Allies may fret but Obama understands America’s role

Allies may fret but Obama understands America’s role
By Philip Stephens
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: July 15 2010 23:33 | Last updated: July 15 2010 23:33
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7089dc50-9049-11df-ad26-00144feab49a.html


Barack Obama’s foreign policy does not earn him many plaudits these days. Political opponents charge he is soft on America’s adversaries and inattentive of its friends. Critics on his own side of the aisle mutter about the absence of a grand strategy for the deployment of American power. Old allies grumble about soaring hopes disappointed.

The funny thing is that Mr Obama’s administration has a more coherent theory of the world than any of its recent predecessors. Behind the scenes, there are signs it is being executed with some diligence. The risk is of it being lost to the political din at home and the array of intractable problems abroad.

The president has better things to do than worry about brickbats from European allies. His own, and his party’s, poll ratings have fallen into treacherous territory. The economic recovery that was supposed to lift the Democrats before the midterm elections has turned out to be anaemic. It has not been creating jobs. Democrats who had anticipated a mauling in November’s poll now fear it may be a meltdown.

Europeans, in any event, will never be satisfied. They want to stand on the sidelines as America fixes things, but then cannot bear the idea of being left out. During the Bush era the charge was one of hegemonic unilateralism. This has elided seamlessly into the present grumbling that Mr Obama’s preoccupation with domestic politics has led to neglect of America’s global responsibilities.

Domestic politics and foreign policy, of course, are not unconnected. Economic and political (the two go together) strength at home confers authority abroad. I have heard one senior US official remark that Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu was never so content as when Mr Obama seemed bogged down in the congressional battle about healthcare reform.

Heavy losses in the midterm elections would deliver a blow both to Mr Obama’s authority and to one of his biggest foreign policy ambitions – to reinvigorate the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Republican hopefuls for the 2012 election are lining up against ratification of the new strategic arms limitation pact with Russia. They are promising to scupper approval of the comprehensive test ban treaty.

The president, it should be said, has made his own foreign policy mistakes. His initial attempt to revive a Middle East peace process did not include a plan B against the possibility that Mr Netanyahu would prove intransigent.

The surge-and-withdraw strategy for Afghanistan is not quite as crude as that description suggests, but it has left Mr Obama looking as if he has one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake. You know something is amiss when the national security adviser feels compelled to send round a note to cabinet members reminding them of the president’s policy.

Those critical of the treatment of adversaries and allies sometimes have a point. A Japanese prime minister toppled because of a dispute over US basing arrangements is not something to boast about in Washington. Mr Obama could hide his yawning impatience with European leaders. Hopeless as they often are, they are still allies.

An improved relationship with Russia is a sensible strategic goal, but the price of this so-called reset must not be the return of Moscow’s suzerainty in the former Soviet space. It is one thing to say that democracy cannot be imposed at the point of a gun; another to abandon the promotion of universal values.

The essential charge laid by Mr Obama’s opponents, though, is that he underestimates American power. Say what you like about George W. Bush, but he offered searing clarity: the US would remain forever pre-eminent and would not hesitate to use military might.

Yet it is precisely here that Mr Obama has got the big story right. Of course, the US will remain one of the 21st century’s great powers – quite likely the most important. But that does not mean it can get its way by coercion.

It is one thing to say Mr Obama has been “soft” on Iran; quite another to produce a credible alternative response to Tehran’s nuclear programme. The war in Iraq weakened the US. That in Afghanistan may well do likewise. Bombing Iran is not an answer.

A particularly thoughtful insight into Mr Obama’s thinking was offered on Wednesday by Strobe Talbott, the president of the Brookings Institution. The president’s theory of the case, as Mr Talbott put it in the Ditchley Foundation annual lecture, begins with recognition of a transformation in the nature, distribution and interaction of power in the world.

In an age of new powers, weak and failed states, malign non-state actors such as al-Qaeda, and existential threats from nuclear proliferation and climate change, the old assumptions no longer hold. Mr Obama’s conclusion was that the US could best leverage its power by designing and building global and regional structures to buttress international security.

The US national interest, in other words, resides in its role as a leader and organiser of multi- and mini-lateral alliances; in seeking to accommodate rather than contain rising powers and in promoting international norms and institutions. To Mr Talbott’s mind, “it is hard to imagine an American president more committed ... to the need for effective global governance.”

That last phrase – global governance – encapsulates the perils of the course. There are still plenty of Americans for whom it implies a takeover by the United Nations; and plenty more who see multilateralism as synonymous with weakness.

For his part Mr Obama has failed to articulate the strategy that attaches to the theory. There is plenty going on: from the “reset” with Russia and efforts to improve America’s standing in the Muslim world to closer relations with India and a search for common ground with China. But somehow it all looks a bit haphazard. A politician who got himself elected by demonstrating his personal global appeal has yet to persuade Americans to warm to his description of the world.

The coincidence of bitter partisan politics in Washington and the bundle of crises running from the Middle East to North Korea could well see the Obama enterprise fail. Success requires a common purpose so far absent at home and abroad. That said, as far as I can see, no one has come up with a better idea.

philip.stephens@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/philipstephens