A New US Foreign Policy? by Norman Birnbaum

A New US Foreign Policy? Norman Birnbaum

Washington 1 February Campaigning as the candidate of change was rather easy for President Barack Obama: recall Senator McCain's unquestioning evocation of the nation's past. Now that Obama is in office, that past has become his present, and he requires more than rhetoric to master it. Indeed, his own language hasevoked large expectations of change within and without our borders. He is burdened, then, not only by the certainty of a future chain of uncontrollable events which no President is spared, but by his promises to control these.

He now enjoys very high rates of public approval, but matters can change rapidly in our perpetually volatile political culture. Forty-six percent of the electorate did vote against him and his opponents in Congress, the media and the larger society will prove unforgiving when, as is inevitable, they detect weakness in the President and his party.The Republicans are now unforgiving because they detect no weakness. Their national leader de facto is the radio personality Rush Limbaugh, whose hateful and ignorant diatribes express with consummate fidelity the racism, status anxiety. xenophobia and accumulated resentments of much of white America. The Republicans in the House of Representatives voted unanimously against the economic proposals of the President, despite the increasing severity of the economic crisis. It will not be too long before deep strata of belief about the nation's role in the world, and the impulsion of existing allegiances and interests, mobilize a determined opposition to his foreign policy. The themes of that opposition are at the moment appreciably clearer and more articulated than the President's own positions---evidence of the artisanal sobriety with which the President has begun to construct his government and of the deliberate pace he has chosen.

The foreign policy apparatus includes the armed forces, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the State Department, and critical segments of other government departments, each with considerable institutional inertia and staffed by experienced professionals who have seen Presidents come---and go. The National Security Council at the White House is charged with coordinating this often incohate aggregate of conflicting bureaucratic interests, the conflicts accentuated by the colonization of parts of the apparatus by Congressional overlords or extra-governmental lobbies. Under Truman and Eisenhower, strong Secretaries of State (Dean Acheson and then John Foster Dulles) acted as Presidential deputies and surrogates in foreign policy. McGeorge Bundy under Kennedy and Johnson and then Kissinger under Nixon, Brzezinski under Carter, were National Security advisors who wrenched control of the foreign policy process back to the White House. A vertiginous alteration of strong Secretaries of State (Schultz under Reagan and Baker under the first Bush) with infrequently effective National Security advisors has followed. The entire process has been complicated by the intrusion of the senior commanders of the armed forces into the conduct of foreign policy. Not only the Chairman and separate Chiefs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but regional commanders overseas, are often as influential in shaping its course as the civilian officials nominally in charge of it. This has one advantage. Catholics are about twenty-five percent of the population but over represented in our officers corp. The senior Catholic officers are educated and reflective, learned in the Church doctrines of proportionality in the conduct of politics and war, and often morally far more profound than many of their contemporaries. That is true, as well, of many senior officers whatever their religion: most of them have been in combat and know the price of the bravado which appears to come so lightly to many Americans.

Obama as a Senator had a good vantage point from which to observe these persons and processes. As a student of American history, he has surely read enough Presidential biographies to learn that modern Presidents beginning with Franklin Roosevelt has had to struggle against the apparatus and often enough (true of both Kennedy and Johnson) their own closest advisors. Readers of Kissinger's memoir may recall Nixon's hostility to the permanent government. The President's senior appointments, then, are instructive.

His first step was to ask Robert Gates to remain as Secretary of Defense.Gates is a former CIA Director (he was expert on the old USSR) who was recalled to Washington by Bush to replace Rumsfeld. He is credited, with former Secretary of State Rice and senior military and political officials, with persuading Bush not to allow Israel to attack Iran. With Admiral Mullen, the senior military officer, he has warned against the over extension of the nation's military capacities---and, with the Admiral, publicly evoked the positive uses of diplomacy. He thinks that the State Department should have more funding, an implicit concession to the view that the armed forces have usurped functions not theirs. It is unclear how long he will remain in office. His retention is ambiguous and perhaps intended as such. It is a reward for his restraint, and a gesture to the permanent government.

The President has appointed two retired military commanders to posts which could have gone to civilians. General James Jones, the former commander of the US Marines and of NATO, a Vietnam veteran, is National Security Advisor.. He attended school in France and graduated from Georgetown, the Jesuit university. is thought of as a dispassionate technocrat. Admiral Dennis Blair is National Intelligence Director, responsible for coordinating the work of the separate intelligence agencies. Blair was Pacific Fleet Commander, and was not always punctillious about following orders he disagreed with. The CIA Director under him will be former Congressman Leon Panetta, who was also Clinton's Chief of Staff. A lawyer, he brings political sensitivity to an organization not always conspicuous for it.

Obama's retention of Gates, and enlistment of Jones and Blair, reflects the President's view of politics, evident in his autobiographical account of his immersion in Afro-American Chicago as a younger man. Matters being organized the way they are, change can only come from within the existing institutions. It also, of course, bespeaks a very large amount of self-confidence. The President has repeatedly declared that he takes his constitutional prerogatives very seriously, and nowhere more so than in foreign and military policy. The President had been an omnivorous reader and one hopes he will find an hour or two a day to learn of things under heaven and on earth not dreamed of by his officials. In crises, technocrats often recur to the lowest common denominator of available dogma.

His Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is unlikely to allow her views to be homogenised by the bureaucracy. The appointment of Clinton provoked a good deal of comment to the effect that a conflict with the President is inevitable. That is far from the case, since Clinton knows that Presidents invariably eliminate troublesome Cabinet members. . After her eight active years in the White House as First Lady, she spent eight in the Senate representing New York, with a seat on the Armed Services Committee. As Senator from New York she was loyal to the Israel lobby: in the Presidential campaign she declared that if Iran attacked Israel, it would be "obliterated." If Clinton is to succeed as Secretary of State, she will have to abandon the opportunism that led her to support the attack on Iraq, to adopt the motto, Israel can do no wrong and to inflate an Iranian threat which is to a great extent fictional. Her very large ambition requires that she take a larger view of her own legacy. She began her public career as a student leader in the protest movements of the late sixties. Her lack of responsiveness to the protesters of recent years cost her the Presidential nomination (along with her absurd faith in the consultants and pollsters who charged her exorbitant sums of money for bad advice.) The appointment places huge burdens on her, but is also a liberation from much of her own recent past. The energetic, intelligent and well informed lady will not be bound by it. That is, apparently, the view not only of the President but of the diplomats who cheered her arrival at the State Department.

There are other figures in the picture. Vice-President Biden was Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and will not put his own experience and views in storage.Vice Presidents, however, are sometimes heard and seen but not necessarily listened to. His successor as Chair, John Kerry, is neither reticent or retiring. Perhaps, as Chair, he can admit what he tried to keep silent when he was running for President, that he speaks French. He began in politics as a Vietnam veteran who opposed the war and may now be free to re-identify with his anti-imperial past, which he repudiated in his inept campaign. Susan Rice, the United Nations Ambassador, is like the President of the successor generation, and did not live through the conflicts of the sixties.She is an African-American, for whom Africa itself has long been an area of interest and we can await greatly increased US political investment in that continent. A senior figures in Obama's foreign policy group during the campaign, Gregory Craig, is now White House Counsel, lawyer to the President. Matters like the constitutionality of Presidential power are his responsibility. He was advisor to Senator Kennedy and Head of Policy Planning at the State Department. Like Clinton and Kerry, he was active in the sixties. As President of the student body at Harvard, he initiated an early challenge to the former Harvard professors Bundy and MacNamara. Should a vacancy develop, Craig is well placed to fill it.

Obama has made a striking start, concentrating on demarcating a rupture with the Bush administration (which itself was half heartedly repudiating some of its failed policies.) At this point, the rupture is mainly symbolic. Guantanamo is to be closed, but a precise reinterpretation of the legal situation of the prisoners remains to be devised. That reinterpretation has deep domestic implications at well, since the Bush lawyers nullified American constitutional jurisprudence by claiming dictatorial powers for the President. Some have concluded that Obama in effect terminated the "war on terror" by refusing to make its continuation or renewal an explicit objective. Perhaps—but he is also skirting another abyss by proposing to enlarge the war in Afghanistan, although there his intentions are saturated with ambiguities. He has spoken to the Muslim world in positive ways. In naming former Senator Mitchell as Special Envoy to the Mideast, he has implicitly told the Israel lobby that its total domination of our policy has ended. Mitchell is the son of a Lebanese Christian mother. In his previous mission in the Mideast he offended a considerable number of supporters of Israel by evincing what they thought of as an impermissible degree of even handedness.

Recall Obama's Inaugural address. "For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus—and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, Drawn from every end of this Earth, and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass, that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself, and that American must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace." The words, with their reminscence of Lincoln's immortal Second Inaugural Address, assign American multi-culturalism a universal role different from that of the Christian or Judaeo-Christian figure of a "redeemer nation," God's chosen instrument. Obama's imagery allows a certain amount of restraint---if we have our role, others have theirs.

To the political constraints imposed by the public's critical assessment of the serial disasters of the Bush years have been added the economic limits entailed by the collapse of our model of capitalism. Our electorate may think in somewhat - west European ways, but we do not have a west European model of a welfare state. Survey research data show that majorities and sometimes large majorities favour a large redistributive role for the state in education, family support, health care and social infra-structure. These attitudes have been blunted or ignored by the political system; the larger needs of the citizenry do not directly influence the political agenda of the parties. In foreign affairs, other processes are at work. The affect laden slogans and ideologically shaped themes of public debate preclude holding our foreign policy elite to account for its usurpation of powers the citizenry usually refrains from claiming as its own. It remains to be seen if Obama will employ his considerable pedagogic gifts not only to instruct the public on the world we inhabit—but to mobilize it against those who have already begun to disparage his interpetation of it.

The President must shortly submit a Federal budget. There is no indication that he will take the opportunity to propose serious reductions in arms expenditure. The Center For Defense Information, a research institute staffed largely by retired officers, believes that the armed services regularly acquire defective weaponry at excessive cost, weapons with no discernible relationship to the missions of the forces. I am reminded of what a retired Admiral told me decades ago of Reagan's fantasy, the Star Wars project. "The weapons, in the unlikely event of their being produced, would not cover the heavens over us---but in every Congressional district, contracts would be brought safely to earth." A large part of the armed force's political influence, and therewith of the militarization of much of our political culture, rests on their function as a domestic economic engine. A fundamental change in foreign policy will be impossible until a President reclaims control of that large segment of the Federal budget which has become immune to correction---roughly, six percent of our Gross National Product.

What will Obama do with respect to Mideast? Israel's attack on Gaza evoked a more negative response than usual in the United States, with the media depicting the suffering of the Palestinians in ways which would have been unthinkable a few years ago. If the "war on terror" is to be replaced by an effort at reconciliation with the Arab and Muslim worlds, the US will have to reconsider the alliance with Israel. The response by Israel and its supporters in the US (by no means exclusively Jewish, since the Israel lobby in an extended sense encompasses the Protestant Fundamentalists and the foreign policy unilateralists) is already clear: emphasize the threat of Iran, which supposedly makes the alliance with Israel indispensable. One development is of potential help to Obama, increasing scepticism amongst many American Jews of the wisdom of encouraging Israel to march to a modern Masada. However, many remain available for mobilisation against a change in American policy.

There is a precedent for this sort of operation. When Nixon and Kissinger, after the loss of Vietnam and American reconciliation with China, sought arms control and other agreements with the USSR to stabilize that relationship, they were stridently opposed by the first generation of neo-conservatives. The USSR, they argued, could not be trusted, was lying about its own arms program, and in any event, the project of limited co-existence was a continuation of the American weakness evident in the abandonment of Vietnam. Occasionally, they referred to the issue which agitated the Jewish community---compelling the USSR to allow large scale Jewish emigration. In the course of this campaign, the western Europeans and especially the Federal German Republic were taxed with moral laxism by the fathers of those who a generation later were to demand their participation in the war in Iraq.

It is difficult to predict how the debate on Iran will develop in the next months in the US. For one thing, Iran is no simple interlocutor. It is certain that many who are categorized as foreign policy realists will argue that the threat from Iran has been greatly exaggerated. Obama has declared that Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons is "unacceptable" and declined to exclude military action. That is not quite an undertaking to attack Iran should it contrive to produce a nuclear weapon.

Disconnecting the Iranian issue from the question of the Israel occupation of Palestine would be a step toward secularizing what could become another of those theological debates which precede our most self-destructive crusades. With respect to the occupation, at the installation of Mitchell as Special Envoy, Obama went further than any American President toward recasting the US as a mediator and dropping the unconditional nature of the alignment with Israel. Should he persist, he will call forth many of the furies of American foreign policy. Should he be forced to accept Israel's intransigence, he will have to abandon the reconciliation with the Muslim world.

In the meantime, there are the specific problems of Iraq and the even more difficult ones of the Afghanistan-Pakistan nexus. In Iraq, the relative success of the elections should facilitate a further reduction in the American military presence. However, there is no evidence that Obama intends to drop the idea of an American protectorate---perhaps to be presented as an alliance. That presupposes an enduring settlement amongst the Iraquis, with all the parties agreeing to the arrangement, which in turn would require Iranian concurrence –not to be had cheaply.

Richard Holbrooke has been appointed Special Envoy for Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, with even less clarity as to his mission than attaches to the Mitchell assignment. General Petraeus, the US Commander for the area, is an accomplished political figure and it is unlikely that he would urge on a President a course of action freighted with large chances of failure. His great success in Iraq, after all, consisted in replacing a good deal of the warfare against some of the Sunnis by bribing them---while arranging for the systematic killing of others.

It is unclear that the same combination could do anything in Afghanistan except postponing our inevitable departure for a very limited period of time. As for Pakistan, Holbrooke's chief concern will be to avoid a war with India. The aim of stabilising the Northwest Frontier area will strike a diplomat who as a younger Foreign Service officer worked in the Mekong Delta as illusory. He is intelligent, enough, moreover, to conclude that the Balkans have few or no lessons for southwest Asia. Upon reflection, then, Holbrooke's task will be to develop a regional settlement which could attract the adherence of China, Russia—and Iran. The assent of the west Europeans to whatever the US works out on the terrain can be taken for granted, since their publics will not allow them to spend lives and money in support of illusions the US is casting off.

Re Latin America, he has allowed himself some ritualised disparagement of Chavez and has not responded to Lula's challenge: we will know that something has changed when the embargo on Cuba is lifted. There is no indication of any imminent move in this direction.

What about US relations with China and Russia? Possibly for familial reasons, possibly because China is so large and resistant to pressure, Bush managed to maintain an open connection to the great power across the Pacific. Economic conflicts during the Bush Presidency, principally the American demand for an upward valuation of the Chinese currency, are being rapidly transformed as both nations struggle with severe economic problems. Obama's most probable course will be the consolidation of the process, already well advanced, of bringing China into the normal system of international relations. To the objection that there is now no normal system, the answer is that the problem is one the USA shares with the entire set of nations represented in, to begin with, the G 20 group.

The Cold War legacy still influences relations between the US and Russia---and is, if anything, more important to Russia for reasons geopolitical and of national pride than to the US. It is difficult to imagine Obama and his advisors provoking Russia as did the last American government. For one thing, Russia is needed if the project of reconciliation with the Muslim world is to succeed---if only to provide guarantees of stability on other fronts. For another, the rapprochement of the USA and western Europe reflected in the western European response to Obama's election would be endangered by a continuation of policies like the move to incorporate the Ukraine in NATO, or the emplacement of missiles in both a reluctant Czech Republic and an absurdly over eager Poland.

Relations with China and Russia do raise issues of the function and weight of civic and human rights in the new government's policies. At the moment (I do not know if the well read President has ever read Max Weber, suspect that he has), the US will concentrate on what that thinker termed exemplary prophecy. The election of an Afro-American President speaks for itself, there is a great backlog of domestic problems of equality and access to the practical possibilities of citizenship to be dealt with, the hypocrisy of the Bush years serves as a warning of the costs of hubris. The Obama government has named to senior legal posts a strikingly talented and reflective group, many of whom have supported in the past positive American attitudes to the International Criminal Court. However, it is facing a challenge to its refusal to seek to hold members of the Bush government responsible for their violations of the Constitution. The Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, the senior Democrat John Conyers, is adamant about investigating and if possible prosecuting recent office holders for their decisions. In the circumstances, an improvised motto on the order of, "Human rights begin at home" may strike the Obama White House as very useful.

Clearly, the new government will have to join in others in a systematic attempt over the next few years to reconstruct the architecture of the international system. The present composition of both the G-8 and the UN Security Council is senseless. The G-8 can be enlarged without much turbulence to the G-20, but a change in the structure of the Security Council may for the moment prove impossible. In the long run, it will have to be altered if the UN as a whole is not be undermined. Changes in the IMF and the World Bank, in the disjoined working of institutions like FAO, ILO, UNCTAD, WHO, WTO, will be required if the new world economy is to have adequate crisis management. The Obama government is rather better equipped to join this project, even to take a leading role in it, than most of its predecessors.

The world economic crisis will clearly influence the realization of the Obama government's foreign policy projects. As inter-connected as the world economy is, the crisis is turning the attention of many Americans from the world outside their borders to concerns centered on their communities, families, themselves---of economic survival. The economic recovery plan of the government, thus far in its progression through the Congress, includes provision for a great deal of social investment and some extensions of the government provision of educational and health services. That could in the long run reduce the differences between the US and western Europe—with some interesting consequences for the relationships of societies divided for four decades, at least, by contrasting ideas of citizenship. That is a matter for the future. For the moment, whatever the value of US Treasury notes, the more honest of the nation's commentators recognize that in matters economic the US had declared ideological bankruptcy. That should, but will not, silence those who cling, against the recent evidence, to the notion of a unique US leadership role in the world. The moral attractiveness of Obama, and the redemptive quality of his speech, are insufficient to restore what history has forever changed.

There is, despite the crisis, much to be expected from Obama---in new approaches to international understanding and conflict resolution, in an indispensable American contribution to the universal task of preserving the environment and repairing, if possible, the damages humanity has inflicted upon it, in other experiments in collaboration across borders, despite cultural and ideological differences. The greatest contribution he can make to his fellow citizens (and therewith to the citizens of the rest of the world) would be to persuade them that a new accession of humility is a necessary condition of a new epoch of progress. * The result remains entirely open.

*The President, however, might wish to have a word with Admiral Blair, the new Director of National Intelligence. At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, he was specific about one task of our intelligence agencies. "While traditional friends of the United States disagree with individual American policies on specific countries and issues, the Intelligence Community can also help policy makers to identify the many government leaders and influential private leaders—in Europe, in Asia and elsewhere—who share American ambitions for the future and are willing to work together for the common good." Is a world wide American payroll the most effective instrument of our policy?