foreign policy

At least one person in Europe isn't going all soft and misty-eyed for Obama. The irascible Melanie Phillips recently penned a fevered attack against the presidential hopeful, warning that Obama "will take an axe to America's defences at the very time when they need to be built up." While The Spectator may not be regular fare across the pond, equally frenzied denunciations of Obama have become common in the last few weeks in the US. Evangelicals beseech their co-religionists to vote for McCain in order to stave off a "far-left agenda [that] would take away many of our freedoms as a nation, perhaps permanently." Elected Republicans try to tar and feather Obama as a radical: "With all due respect," Senator George Voinovich, a Republican from Ohio, said, "the man is a socialist." In terms that echo the shrillest of these fear-mongers across the pond, Phillips claims an Obama victory would invite apocalypse.

For a hack who imagines the end of western civilization around every corner, Phillips unsurprisingly finds the most self-destructive instincts of the west in him. "Obama stands for the expiation of America's original sin in oppressing black people, the third world and the poor," she writes. "Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west's fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted."

According to Phillips, Obama is the epitome of the guilt-ridden, multicultural self-hater. His inevitable failures as president would not only be those of diplomatic compromise, but of cultural and historical surrender. Overreaching minorities will be coddled within their obliging societies. Terrorists will become objects of politically-correct sympathy. Iraq and Afghanistan will be evacuated. Israel will be sacrificed to the Arabs. Obama will strip the US - and ultimately, the "West" - of the right to assert its identity and strength. Under an Obama presidency, there will be no safe buffer zone - political and psychological - between the west and the rest.

Of course, Phillips has no real interest in looking at Obama seriously. She only wants him to be a woodcut in her shadow world of demons and angels. So it makes sense that her rant impresses other paladins of the clash of civilisations (see the comments below her piece on The Spectator website). It's as willfully deaf to reality as they are.

Over on our sister blog, openRussia, Patrik Shirak takes both McCain and Obama to task for their simplistic views on this summer's Russia-Georgia crisis. During last Friday's debate, the Republican stuck to his hawkish, cold warrior line on the Kremlin, while Obama declined the opportunity to add much needed nuance to the discussion. Both candidates said nothing of the tortured local history of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, a history that lies inescapably at the root of the conflict. The imperatives of great power grand strategy remained self-evident and unchallenged.

Obama was disappointing more broadly in his cautious acceptance of traditional foreign policy wisdom. On the left-of-centre Foreign Policy in Focus, Stephen Zunes catalogues what could have been. I agree with Zunes that the "success" of the surge needs to be questioned. It was the "de facto partioning" of Baghdad into sectarian neighbourhoods, a process underway before the arrival of additional US troops, that contributed most to the reduction of violence in the city. The other achievement of the surge - the so-called Anbar Awakening of Sunni tribal fighters - had nothing to do with the surge policy itself. Obama may indeed be aware of these trivial matters of fact, but the debate showed clearly that his camp was wary of drifting too far from McCain's message of strength.

Last Friday's debate was Obama's to win. While many observers suggest he "shaded it", his wooden performance hardly constituted a victory. If Obama wanted to put daylight between his weathered opponent and himself, he should have been more forthright with his opinions, more honest to his intellegence, and less deferential to the McCain view of the world. Will it be left to Joe Biden in today's VP debate to more forcefully evoke the alternative foreign policy vision of an Obama presidency? 

Sarah Palin may be the new darling of the media, but that attention comes with a price. At some point glowing hagiography dims into scrutiny. Yesterday, the Republican vice-presidential candidate showed why the initial "Palin bump" in support for McCain is not as substantial as it seems. In her first public interview since her nomination, Palin was found out by a surprisingly serious and probing Charles Gibson (this was the same interviewer who brought shame on the fourth estate by making Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton talk about flag lapel pins). She was floundering in her answers, her nervousness thinly veiled by a tightly set jaw and the excessive repetition of the interviewer's name. Amongst a number of cringe-worthy moments, her ignorance of the content of the Bush doctrine (video below) and subsequent evasiveness stand out. Like a frustrated schoolteacher, Gibson cut her short, saying that he was "lost in a blizzard" of Palin's words.

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with openDemocracy author Godfrey Hodgson (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3)

When you’ve had enough of the dugout convention chatter on the US cable networks, try Godfrey Hodgson from Oxford, 5000 miles from the convention scene. I wonder if anybody sees American politics more essentially than the co-author of a reporters’ masterpiece (up there with Norman Mailer’s) on the 1968 campaign, An American Melodrama, and many other rapt studies of us. (Forthcoming: The Myth of American Exceptionalism.) Hodgson volunteers in conversation that what he missed forty years ago was the length and depth of the conservative cycle the US was entering with Richard Nixon’s election. Today, forty years later, Hodgson’s keynote is that the conservative ascendancy, having fomented the Iraq War and a Gilded Age of inequality, sounds far from broken. The “change” chord rings to Hodgson more of therapy than political reconstruction. The tune from America these days, he says, still sounds something like the Russophobic ditty sung in England in the 1870s — the song that gave “Jingo” to the lexicon of chip-on-the-shoulder patriotism.

We don’t want to fight,

But by Jingo if we do,

We’ve got the ships,

We’ve got the men,

And we’ve got the money, too.

From a popular music-hall song by G. W. Hunt, around 1877.

Michael Walzer, the American political philosopher, breaks down the dimensions of the foreign policy of a prospective Obama administration at the "Dialogues on Civilisations" conference in Istanbul. There's nothing particularly new here - more multilateralism, more engagement with international institutions (like the International Criminal Court) and processes (a return to Kyoto), a change of focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, etc.

Some of Walzer's predictions are too hopeful. He expects more emphasis on workers' rights and environmental protection in trade negotiations, which, given the chip-off-the-old-block economic advisors surrounding Obama, is wishful indeed. Washington also has miles to go before its current martial stance on the "war on terror" is softened to the more old world "criminal justice" approach.

Changes in degree rather than in nature, perhaps, but welcome changes indeed after the Bush administration's plodding and blundering track record of international engagement. But is it enough? As Walzer perceptively concludes:

America has less power and a diminished authority today compared to the Clinton years. And the world is even more recalcitrant now than it was then. A different American foreign policy, that I have just described, may not make a big difference, and it won’t make a big difference unless it is accompanied/supported by different policies in other parts of the world.

As this blog has frequently pointed out, the supposed "epochal moment" of Obama's rise is shrouded by substantial shifts in global geopolitics, an "epochal moment" of sorts above and beyond the US. The true test of either an Obama or McCain foreign policy will lie in how Washington comes to grips with a political landscape in which the confidence and bluster of US campaign rhetoric sounds hollower than ever before.

In the New York Times, an op-ed by Nathan Thrall and Jesse J. Wilkins draws lessons from a particularly odd historical analogy. The authors describe the unsuccessful meeting between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. They see in the episode a cautionary tale, warning Barack Obama to re-think his pledge to negotiate with Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were the former to be elected president.

In fairness, this is a historical analogy Obama made himself when he boomed, “If George Bush and John McCain have a problem with direct diplomacy led by the president of the United States, then they can explain why they have a problem with John F. Kennedy, because that’s what he did with Khrushchev.” Such capacious rhetoric invited Thrall's and Wilkins' rigorous dissection of the Vienna encounter and its debilitating consequences for US foreign policy.

But Thrall and Wilkins - and Karl Rove in today's Wall Street Journal - miss the point if they think that the examples of the Cold War's bipolar politics should frame 21st century thinking.

The American Prospect - The Nation's more wonkish, DC-based little sister - hosts a (un)surprisingly insipid debate on the future of American "liberal internationalism". It is kicked off by ex-Prospect scribe and current Atlantic editor Matthew Yglesias, who has just published a new book on the subject called Heads in the Sand.

His argument isn't particularly ground-moving. As American foreign policy teetered from bad to worse under the Bush administration, Democrats utterly failed to articulate clear policy differences or come up with an alternative to the neocon-stamped White House reverie. What's needed now is a return to the "liberal internationalism" of the past, in which American leaders sought to cement a rules-based global order based on multilateralism and consent.

Inspired? No? Well, nor are the chosen debaters. oD author Anne-Marie Slaughter is puzzled that Yglesias doesn't recognise the extent to which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are already signed up to the liberal international cause, making his rallying call look slightly silly. Derek Chollett is cautious to underline the very real limits of global cooperation. And the neo-con pundit David Frum fulminates rather feebly against the premise of the whole debate.

Only David Rieff strikes the nail on the head:

The debate between Democrats like Yglesias and neoconservatives like those who supported the Bush administration and now are drifting back to Sen. McCain is more in the nature of an internationalist family quarrel than a fundamental difference over matters of principle...

To claim that these second-order differences are matters of fundamental principle seems absurd. It is to have so assimilated the ideology of America's manifest destiny and of American exceptionalism ("the cause of the United States is the cause of humanity"; Benjamin Franklin said that, not some wicked neoconservative) that anyone not similarly convinced of America's positive role in the world -- and certainly people like me, who tend to view the United States as one more empire, probably no worse than its British predecessor but no better, either -- can only admire this illustration, in the foreign-policy sphere, of Freud's "narcissism of small differences."