes and generalities;
claim multiple sources of inspiration; and tout on the basis of
personally embodying diversity, rather than any particular
set of concrete achievements or prior record of experience, a
distinctive set of “qualifications” for political
leadership: not just speaking for, but personifying, “change” (or,
as one of his campaign slogans had it, “we
are the change that we have been looking for”). This enticing
appeal secured Obama substantial electoral support at
home, and overwhelming political support and admiration abroad. As
David
Remnick noted:
There was also little doubt that one large non-voting constituency favored Obama: the rest of the world. In a poll conducted by the BBC World Service in twenty-two countries, respondents preferred Obama to McCain by a four-to-one margin. Nearly half the respondents said that if Obama became President it would “fundamentally change” their perception of the United States.[59]
During
the early stages of his campaign for the White House, “Obamagirl”
famously developed a crush on the candidate from Illinois; one
that came to be shared by many millions worldwide. But to judge
by the many competing interpretations of Obama's foreign policy
stance, while some observers evinced not dissimilar attitudes,
the commentariat as a whole was anything but in agreement.
Depending on one's perspective, it was a measure of either the
shrewdness or the shallowness of the Obama campaign that, even by
the day of the 2008 election, opinion as to what an Obama
foreign policy promised was so divided both within and between
broadly progressive and conservative camps. This was not simply
a matter of the inevitably heated partisan nature of the election
and the more ideologically driven forces on both the left
and the right, but more with regard to mainstream analysts and
commentators. Confusion, or at least disagreement, was more
notable than consensus.
For example, for some analysts, such as Fouad
Ajami,[60] the steady development of the Democrat's campaign increasingly suggested that Obama represented not
only a decisive break from the George W. Bush years, but also “the sharpest break yet
with the national consensus over foreign policy
after WWII.” Disaffected with American power and convinced of the
utility of “soft power” – the ability
to bend the world towards your view, through attraction rather
than coercion – the Obama vision represented the embodiment
of an elite liberalism which, in contrast with that of his
erstwhile hero JFK and other Cold War hawks, had steadily become
unmoored from traditional American nationalism and rejected
entirely the notion that America was an exceptional nation-state:
This is not only a matter of Senator Obama's own sensibility; the break with the consensus over American exceptionalism and America's claims and burdens abroad is the choice of the activists and elites of the Democratic Party who propelled Mr. Obama's rise.[61]
In
heralding a “post-exceptionalist” foreign policy, Obama's securing
the nomination of his party over the early frontrunner (albeit
very narrowly, and after a protracted campaign) represented,
on this view, more than ever the victory of the left in American
politics over traditional liberals. Whereas, in 1960, Kennedy and Nixon occupied a similar generational and cultural milieu,
and hence differed more on tactics than fundamental strategy in the Cold War struggle against communism, Obama and McCain
occupied markedly different generational and cultural space in 2008. As
a result,
the election represented far more a choice than an echo. It
heralded not simply a different occupant of the White House but
an approach to America's place, role and influence in the world
fundamentally at odds with all prior modern-era presidents,
Democrat and Republican alike.
By contrast, rather than viewing Obama as a final victory for the left within the
party, much foreign policy analysis – from the bulk of in-house journalists of the Washington
Post and New York Times to Time and Newsweek and most pundits on CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS – accepted Obama as an emphatic return
to a Bill Clinton-style liberal internationalism. The “radical,” “rational” or “militant”
center found vindication of such an interpretation in the vituperative attacks on the senator from both the activist left
and the conservative right. On this basis, the selective shots that Obama had to endure from the Huffington
Post and the Dennis Kucinich/John Edwards/Mike Gravel wing
of the Democratic Party – from voting to confirm Condi
Rice as Bush's Secretary of State in early 2005 to reversing
position on immunity for telecommunications companies that assisted
post-9/11 government eavesdropping on suspected terrorists in 2008
– testified to the senator's instinctive centrism,
pragmatism and temperamental coolness: even a small “c”
conservative disposition.
Similarly, the depiction of the McCain campaign, most conservative columnists and
the right-wing blogosphere of Obama as a soft-headed, liberal idealist who believed that “soft
power” alone, deployed with sufficient charm and erudition, could face down the threats and remedy the ills of a dangerous
world, reinforced the notion that Obama represented a post-Bush “return to normalcy.” Opposing “dumb”
wars but not all wars, keeping all options on the table but being unafraid to negotiate directly with enemies, being
supportive of open market democracies but recognizing the flaws in free trade, Obama represented the type of fresh, un-ideological and
intelligent centrist Democrat cognisant of global interdependence that candidate Bill Clinton had previously in 1992.
The
originator of the “post-American world” notion, Fareed Zakaria, by contrast, claimed that in terms of the framework foreign policy ideas
that Obama elaborated during his presidential campaign, “What emerges is a worldview far from that of a typical liberal,
much closer to that of a traditional realist.”[62] The evidence for this? First, Obama was “strikingly
honest” about his “inclinations and inspirations,” not only repeating the Democratic foreign policy mantra
of praising Harry S. Truman but also expressing “enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George
H. W. Bush.” Second, Obama avoided moralistic speech, binary divisions, and a lack of complexity, viewing nations and
sub-state actors as motivated as much by power, greed and fear as by ideology. Third, the Illinois senator “never”
used soaring language like the “freedom
agenda,” preferring to speak of economic prospects, civil society
and “dignity.” Finally, Obama spoke admiringly
of towering historic American foreign policy figures such as Dean
Acheson, George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr. Acutely aware
of the limits of both American idealism and American power,
Zakaria concluded that “Obama seems – unusually for
a modern-day Democrat – highly respectful of the realist
tradition.”
Still other Obama enthusiasts went even further. Eli
Lake, for instance, dismissed conservative charges that Obama
resembled a latter-day turbo-charged Jimmy Carter, instead suggesting
that – at least in his approach to counter-terrorism – it would be
Ronald Reagan's playbook on which he relied:
eschewing a “one size fits all” approach to fighting terrorism,
finding proxies to battle America's enemies, and aggressively
seeking-out allies among the tribes co-mingling with terrorists
while engaging and minimizing the corruption and brutality of
local police and intelligence agencies.[63]
Such
a view was of course anathema to many on the right, who viewed Obama's
candidacy
with a mixture of barely concealed fear and loathing. For many,
Obama appeared a carefully calculated construction whose apparently
moderate pedigree deceptively obscured a political trajectory
typical of the far left. On this basis, from Obama's “exotic”
personal journey through the associations with Reverend Wright and
Ayers, to
the community activism and Chicago machine politics, the
senator's instincts were fundamentally far out of the mainstream
of American politics. As the most notorious right-wing polemic
put it, Obama possessed “at best only an intellectual
understanding of foreign affairs,” yielding a foreign policy
that is “anti-war, anti-Israel”:
Obama's foreign policy appears predicated on an overconfidence that the power of his personality and his willingness to negotiate will somehow transform international politics to the point where we can pursue nuclear weapons disarmament, reduce our military, and withdraw from Iraq without adverse consequences, even for Israel. Obama talks as if he can transcend international politics-as-usual simply by employing some of the listening skills he learned in Saul Alinsky's radical community-organizing methodology.[64]
Cosmopolitan, liberal internationalist, realist, Reaganite, leftist? Was this division
in opinion more a function of the divisions within American politics more broadly or did it reflect a genuine interpretive
problem on the Obama approach to world affairs? And, if so, where did the “real Obama” lie on foreign policy for
the post-Bush and post-American worlds?
The most oft-touted explanation
for uncertainty as to Obama's foreign policy beliefs, cited by both defenders and opponents alike, was the normal dynamics
of American presidential election campaigns.
On this view, the infamous
Nixonian advice of moving towards the partisan extremes to placate
the activist base during the nomination battle before rapidly
refocusing on the center ground for moderates and Independents in
the general election adequately, and fully, captured Obama's
foreign policy “refinements” over 2007–08. Faced by a principal,
and formidable, intra-party opponent in
then Senator Hillary Clinton, Obama exploited what limited
differences existed between them on the substantive issues to appeal
to the base of the party. In particular, his opposition to the Iraq
war, and his criticisms of NAFTA and free
trade, sought to distinguish his candidacy from hers and to pit
his better judgment against her greater experience. Having
ultimately succeeded in squeaking to the nomination, Obama's logical
course was to reassure centrist opinion, which began as soon as
June 4, 2008 with his first presumptive nominee speech to
AIPAC.
But
a deeper explanation for the more opaque aspects of his outlook on the
world
can be found in Obama's carefully crafted public image and his
strategic political ambition. As his two memoirs make clear,
Obama not only has been deeply preoccupied by the nature of his
multiple overlapping personal identities since his early years,
but has also carefully calibrated the public projection of this in
his political life. In campaigning for the Illinois US
Senate seat in 2004, Obama framed his life as “part of the great
American narrative of rising above challenges, even
though Obama benefited from many upper middle-class institutions,
such as private schools.”[65] He projected
himself as “multicolored. He's everyone's candidate.”[66] Obama stressed not only that he
was genuinely African American, tracing half his heritage directly to Africa, but also that he belonged to the “community
of humanity.” His struggle to define his community encompassed not just race
but class and geography, with a half-Indonesian sister married to a Chinese Canadian. While rooted in the African American community, Obama stressed that, “I'm not limited
by it.”[67] As such, his persona served as an effective surrogate for actual positions. As
two Illinois observers put it, Obama is “the literal embodiment of our cultural hybridity” and represents “whatever
you want him to be.”[68]
Such a capacious flexibility can constitute a burden as much as a boon, according
to Obama, since “everybody's projecting their own views onto you.”[69]
But in fact,
that opacity was something which, as one of only five African
Americans ever to serve in the US Senate, and the first African
American to mount a genuinely credible bid for the presidency,
served Obama extremely well. As David
Mendell put it in an early biography, in political terms, Obama “struck gold when it comes to race. Instead of being
torn asunder trying to please each racial camp, he has strung a tightrope between the two and walked it with precision.”[70] Moreover, Obama's calculated deployment
of a trait that none of his African American predecessors
shared, and which is applicable to very few American politicians
even today, served partially to compensate for his slim resume
and demonstrative lack of foreign policy experience or expertise.
As Charles
Krauthammer caustically observed:
For no presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great. Which is why McCain's Paris Hilton ads struck such a nerve. Obama's meteoric rise was based not on issues – there was not a dime's worth of difference between him and Hillary on issues – but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.[71]
While
Obama read and consulted widely on foreign policy as his presidential
campaign
progressed, and despite his much vaunted intellectualism, his
familiarity with international affairs was limited and not especially
distinctive. As Ryan Lizza recounted:
As a student during the Reagan years, Obama gravitated toward conventionally left-leaning positions. At Occidental, he demonstrated in favor of divesting from apartheid South Africa. At Columbia, he wrote a forgettable essay in Sundial, a campus publication, in favor of the nuclear-freeze movement. As a professor at the University of Chicago, he focussed on civil-rights law and race. And, as a candidate who emphasised his “story,” Obama argued that what he lacked in experience with foreign affairs he made up for with foreign travel: four years in Indonesia as a boy, and trips to Pakistan, India, Kenya, and Europe during and after college.[72]
That travel may well have broadened and even sharpened his mind. But, despite the
efforts of some his more enthusiastic supporters to parse it otherwise – Martin
Dupuis and Keith Boeckelman claiming that the Illinois senator had
“established strong credentials on foreign affairs, especially with respect to nuclear disarmament,”[73] and John Wilson even suggesting that, prefacing a one-page summary of the senator's foreign
policy achievements in the national legislature, “Obama's experience in foreign affairs may be his strongest
attribute”[74]
– Obama's foreign policy credentials were markedly meagre in 2008.
Although
he gained a seat on the (for established US senators, increasingly
unattractive) Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2005,
his overriding focus was – understandably and entirely rationally –
the domestic concerns of his Illinois constituents.
Obama did travel to Russia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East,
including Israel and Iraq, during his first year in the Senate.[75] In 2006 he also travelled to Africa, to visit South Africa and his father's homeland in Kenya, a
prelude to the publication of The Audacity of Hope and, as even a sympathetic biographer noted, “much more successful
as a major media hit than as a mission to imbue a first-term senator
with greater knowledge about Africa.”[76]
Compounding
Obama's lack of foreign policy experience was a lack of legislative
productivity, achievement or novelty. Again, while his defenders
exaggerated his senatorial success, even a cursory examination
revealed the hollowness of such claims. Wilson's
one-page summary
of his foreign policy record, for example, mentioned Obama writing
a law signed in 2006 to provide $52 million to help stabilize
Congo, and penning an op-ed with Sam
Brownback (R-KS) in the Washington Post. The signal other achievements were working with
Richard Lugar (R-IN) to secure dangerous conventional weapons in
the former Soviet Union, penning an “incisive” chapter on foreign policy in his second book, and convincing “global
experts” such as Samantha Power and Susan
Hill to work for him. In their less hagiographic tome, Dupuis and
Boeckelman's two-page review of Obama's work on international affairs
also cited his work with Lugar and his 2006 trip to Africa. The latter was also stressed in Mendell's
biography, where the senator symbolically took an HIV test in public and where his speech, “A Common Humanity Through
Common Security,” stressed that AIDS, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and environmental degradation should bind rather
divide people across the globe – although Obama, typically, “offered few specifics as to how that should occur.”[77]
In terms of his substantive policy views, Obama's senatorial record was one –
unsurprising perhaps, as a junior senator with national ambitions – solidly in line with his party. He voted with his
party 95 percent of the time in 2005, according to Congressional Quarterly, with just
eight senators more consistently Democratic, and of his hundreds of votes he “agonized over a dozen or so.”[78] According to National Journal, Obama's votes were more liberal
than 76 percent of all fellow senators on foreign policy, and more conservative than 15 percent. He was rated as the most
liberal senator of all one hundred on the basis of his 2007–08 voting record by National Journal. As Christopher
Hitchens
argued, the reality of Obama's foreign policy record, together
with his inexperience of executive office, did not suggest
a president bringing novel or transformative change to America's
engagement with the world, even if his speeches and persona
did.
It was difficult, though not impossible (Al Gore, after all, ran for the presidency
in 1988 and John Edwards first ran in 2004, at the end of his first full term in the Senate), to imagine a white American
politician running for the presidency on the same meagre basis as Obama's bid: community organizer, state legislator, and
barely two years in the US Senate before formally announcing a presidential campaign on February 10, 2007. With minimal foreign policy experience,
and an entirely conventional liberal voting record, to present a campaign
as “the new face of American politics”[79]
also represented a truly audacious gambit.
Its success relied on the deep unpopularity of the Bush years, the
internal demographic battles of the Democratic Party's
fractious base, and the ability of an exceptionally gifted,
eloquent and distinctive candidate in Obama to connect with key
elite officials, fundraisers and demographics – not least African
Americans, the college educated, and the young –
within the party.
In that respect, Obama almost certainly would not have won the party's nomination
in 2008 without his unique position on the Iraq war. Among the leading
candidates, only Obama was able to claim consistent opposition to the intervention. Clinton, Joe
Biden, John Edwards, and Christopher Dodd had all voted for the
Senate resolution to authorize the use of force in 2002, while
Bill Richardson (then governor of New Mexico) had vocally
supported it as well. By the time, in 2008, that almost no Democratic
primary and caucus voters approved either of the war or of George
W. Bush, only Obama was able to claim complete “purity.”
Not only did his good “judgment” thereby garner him early media
attention, help his money-raising efforts and
compensate for his lack of experience in foreign affairs – a key
charge made against him by his opponents and, especially,
Hillary Clinton – but he also made sure to note that he did not
oppose all wars, only the “dumb” ones; crucial
protection against subsequent Republican charges of softness on
national security.
But in terms of specifics, the campaign's
progression offered some more flesh on the relatively thin bones
of Obama's foreign policy record. Drawing from his chapter
in The Audacity of Hope, his
Foreign Affairs
campaign article of 2007, his campaign website, debate answers and
public
speeches, thirteen themes emerged as key templates of an emerging
strategy to guide the US through a potentially treacherous
post-American era:
- The war on terror, whether renamed or not, would continue, but with a more effective execution. Its central focus would return to Afghanistan, the real central front in the war on terrorism, and Obama would deploy two additional brigades (approximately 10,000 troops), made available by a 16-month draw-down from Iraq.
- Obama supported proposals by Joe Biden on pressuring Pakistan by tying US military aid more closely to Pakistani anti-terrorist actions, and to triple US non-military aid to Islamabad for education, health and infrastructure to $1.5 billion per year. Obama reserved the right to order unilateral US strikes on Pakistani territory.
What these commitments amounted to in terms of gleaning any reliable sense of Obama's
overall perspective on international relations remained rather unclear. For example, in The Audacity of Hope, he stated that, “We need a revised foreign policy framework that
matches the boldness and scope of Truman's post-World War II policies – one that addresses both the challenges and the
opportunities of a new millennium, one that guides our use of force and expresses
our deepest ideals and commitments.”[80]
But in the next sentence he responded forcefully: “I don't presume to
have
his grand strategy in my hip pocket.” What Obama did seem to
reject was a mere set of traditional liberal goals, as
might have befitted a Democratic candidate during prior decades.
As he put it, the conventional objectives that liberals currently
have – withdrawal from Iraq, stopping AIDS, working with our
allies more closely – “have merit. But they
hardly constitute a coherent national security policy” whereby “to
make America more secure, we are going to have
to help make the world more secure.”[81]
Perhaps Zakaria's claiming Obama for the realist mantle therefore held better sway?
After all, while excoriating the George W. Bush administration's “unilateralism,” Obama argued that acting multilaterally,
which is “almost always” in the US strategic interest when it comes to using force, did not mean giving the UN
Security Council a veto power over the US. Instead, it “means doing what George H. W. Bush and his team did in the first
Gulf War – engaging in the hard diplomatic work of obtaining most of the world's support for our actions, and making
sure our actions serve to further recognized international norms.”[82]
Yet, the administration having
done all of that hard work, most Democrats in the Senate voted
against authorizing force in the Gulf in 1991 – including
Obama's vice-presidential selection, Senator Joe Biden. What if
the hard diplomatic work failed once more, as in 2002? Would
Obama, like Biden later did in 2002, then endorse the “unilateral”
deployment of US force?
Whether Obama – like Biden, Hillary, Tom Daschle and others – would
have voted for the Iraq resolution had he actually been a sitting US senator in 2002 represented a “known unknown.”
But as a sitting senator, Obama did emphatically oppose the 2006–07 “surge” in Iraq, favoring instead the
“realist” prescriptions of the Baker-Hamilton
Study Group:
he voted to deny funds to that surge; he insisted on a rigid
timetable for withdrawal of troops; and he denied the centrality
of the surge to the stabilization of Iraq in 2008. Thus, on the
key question on which he could vote as a sitting legislator,
his much vaunted judgment proved faulty and, as The Economist put it, “both wrong
and dangerous”[83] – the surge being the key initiative bringing Iraq to a position in which,
ironically, the war had receded sufficiently as an election issue that both Obama and McCain
could commit to troop drawdowns. Indeed, just as Obama's
opposition for the war sealed his advantage in gaining the nomination,
so McCain's steadfast support for it (and especially for the surge
when, at a time of deep demoralization among Republicans, the Arizona senator repeated his refrain that he would “rather
lose an election than lose a war”) was crucial to his obtaining the GOP candidacy.
But a similar predicament confronted Obama observers on other foreign policy issues.
The strong campaign rhetoric that the senator deployed during the
primaries and caucuses to tilt towards protectionism
on trade he subsequently dismissed in the summer
of 2008 as “overheated.” Having argued for no preconditions for negotiations with Iran, he subsequently called
for careful “preparations” before any such direct efforts. Having declared an undivided Jerusalem to be his position
in his June 4, 2008 speech to AIPAC, his campaign retreated the next day to (re)state that the city's status was always to
be part of a negotiated settlement between the Israeli and Palestinian
parties. Having opposed it previously, Obama voted in the summer of 2008 for legislation to grant immunity to those telecommunications
companies that cooperated with the federal government on
counter-terrorist
monitoring in the aftermath of 9/11. In sum, whether one followed
an inductive or deductive method to ascertain Obama's core
foreign policy philosophy, discerning where Obama stood on foreign
policy specifics was a difficult enterprise.
Even
in terms of his own
party, the studied ambiguities, refinements of prior positions,
and campaign emphasis on change together obscured rather than
clarified where Obama's approach was best identified. In the
useful typology of Kurt
Campbell and Michael O'Hanlon,[84] four types of
foreign policy tendencies are identifiable within today's Democratic
Party: hard power Democrats, who view the flaw in the Bush Doctrine as its problematic
execution, not its design; globalists, who focus on problems caused by globalization
and broader definitions of security, and who are mostly uneasy with the use of military force; modest
power Democrats, who would prefer America to retrench and refocus energies and treasure at home, regarding Bill Clinton-style
Democrats as “Republican-lite;” and global rejectionists,
comprising old-style
leftists, labor unions and environmentalists, especially prevalent
in the blogosphere and American academia. If one sought
to place Obama within this particular typology, perhaps the only
category from which one would confidently have excluded him
was the last. But he could have fitted into the first three
easily, and even the last – at least on the basis of his
voting record – would have had something to commend it. “All and
none of the above” was not an inappropriate
assessment.
Some imprecision was perhaps inevitable. Ajami,
pointing more to the personal story of Obama and the cultural milieu from which he emerged, put it thus:
Samuel Huntington, in Who Are We?, a controversial book that took up this delicate question of American identity, put forth three big conceptions of America: national, imperial and cosmopolitan. In the first, America remains America. In the second, America remakes the world. In the third, the world remakes America. Back and forth, America oscillated between the nationalist and imperial callings. The standoff between these two ideas now yields to the strength and the claims of cosmopolitanism. It is out of this new conception of America that the Obama phenomenon emerges.[85]
Huntington's three-fold framework essentially reflected a realist/nationalist, neo-conservative/liberal
interventionist, and a cosmopolitan/transnationalist trifecta.
On the national model, America can neither become the world and
remain America – the erstwhile cosmopolitan model; nor
can it convert or impose “American values” abroad, however
tempting the imperial impulse to do so has historically
proven (the neo-conservative/interventionist model). But the
cosmopolitan view, increasingly dominant in US universities,
the mainstream media elites and among American judges and law
professors, is one whereby the world in effect reshapes America:
America welcomes the world, its ideas, its goods, and, most importantly, its people. The ideal would be an open society with open borders, encouraging sub-national ethnic, racial, and cultural identities, dual citizenship, diasporas, and led by elites who increasingly identified with global institutions, norms, and rules rather than national ones. America should be multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural. Diversity is a prime if not the prime value. The more people who bring to America different languages, religions, and customs, the more American America becomes ... The activities of Americans would more and more be governed not by the federal and state governments, but by rules set by international authorities, such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the World Court, customary international law, and global treaties and regimes.[86]
In the hackneyed phrase, Americans should not act, as the late Richard Holbrooke described it, “with consistent disregard for what the Declaration
of Independence called ‘a decent respect to the opinions of mankind',”[87]
– never
mind that the actual meaning of the phrase was not about colonial
Americans heeding foreigners' advice, but showing them the
respect of declaring “the causes which impel them to the
separation.”
The dynamics and speeches of 2008 made it difficult, at that stage at least, to
contest such an interpretation as being the most applicable to Obama's basic worldview. Obama's Berlin
speech, while cultivated as much for Americans' eyes at home as
for the ears of Europeans, certainly evinced the quintessential
“world citizen” mode. Indeed, the speech serves as a model of
Obama's cosmopolitanism – the quintessential
product of “post-modern” multicultural politics. As Obama avowed
in the speech, the West's triumph in the Cold
War proved that “there is no challenge too great for a world that
stands as one” (even though the world was, as
tends to be the case in most wars, manifestly not as one). Much as
Obama used his dual African and American heritages to appeal
to an increasingly diverse black community in the United States
during his campaigns for the state legislative and US Senate
races – the product of immigration reform since the 1960s that has
seen large-scale African and Caribbean immigration
which has added to the community intra- as well as inter-racial
tensions –
to craft appeals as being rooted in but not limited by his
identity, so the implicit message that Obama offered to the world
was that he may be rooted in America, but he is not limited by
that; unlike, most obviously, George W. Bush, Senator John
McCain, and then Governor Sarah Palin. As Carl Pedersen suggested,
Obama represented, much to their delight, a “rooted cosmopolitan”
holding out the hope of bringing about a “post-American” foreign policy:
A cosmopolitan American national identity actively promoted by a rooted cosmopolitan president will inevitably have an impact on notions of American exceptionalism that elide national differences in favour of an us-versus-them worldview ... Furthermore, cosmopolitanism can function as a bulwark against the cultural myopia that has plagued American foreign policy since 1898, by nurturing deep knowledge of other societies. Instead of seeing cosmopolitanism as a threat of disunion, Americans could regard it as an opportunity to become citizens of the world even as they maintain their allegiance to the US.[88]
Such
an appeal carried obvious risks domestically, not least with the large
swathes
of America – small-town, provincial, nationalist, religious, gun
owning, hunting – for whom the term “cosmopolitan”
assuredly did not apply. Obama's prevailing in the presidential
race owed at least as much to the burdens of elitism, class,
and gender that he needed to triumph over as that of race. But the
general election
campaign also featured two important factors that assisted Obama
strongly. First was the dominance of the economy –
the most important issue to 63 percent of voters, 53 percent of
whom supported Obama on it, compared to just 44 percent for
McCain. But, second, it is important to note that exit polls
showed Iraq to be the second most important issue to voters (at
10 percent) and terrorism tied with health care for third (9
percent each). Those citing Iraq as the most important issue
to them favored Obama by 59 percent to 39 percent, while McCain
carried those most concerned about terrorism
by the huge margin of 86 percent to 13 percent.[89]
The absence of another 9/11 terrorist attack on the homeland since
2001, and the
relative stabilization of Iraq since the surge, had together muted
the salience of foreign affairs to evaluations of the two
nominees.
But
the real burden of an approach that stressed the credentials of
“Cosmopolitan-in-Chief”
over Commander-in-Chief were always more likely to occur in office
than on the campaign trail. Even with a Democratic House
and Senate with large majorities, many of the “soft” security
imperatives that Obama stressed need to be met –
ending energy dependence, tackling the illegal narcotics trade and
combating climate change – remained years, if not
decades, away from significant reform, much less resolution.
Convincing NATO allies to do more in Afghanistan was laudable,
but quite how Obama proposed to succeed where Bush had failed was
unclear. If the promised direct negotiations failed with
Iran, as they did previously in more propitious times with the
gifted diplomat Bill Clinton, what then? If a precipitate drawdown
in Iraq plunged the nation back into instability, while failing to
pacify Afghanistan or to meet the ever-growing security
threats from Pakistan, how well would the rhetoric of “standing
together” as one fare? And if Obama genuinely
acted on his campaign promise to use military force within
Pakistan if the US had actionable intelligence on al Qaeda and
Islamabad refused so to do, what then of the attempt to reclaim
America's legitimacy and respect in the Muslim world?
Moreover,
finally, with a Democratic Congress and undivided Democratic
control of the federal government for the first time since 1993–4,
the dangers that the elected institution least susceptible to protectionist pressures (the presidency) would succumb to those most
susceptible (the Senate and, especially, the House) remained very real and dangerous. Obama's trade record was a microcosm
of the lack of clarity – or, for his supporters, the pragmatism – in his foreign policy more broadly.[90]
He had stated
that expanding trade and breaking down barriers between nations
benefited the US economy and security. But Obama publicly
supported yet then voted against the Dominican Republic-Central
America-US Free Trade Agreement in 2005, voted for the Oman
Free Trade Agreement in 2006, opposed the free trade agreement
with Colombia – a key US ally – in 2008, and supported
the Peru Free
Trade Agreement in 2007 (only subsequently to miss the Senate vote). Obama's U-turns on NAFTA
renegotiation, scepticism about the Doha Round, support for
proposals to strengthen the renminbi, and advocacy of tax credits
for US companies that kept their headquarters in America and that
increased their US labor force relative to their overseas
workforce together belied his “cosmopolitan” credentials and
powerfully suggested that international relations
under an Obama administration – particularly one backed by large
Democratic congressional majorities – would be
anything but straightforward for allies abroad.
As
the 2008 campaign developed, Obama gained ever greater national and
international
admiration and support, while simultaneously posing an increasing
enigma to more critical observers. Despite the rhetorical
brilliance, self-conscious intellectualism and strongly
charismatic appeals, the most audacious decision Obama made in his
entire public life was to run for the US presidency. By virtue of
being unknown and distinctive, Obama not only articulated
but also symbolized the change which democratic politics is
deliberately designed to facilitate. As critics such as Gerard Baker put it, “It is indeed audacious to think that hope – and not much else – is sufficient to run a great country.”[91] And despite his campaign's tactical brilliance, its overall strategy was consistently cautious and
risk averse. The change
that Obama called for remained, for the most
part, as reliably opaque as his voting record had been reliably
conventional and his bipartisanship reliably rare. As previously
enthusiastic Arab leaders increasingly realized, the black
progressive African American senator increasingly appeared an American
first, a progressive second, and an African American third.
Whether this was so by calculation or conviction – or a
carefully calibrated combination of the two – was not fully clear.
But Obama's victory was not because he was a black politician nor even a politician
who “happened to be black” – one who, in Shelby
Steele's formulation, was a “bargainer”
rather than a “challenger” when it comes to dealing with the status quo.[92]
Rather, it was
because Obama embodied and exuded a cosmopolitanism whose
symbolism overshadowed substance and was itself the story, the message,
and – ultimately – the grand strategy. Obama's strongest
supporters regarded him as not just a “change agent”
but also a “transformational figure” who, largely by dint of who
he was, could repair America's tarnished global
image and bring closure, catharsis and redemption to the recent
history of pain at home and abroad alike.
Obama's
election certainly represented an historic symbolic development for
America
that had an impact at home and around the world. But, contrary to
the forecasts of his most ardent supporters, for whom Obama's
offer represented nothing less than “an end to US stupidity,”[93] there existed good reason to expect
that in substance this would exacerbate, not ease, Obama's time in his office. As Krauthammer
noted by way of historical comparison:
The problem is that Obama began believing in his own magical powers – the chants, the swoons, the “we are the ones” self-infatuation. Like Ronald Reagan, he was leading a movement, but one entirely driven by personality. Reagan's revolution was rooted in concrete political ideas (supply-side economics, welfare-state deregulation, national strength) that transcended one man. For Obama's movement, the man is the transcendence.[94]
As Kathleen Hall Jamieson
later reflected on the Obama campaign: “There's a tendency to overpromise and overestimate the power of the presidency.
He made all those mistakes as a candidate. It helped him get elected. But it all but guaranteed he would fail to meet the
expectations in his governance.”[95]
Long before John McCain
began stressing his admiration for “TR” during the 2008 campaign, Obama had characterized the Bush Doctrine as
an extension of Theodore Roosevelt's more expansive corollary to
the Monroe Doctrine (“the notion that we could pre-emptively
remove governments not to our liking”[96])
from the Western hemisphere to span the entire globe. But the choice
confronting
Washington was, and remains, neither the starkly binary one of
unilateralism versus multilateralism, realism versus idealism,
nor war versus peace. Post-Bush, the next US president would
confront a myriad of global challenges, a mix of reliable and
unreliable allies, and a set of creaking institutions from the UN
to NATO that, if not quite broken, were inadequate fully
to meet the threats of a dangerous and changing world. President
Obama, like all his predecessors since 1945, inherited an
office at once of extraordinary power and extraordinary
limitations. Priorities needed to be identified. Limited resources
had to be deployed in a world of unlimited demands on American
power. And a careful calibration of constraints as well as
opportunities would necessarily condition American action with
allies and against adversaries. How Obama sought to reconcile
the harsh realities of office with the exuberant transformative
hopes of his “change” campaign is the subject
to which we turn next.
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