The Audacity of What?

OBAMA IS A PRAGMATIC REALIST

“The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional, bipartisan, realistic foreign policy of George Bush’s father, John F. Kennedy, of in some ways Ronald Reagan.” March 28, 2008

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama promised to bring back the sort of traditional, interests-based pragmatism that has defined the majority of postwar U.S. foreign policy. He promised to restart dialogue with hostile countries like Iran and Cuba and was fond of quoting Kennedy: “Never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate.”

The message proved popular with the pundits, and ultimately with voters as well. When he took office, Obama’s appointments seemed to reflect a realist mindset — keeping Robert Gates at the Pentagon and placing his more hawkish primary rival Hillary Clinton in Foggy Bottom.

There are certainly elements of realism in Obama’s foreign policy so far: Working with China and Russia to isolate Iran, maintaining ties with Beijing while building military alliances with countries like Taiwan and Vietnam, working to ease the decades-long political stalemate with Cuba within the limits imposed by Congress, restarting diplomatic relations with Syria, and nudging Sudan in a more productive direction through carrots and sticks.

Obama’s realism may be most evident in the “reset” with Russia. Despite criticism from human rights advocates and U.S. allies along the former Soviet periphery, he has aggressively wooed Moscow, agreeing to relocate a planned U.S. missile shield in Eastern Europe and supporting Russia’s bid to join the World Trade Organization. And he’s been rewarded, arguably, with Russian support for a northern supply route into Afghanistan and a treaty on nuclear arms reduction.

Whether this approach will continue to bear fruit is open to debate, but it’s clear that Obama’s team sees him as fitting in this mold. When asked to describe his boss’s foreign policy earlier this year, outgoing Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said, “If you had to put him in a category, he’s probably more realpolitik, like Bush 41.”

OBAMA IS A LIBERAL INTERNATIONALIST

“To put it simply, democracy, more than any other form of government, delivers for our citizens. And I believe that truth will only grow stronger in a world where the borders between nations are blurred.” Sept. 23, 2010

For most of the first year of Obama’s presidency, democracy and human rights seemed a secondary concern. Funds for democracy promotion in the Middle East were cut; a meeting with the Dalai Lama was delayed over fears of offending China; and the voices of prominent human rights hawks within the administration, such as U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and White House advisor Samantha Power, seemed absent from the national conversation. When asked whether she would raise human rights concerns on a visit to China in February 2009, Clinton dismissively remarked, “We pretty much know what they are going to say.”

Last year, however, came signs that the administration might be taking some small steps toward a more liberal internationalist foreign policy. Last January,Clinton laid out an ambitious agenda for using the Internet to promote democracy, following up on the administration’s intervention to keep Twitter operating during the 2009 Iranian election protests.

Obama’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly in September was probably his most strident statement on democracy to date, calling on the organization to do more to protect and promote civil society. When he made high-profile stops in rising democracies India and Indonesia — but not authoritarian China — during his Asia trip last fall, the message was pretty clear. And when imprisoned Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo’s won the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama took the opportunity to note that “political reform has not kept pace” with China’s economic progress and called on Beijing to “release Mr. Liu as soon as possible.”

Granted, Obama’s no Woodrow Wilson. But George W. Bush’s bellicose rhetoric didn’t exactly make the world safe for democracy either. Perhaps Obama’s more measured approach — speaking out on human rights when it’s useful and staying quiet when it’s not (such as during the Iran protests, when overt American support might have discredited the Green Movement) might meet with more success.

OBAMA’S PRESIDENCY IS A CONTINUATION OF BUSH’S

“We must never lose sight of what’s at stake. As we speak, al Qaeda continues to plot against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We will disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda, while preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a base for terrorists. And because of our drawdown in Iraq, we are now able to apply the resources necessary to go on offense.” Aug. 31, 2010

Shortly before Obama took office, former State Department speechwriter Christian Brose predicted in Foreign Policy that the new president would be successful, “not because he’ll totally change the foreign policy he’ll inherit from Bush, but because he’ll largely continue it.” It seemed a highly counterintuitive argument at the time. After all, Obama was a liberal democrat who first defined himself as a candidate by his opposition to the Iraq war. Two years later, the idea doesn’t seem so far-fetched, and in many ways, Obama’s foreign policy is even closer to Bush’s than Brose predicted.

Although Obama has officially overseen the end of combat operations in Iraq, at least 50,000 residual “noncombat” troops remain in the country and the withdrawal timetable is nearly identical to the one negotiated by Bush. Meanwhile, Obama has dramatically expanded the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan and escalated a punishing campaign of drone attacks against al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan.

Obama has tried, with limited success, to close down the prison facility at Guantánamo Bay, but has preserved many of Bush’s controversial legal tactics — including extraordinary rendition of terrorist subjects for detention and interrogation in third countries and the use of military commissions to prosecute Gitmo detainees. And like Bush, Obama has supported immigration reform, funded the drug war in Mexico, and deepened economic and military cooperation with India.

Often the differences have been more in tone than in substance. Bush may have had closer relationships with the countries in Russia’s near abroad, but that didn’t do much to help Ukraine join NATO or prevent Russian tanks from rolling into Georgia. And despite the hype around Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world and more critical tone toward Israel, the United States remains Israel’s biggest economic and military backer and its staunchest ally at the United Nations.

It may well be that foreign policy is a football game played between the 40-yard lines. But even so, the transition between the two presidents has been far more seamless than the cheering crowds of Berlin likely expected in 2008.

OBAMA’S FOREIGN POLICY IS STILL UNDEFINED

“Foreign policy must be based on a marriage of principles and pragmatism, not rigid ideology.” — Hillary Clinton, Jan. 13, 2009 

Few presidents end their terms with the same foreign policies with which they begin them — as is often pointed out, Bush campaigned on the promise of a humble foreign policy that eschewed the ambitious nation-building projects of the Clinton years. Moreover, presidents rarely fit neatly into the ideological boxes to which they are later assigned: The same Ronald Reagan the critics celebrate for his aggressively ideological “Evil Empire” speech is held up by Obama as an example how a U.S. president can talk constructively with America’s rivals.

At times, Obama’s foreign policy can seem contradictory or even flatly hypocritical. At times, he sounds like a neoliberal free trader in the Clinton mold; at others, like an old-time Democratic protectionist. He will chastise corrupt African governments while tolerating corrupt Middle Eastern ones. The same president who, at times, seems uncommonly aware of declining U.S. influence in the world can also declaim American exceptionalism with such clarity that leading neoconservatives wonder, with some irony, if he might actually be one of their own. Some critics have gone as far as to wonder whether Obama has a defined foreign policy at all.

Not all of this is Obama’s doing. The president, after all, inherited two wars and a global recession and has necessarily spent much of his first term so far addressing the unfinished business of his predecessor rather than laying out a new agenda of his own. And like all presidents, he operates under the constraints of domestic political lobbies and fickle voters — not to mention the hard realities of an unyielding world.

But it also seems at times that Obama is simply testing out what works. In the next two years, we may see what he’s decided.