What Obama's Victory Means For US Foreign Policy

The President-Elect Faces Stiff Challenges In Reshaping America's Relationship With The Rest Of The World

By Julian Borger
Wednesday November 5 2008 08.40 GMT
Courtesy Of The Guardian

As election day approached, both presidential candidates were given a CIA briefing, sketching out the shape of the world the winner would inherit. At the end of an exhausting and sometimes terrifying list of global threats, Barack Obama took a deep breath, according to someone familiar with his session, and said: "Good grief, why do I want this job?"

Now the job is his, and he has until January 20 to prepare himself and his staff before taking on a troubled world. Obama has of course been preparing for years. He has approached foreign policy in the same cool and strategic manner he handled the long campaign. By the end of the race, there were 300 foreign policy experts - divided up into groups by region and issue - brainstorming for him.

That huge thinktank moved from campaign to transition mode weeks before election day so that it would be ready to break to the surface as soon as the votes were counted. The new president-elect is said to be anxious to avoid the mistakes of Bill Clinton and George Bush, who took months to get their policies and staff in place while the world changed around them. Some reports from the Obama camp suggest a national security team could be named by the end of the week.

The broad foreign policy goals of the new White House have been repeatedly signalled over the course of the long campaign. US troops will be pulled out of Iraq in the next 16 months, while the American force in Afghanistan will be substantially reinforced, reversing what is widely seen as one of the fundamental strategic blunders of the Bush era. The US military effort is to be focused once more on al-Qaida and its allies. Obama has vowed that if necessary, American forces would, as under the Bush administration, cross the Pakistan border in pursuit of al-Qaida targets.

There will be a much higher level of US engagement in the Middle East, reversing the arms-length ambivalence that characterised much of the Bush administration and returning to the micro-management attempted by Clinton. Clinton's Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, is one of Obama's closest advisers. He accompanied the candidate to the region over the summer and is tipped for high office in the new administration, signalling the priority given to the region.

The president-elect has made it clear his administration would be willing to talk directly with Syria and Iran, both pariahs in the eyes of the Bush White House. Obama's advisers see an opportunity to draw Damascus away from Iran's orbit with the promise of international acceptance, investment and the land-for-peace deal that Clinton came close to brokering, exchanging the Golan Heights for a guarantee of Israeli security.

The Syrian foreign minister, Walid Mualem, came to London late last month with a message intended for Washington: Damascus is open for business and would ultimately prefer alignment with America - particularly under Obama's leadership - to a future perpetually joined at the hip with the Shia clerics in Iran.

As for Iran's theocracy, Obama has said his administration would be ready for direct talks with Tehran, though probably not at summit level while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains in office. There would be no weakening of the west's position of refusing to countenance the enrichment of uranium in Iran, but there could be talk about broader strategic issues with the aim of a "grand bargain" in the region.

Underpinning these initiatives is a global philosophy sketched out by Obama's team and a group of Democratic foreign policy specialists who called themselves the Phoenix Initiative - supposedly taking wing after two Democratic defeats. When the group published its report last year, the preface was written by Susan Rice, Obama's chief foreign policy adviser.

The core idea essentially turns the Bush doctrine on its head. It argues the main problems and threats facing America in the 21st century - terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change and dependence on fossil fuels - cannot by addressed by one country acting alone or even in concert with traditional allies. As Obama said in his first major foreign policy address, in Chicago last year: "The threats we face at the dawn of the 21st century can no longer be contained by borders and boundaries."

The aim would be to restore America's global leadership in a world that is no longer unipolar. It would be achieved not primarily through military force (although the Obama team are at pains to stress they are not traditional liberal doves), but through soft power, exemplary action and networking among governments, inside and outside formal international organisations, to address specific problems.

An Obama White House would seek to take the initiative on the two existential issues facing the planet, nuclear proliferation and climate change. It would seek to negotiate deep cuts in the US and Russian arsenals, to give the non-proliferation treaty before it comes up for review in 2010 and before a nuclear arms race breaks out in the Middle East.

To confront global warming, Obama has said he is ready to adopt a European-style cap-and-trade system of mandatory limits on emissions for the world's major polluters. That would include China and India, emerging economies that have been resistant to facing the same constraints as industrialised countries.

Taken together, the policies represent a sharp break with the Bush era to suit a world in which American hegemony has arguably run its course, a break personified by the president himself. Being America's first black president, with the middle name Hussein, gives him a transformational image across the globe. That will open a lot of doors but raise expectations to impossible levels.

The big question now is how many of Obama's carefully laid plans will survive the realities of office, when crises come thick and fast. For his foreign policy team, January 20 will seem like walking out of a serene library into a meteor shower.

"The problem is going to be everything is going to come at them from day one," said Stephen Stedman, a Stanford University professor and a director of a national strategic project known as Managing Global Insecurity.

"You'll have an enormous number of crises and a global agenda coming at you," Stedman said. "Are they going to be able to think strategically about where they are going to be in two or three years, or are they going to be reactive? The temptation will be to put off decisions on international institutions and deal with the crises."

Getting out of Iraq will be all the more imperative because a financially weakened America can no longer afford to stay, but it will be far from easy. Robert Kaplan, an author and strategic analyst at the Centre for a New American Security in Washington, warns that the insurgents and the Iranian government will seek to ensure an American withdrawal is a humiliating one.

"I fear a measurable uptick in violence in Iraq if Obama wins on Tuesday," Kaplan wrote last week, arguing that US forces should ease their way out of Iraq rather than "rush for the exits".

"Tough, albeit responsible, talk on Iraq the moment he is elected would buy the president-elect time. While his fervent desire to withdraw may be the correct approach, in the Hobbesian world of the Middle East, it transmits only vulnerability," Kaplan argued.

In Afghanistan, security has been eroding and the Taliban is resurgent. Diplomats and soldiers in the US and Europe have been warning that pouring in more troops could be ineffective, or even counter-productive without a stronger government in Kabul to fight for. Meanwhile, continuing to cross the Pakistani border in pursuit of al-Qaida or the Taliban could fatally weaken that country's already fragile democracy and bolster extremism.

In the Middle East, progress could be torpedoed before it even begins if the moderate Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, fails to negotiate an extension to his term with Hamas, and if the hawkish Binyamin Netanyahu emerges from Israel's elections as the new prime minister. As for the Syrian track, Mualem's overtures in London may well not have the backing of the formidable security apparatus. Meanwhile, Obama may have to postpone direct talks with Tehran for fear of boosting Ahmadinejad before Iran's presidential elections in June.

Even Obama's ambitious plans for taking the lead on climate change before the planned Copenhagen summit at the end of this year could be blocked at home at a time of recession and belt-tightening.

"A Copenhagen agreement with strictures and cap-and-trade is going to be hard for this Congress to digest," said Steve Clemons, a foreign policy strategist at the New America Foundation. "They are going to have to find a way to engage in climate change that is credible but isn't going to deliver another gut-punch to the economy."

The constant buffeting of unforeseen events means that political campaigns, however successful, are poor indicators of how presidents will govern. Obama steps on to the international stage holding the promise of transformation and a global realignment.

He comes buoyed by goodwill but weighed down by expectations. America's predicament has worsened exponentially since he began his campaign, and has the potential to deteriorate yet further. Hopes are high, but so are the dangers.