Obama Foreign Policy May Keep Some Bush Initiatives

Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) — President-elect Barack Obama is committed to a foreign policy of intense diplomatic engagement with allies and adversaries alike and an international approach to curb nuclear proliferation and terrorism.

He will move to implement pledges to accelerate the U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, build up American forces in Afghanistan and ask allies to play a bigger role in the fight against a resurgent Taliban, advisers say.

Obama, 47, has cast his foreign policy approach as pragmatic rather than ideological, focused on diplomacy and partnerships and not hog-tied to Iraq. He calls it a more modern strategy for the boundary-blind threats of the 21st century.

“To all those watching from beyond our shores, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand,” Obama said in his victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park. “To those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you.”

In a number of areas, there is likely to be continuity with the policies of President George W. Bush.

Mideast Politics

Obama has described a middle path on China much like Bush’s, seeking expanded contacts while pressing for economic concessions. He has criticized Russia for supporting breakaway Georgian territories while eschewing confrontational measures such as expulsion from summits of the Group of Eight economic powers.

While Obama has promised greater engagement in the search for a Middle East peace, he will likely be forced to wait until both Israelis and Palestinians sort out internal political conflicts.

What much of the world may find surprising about Obama’s foreign policy is that it will mark a far less dramatic shift in substance than many anticipate — because Bush has moved in the same direction during his second term.

Analysts point out that Bush has struck a deal with North Korea to contain its nuclear-arms development effort, accepted the idea of a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, embraced talks with some elements of Afghanistan’s Taliban rebels and contemplated opening a diplomatic outpost in Iran.

Russia, China

“The Bush administration has, without acknowledging serious error, tacked away from many of the hallmarks of what it professed to believe in 2003 and 2004,” when it pursued a unilateralist approach, said Andrew Bacevich, an international relations professor at Boston University. “The change that Obama will bring is not going to be as great as many people imagine.”

Obama will face a daunting array of problems when he takes office Jan. 20: the fallout from a global financial crisis, two wars, the persistent threat of terrorism, the nuclear aspirations of hostile and potentially unstable regimes, a resurgent Russia, a rising China and a festering conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Obama had barely been declared the winner when Russia illustrated its expanding role. President Dmitry Medvedev today said Russia would deploy new missiles in Europe to counter a U.S. shield in Poland and the Czech Republic “if necessary.”

Medvedev said he would place a short-range missile system designed to carry conventional warheads in Russia’s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, wedged between Poland and Lithuania. The Russian leader addressed lawmakers in his first state-of-the- nation address since succeeding Vladimir Putin in May.

High Expectations

If the challenges are high, so are the expectations of change, all over the world.

“The new leader of the U.S. must discount this idea, `If there is a problem we go in and bash them and force them to submit to us,”’ said former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in an Oct. 22 interview. Obama, he said, will be “much more likely to bring about” such a shift than his defeated Republican rival, John McCain, would have.

Russian parliamentarian Sergei Markov, an ally of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, voiced a similar view.

“Obama is a rejection of the spoiled America of this century, and the rest of the world wants that,” Markov said. “If the old world order was Washington stamping its feet, the new world order will entail more cooperation with a range of countries,” a view Obama is open to, he said in an interview.

China’s Hesitancy

If much of the world will welcome Obama’s approach, others are more hesitant. Chinese leaders aren’t expecting big changes because Obama buys into a U.S. consensus that China is “a one- party system that is fundamentally against American interests,” said Shen Dingli, director of the Center for American Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University.

Indian leaders, who enjoyed a warming relationship with the U.S. under Bush, may also be wary of departure from that policy. And Israeli leaders will watch Obama to see how far he goes to accommodate adversaries such as Iran.

The Iranian regime, as well as al-Qaeda leaders, may view Obama’s emphasis on engagement and negotiation as a sign of faltering U.S. resolve, said Danielle Pletka, an analyst at Washington’s American Enterprise Institute and a former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“What we think of as multilateralism and internationalism is perceived as weakness by some,” Pletka said. “The problem is that those who perceive it that way are most likely to try to take advantage of it.”

Changed Style

There is wide agreement that Obama will embody a perceptual change in America’s face to the world — partly because he will be the first black president, partly because of life experiences that include a Kenyan father and a boyhood spent in Indonesia, and partly because he isn’t Bush.

“The basic difference is going to be style,” said Edward Walker, a former U.S. diplomat who is now a scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

“Obama is a much more open person, somebody that will at least listen to others, will have an interest in what they have to say,” said Walker, who served as assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs and U.S. ambassador to both Israel and Egypt under President Bill Clinton. “We’ve gotten a reputation of never listening to anybody.”

Early Test

One early test for Obama, analysts said, is whether he can leverage his popularity abroad to win more European cooperation on Afghanistan, both to commit more troops and allow them to serve in the most dangerous parts of the country.

He certainly means to try, said Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s senior foreign-policy advisers. “You’ll see more from the United States on a set of issues, but Obama is also going to want more from our allies,” Rhodes said in an interview.

Rhodes said the president-elect has repeatedly made clear that “he is not going to anchor our national-security policy in Iraq. What you’ll see is what he’s outlined throughout the campaign, and that is a reorientation of American foreign policy away from that focus.”

Obama has pledged to quicken the pace of withdrawal by pressing Iraqis to take on more financial and military responsibility faster. He has talked of pulling out most U.S. combat troops within 16 months, leaving behind a residual force to train Iraqi troops and conduct counter-terrorism missions.

“We’re not going to defeat terrorist networks that operate in 80 countries through an occupation of Iraq,” the Illinois senator said in an Oct. 22 news conference.

Afghan Conflict

Attention and resources would be shifted to Afghanistan and the militant sanctuaries along its border with Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden may be lurking. Obama has said he would send at least two additional combat brigades, or about 7,000 soldiers, to bolster a U.S. force of 32,000 in Afghanistan.

The Bush administration has given its blessing to sending three new brigades to Afghanistan and has repeatedly asked NATO allies to increase their participation, with only limited success.

Obama also has said he would outlaw the use of torture and close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that critics say has stained America’s global reputation.

“He has discussed tangible shifts on some of the core rule- of-law issues in the war on terror,” Rhodes said. Such a change “would send a fairly powerful signal to the world about the way in which America is going to prosecute the war on terror under an Obama administration.”

Forced by Failure

Rhodes agreed that the Bush administration has moved toward positions espoused by Obama in several areas, adding that the shift has been largely forced by failure.

“Events have kind of drawn them in this direction because, frankly, there were approaches being taken that weren’t working,” he said.

Pletka, who is critical of Bush’s second-term shifts, agreed that “on a number of issues we can expect a good deal of continuity.”

She said her most hopeful scenario for an Obama administration is that he opts for such continuity and moves quickly to dispel any “misperceptions” abroad about his toughness.

Her worst-case analysis is that “it’s the second Carter administration,” a rerun of a presidency in which U.S. weakness and irresolution “set in motion a series of events that have seismic implications.”

Bacevich sees a different problem: that Obama’s policies don’t represent a sharp enough break with Bush.

Obama remains committed to U.S. global military primacy and “the proposition of a global war on terror as the proper response to Islamic radicalism,” even if he thinks the central front is in Afghanistan rather than Iraq, said Bacevich, whose son died in Iraq.

“That’s a difference in emphasis, but it doesn’t seem to suggest a difference in strategy,” he said. “And that exemplifies the fact that even though there will be change, it won’t mark a sharp break from the past.”

Bloomberg | Ken Fireman and Viola Gienger | Wednesday, November 5, 2008