Obama's Foreign Policy

Have you been sent some variation of hate mail about Barak Obama through your email? Well here's a more rational review of what Obama's foreign policy is likely to resemble if he becomes president of the U.S.A.; from an Australian perspective.
Edward Cohen is an Intern at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, and currently at Cambridge. The following article is posted with the author's permission (kindly so) and that of The Diplomat.
Obama's Foreign Policy:
Barack Obama mania is sweeping the United States. The charm, energy and thrilling idealism that ooze from his speeches have led some Washington commentators to label him as an African-American JFK and the best Democrat orator since Bill Clinton.
One New York magazine columnist called Obama the Aaron Sorkin fantasy candidate, reflecting the combination of tough but compassionate liberalism celebrated by the creator of The West Wing drama series.
Beneath the hype, however, this tension between strength and compassion permeates the core of Obamas political thinking. The different ways in which he has tried to reconcile that tension have re-exposed longstanding uncertainties in the foreign policy of American liberals.
Obamas unusual political education as a community organiser and activist in the impoverished South Side of Chicago steeped him in the radical tradition of American progressive politics. Indeed, Obama has made that experience central to his political identity, announcing his presidential candidacy by saying that the best education he had was not in college but the four years he spent in the mid-1980s working on behalf of Chicagos poor.
Obama began his career influenced by the University of Chicago-trained radical sociologist Saul Alinsky. Alinsky emphasised that appealing to self-interest and using hard power, rather than naive altruism, were the tools to achieve social justice.
This influence has doubtless contributed to Obamas keen sense of political pragmatism that attempts to reconcile acting in the world as it is with the world as he would like it to be the big heart versus the hard head.
Obamas second and most recent book, The Audacity of Hope, provides some clues as to how he translates this approach into foreign policy. In one chapter he upbraids liberals for saying that their top foreign policy priorities were withdrawing troops from Iraq, stopping the spread of AIDS and working more closely with our allies.
The objectives favoured by liberals have merit, he argues, but they hardly constitute a coherent national security policy. Obamas point is not that idealism is misplaced indeed it is implicit in the objectives he wants to pursue but rather that in order to succeed it has to be closely tied to an understanding of both the limits and the possibilities of American hard power.
Several key staffers have helped shape many of the big-picture ideas for the foreign policy side of Obamas campaign. Foremost is Samantha Power, a professor of government at Harvard and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.
For Power, the central failure of the Bush administration has been the squandering of half a century of American leadership of the international system by a cavalier disregard of international institutions as well as of existing and potential alliances.
In lamenting the resultant decline of American legitimacy and credibility, Power argues that now were neither the shining example, nor even competent meddlers. Its going to take a generation or so to reclaim American exceptionalism.
A source of ongoing anger and concern for Power has been what she sees as Americas persistent failure to prevent genocide, a view she formed while covering the Srebrenica massacre for the Washington Post. The United States, the supposedly shining beacon to the world of freedom and human rights, had never in its history intervened to stop genocide, she argued.
In Powers mind, Obama represents the best possibility of allowing America once again to act as a force for good in the world through a reinvented and revitalised international system.
Former national security advisor to President Clinton, Anthony Lake, was also drawn to Obama by the possibility that his political freshness could lead to a fundamental change in American diplomacy. In the immediate post-Cold War period, Lake probably came the closest of anyone in Washingtons foreign policy establishment to formulating a doctrine to follow containment.
As he put it in 1993, The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement enlargement of the worlds free community of market democracies. When introduced to Obama in 2002, Lake was deeply impressed with the then state senator and saw in him the eventual possibility that he was someone who could rethink the premises of the international system.
The central tenet of Obamas foreign policy is that security, democracy promotion and global prosperity require a nuanced appreciation of the limits and proper uses of American power tied to strengthening alliances, ensuring greater consistency between domestic principle and international practice and restoring trust.
American leadership and strength remain prime considerations, but these are to be advanced by a greater focus on the process of meeting challenges, a correction to the Rumsfeldian notion of letting the issues determine the coalitions.
Obama declared that reform of alliances and institutions will not come by bullying other countries to ratify changes we hatch in isolation. It will come when we convince other governments that they, too, have a stake in effective partnerships.
As a social and economic progressive, Obama believes that American foreign policy cannot succeed unless due care is first taken of poverty and social breakdown within America itself.
Safeguarding American prosperity as a prerequisite for leadership overseas is a contemporary version of Jeffersonianism: that in order for American interests to be advanced, the lot of the common person must be improved and the democratic example America sets must be strong. As Obama put it recently Ultimately no foreign policy can succeed unless the American people undertand it and feel they have a stake in its successwe cannot negotiate trade agreementsso long as we provide no meaningful help to working Americans burdened by the dislocations of a global economy.
Rather than reflecting any latent isolationism, this sentiment is premised on the idea that American power is not just something to be exercised to destroy a particular evil, as conservatives would prefer, but something that rests on a popular consensus and must be protected by smarter application. Obama famously said in 2002, Im not opposed to all wars. Im opposed to dumb wars and justified his opposition to the impending attack on Iraq in part by accusing Karl Rove of using the war to distract the American people from rising poverty.
However, in a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in April this year, Obama called for the United States to build the first truly 21st century military ... A 21st century military to stay on the offence, from Djibouti to Kandahar. Repeatedly he emphasised the importance of American global leadership and the USs right to act unilaterally to protect ourselves and our vital interests.
Here Obama becomes more a conventional liberal hawk. The United States, he argues, is still the indispensable nation and its national mission to lead the world towards democracy is as imperative as ever. His writing still reflects the dilemma thrown up by Americas national myth, that the United States has an exceptional responsibility as the leading liberal democracy to pursue universal goals.
In a revealing passage in The Audacity of Hope, Obama laments that there are those who would argue with my starting premise that any global system built in Americas image can alleviate misery in poorer countries.
It is a telling commentary on the resilience of American nationalism, even post-Iraq, that someone as progressive as Obama believes that these two positions are necessarily one and the same.
There is a very real risk here that Obama will fall into the same trap as President John F. Kennedy, a leader he quotes often. In the USs sincere attempts to combat tyranny, he assumes that long-suffering people will naturally choose a system comparable with his own ignoring the cultural context in which self-determination occurs. One need only look to the collision between democratic processes and clan-based local power structures in the recent elections in Papua New Guinea to see the importance of a more nuanced approach.
Ultimately, the most promising aspect of Obamas foreign policy is that he hopes to recalibrate the equilibrium between the ends America pursues and the methods it uses to achieve them.
As Walter Lippman famously put it in 1943, a policy has been formed only when commitments and power have been brought into balance. To the extent that Obama would be able to do this in office, the United States would produce a grand strategy that is not only more politically sustainable from a domestic perspective but also would present a more amenable version of American leadership to an anxiously onlooking world.