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Obama’s foreign policy takes the long-term view
By Abby McCartney Abby McCartney is a sophomore Political Science major in Yale’s Branford College. With each Democratic debate, the responses get a little more ridiculous. The questions about Iraq become more and more issues of semantics, or else of nitty-gritty details that will have to be worked out later by the generals and Congress. One candidate supports bringing all the troops home in a year. Another says eight months. Another says he will leave behind support forces to guard the embassy, sparking an argument over whether such guards count as “troops.” Left unsaid is the truth at the center of the debate: Most of the Democratic candidates fundamentally agree on Iraq, and any plan offered now to bring the troops home will be functionally useless by the time any of them—knock on wood—are sworn in January 2009. The more interesting question is the question not being asked: What comes next? Assuming that withdrawing most of the American military presence, establishing some form of political solution to mitigate the ongoing civil war, and stabilizing the borders of Iraq and the region will be the immediate foreign policy priorities of the next president, what will the next three years of American foreign policy look like? And how are we going to get there? Alone among the major candidates, Senator Barack Obama has laid out a comprehensive plan for fighting the nebulous “war on terror” in concrete and sophisticated terms. Rather than using the debacle that is Iraq as a reason to withdraw from the world, he argued in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs that we must “use this moment” to confront “threats are at least as dangerous as and in some ways more complex than those we have confronted in the past.” His strategy combines military strength with diplomatic finesse, utilizes the “soft power” of American reputation and influence productively, and incorporates a vision of American power that goes beyond conflict resolution in the “hot spots” of Iraq, Iran, Israel, and North Korea. It is a vision worthy of closer consideration, not least of all because such a long-term and comprehensive view of the world is so rarely offered and discussed. In a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on August, 2007, Obama identified terrorism as an ongoing and serious threat, saying, “Just because the President misrepresents our enemies does not mean we do not have them.” He then went on to identify five components of his comprehensive counterterrorism strategy: “getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan; developing the capabilities and partnerships we need to take out the terrorists and the world’s most deadly weapons; engaging the world to dry up support for terror and extremism; restoring our values; and securing a more resilient homeland.” If you heard about this speech at all, you probably heard about Pakistan. In their infinite wisdom, the reporters covering the speech identified the toughened rhetoric against President Musharraf as the major news event of the day and turned this quote into the soundbite: “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.” Certainly this was an important statement, and it drew criticism from some, who argued that it is irresponsible for presidential candidates to threaten foreign leaders and risk undermining complex diplomatic relationships. Nonetheless, Obama was hardly breaking new ground with this comment: He was simply vowing a renewed commitment to an existing tenet of American foreign policy. There was a time when President Bush promised to lean more heavily on Pakistan, too. Reading the entire speech, though, one discovers an odd but effective mix of eloquence and details. Obama lays out a sweeping portrait of America as the hope of the world, and the speech occasionally takes a literary turn, referring to Northwest Pakistan as “the wild frontier of our globalized world,” full of “wind-swept deserts and cave-dotted mountains.” But interspersed among these grand and fuzzy declarations are specific policy proposals. Obama did not just scale up the rhetoric on Pakistan’s practice of harboring terrorists. He also vowed to make foreign aid to Pakistan conditional on a crackdown on terrorist training camps and to increase support in the border region to help the Pakistani government provide secular education and establish order. An oft-cited but little acted-upon sentiment in politics since September 11 has been the need for our military to evolve to face a new kind of threat. While the Bush administration has rearranged a few organizational charts, its approach to military strength is still largely conventional, and this outdated structure is at the root of many of the problems we face in fighting an insurgency in Iraq. Obama, recognizing this, proposes a new set of “Mobile Development Teams” that would incorporate personnel from the State Department, Pentagon, and USAID. These teams would work to address problems holistically, from political and economic as well as military points of view, recognizing that few conflicts in our modern world can be boiled down to a single issue or response. He also proposes a “Shared Security Partnership Program,” with a $5 billion budget, to focus exclusively on counter-terrorism cooperation with other countries, from securing borders to fighting corruption to improving the sharing of information. Perhaps most importantly, Obama has framed all of his initiatives in terms of fighting extremism from its roots. Noting that extremism flourishes in places where opportunity seems most distant, he has vowed to create a $2 billion “Global Education Fund”2 to provide an alternative to radical madrasas and bring the world’s economy within reach of its most desperate residents. And he has promised to double the United States’ commitment to poverty reduction in the developing world by 2012. As he put it, “We must work for a world where every child, everywhere, is taught to build and not to destroy.” John Edwards, the only major candidate to make non-Iraq foreign policy a major focal point of his campaign, makes a similar point, arguing that we must restore America’s role of moral leadership in the world. However, like most foreign policy plans laid out by the other Democratic candidates, his proposals are largely discussed in terms of undoing the damage of the Bush administration, rather than forming a distinctive vision for the future. He calls on us to “repair the tremendous damage done to civil-military relations” and “root out cronyism and waste and increase efficiency at the Pentagon.” Edwards also identifies ending global poverty as a “moral and security issue,” but he focuses far more on the moral aspect, calling for primary education for every child and better efforts at preventing disease, mentioning the prevention of extremism only as an aside. This is not to say that he is wrong: The vast inequalities among children born in different parts of the world may well be the starkest moral issue of our time. But for generations, American taxpayers have resisted increases in foreign aid and global poverty programs because their altruistic impulses were not strong enough to override pressing domestic concerns. Until politicians begin to frame education and economic development in the developing world as national security issues—the national security issue, if terrorism is our primary concern—the expense will continue to be hard to justify. But if every leader talked about the issue as Obama has—as primarily a long-term strategy to make the world safer for everyone, from Tehran to Nairobi to Chicago—the fight over funding would begin to take on a very different shape. And in fact, this is the distinctive characteristic of Obama’s foreign policy vision. His view of America as the hope of the world is based on a certain degree of idealism, to be sure, but also on the practical necessity of winning support and trust in pockets of the world where we have long been hated. The Economist called it a “Clintonian” outlook—in the Bill sense—but worried that American voters would hesitate to take the risk of engaging in messy and complex situations around the world. What they failed to understand was the foundation of self-interest that underlies Obama’s proposals. By talking about global altruism as a crucial counter-terrorism strategy, Obama is well on his way to convincing the country that “the security and well-being of each and every American depend on the security and well-being of those who live beyond our borders”—and not just in Iraq. |
