Rich Lowry and David Brooks both see Obama pursuing a surprisingly smart foreign policy for the country and, hopefully, for the world as well. Here’s Lowry:
Obama has selected a former Marine commandant close to John McCain, Gen. Jim Jones, as his national-security adviser; asked President George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Bob Gates, to stay on; and selected Hillary Clinton, a relative centrist who denounced Obama’s naiveté in the primaries, as secretary of state.
It’s as moderate as any Democrat’s national-security picks could possibly get. Just when it seemed that the hawkish Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party was dead forever, a jerry-built version of it is making a comeback via the impending administration of a man championed by anti-war zealots. Yes, God does have a sense of humor.
The success of the surge in Iraq made Obama’s pragmatic turn easier. Perhaps never has someone owed so much to a policy he opposed so vehemently. First, the success of the surge diminished the Iraq War as an issue in the general election. Second, it makes it possible to contemplate a responsible drawdown in Iraq.
On the campaign trail, Obama pledged to end the war in 2009. That’s a non-starter. He still talks of getting out in 16 months, but in his press conference announcing his national-security team emphasized that he’ll listen to his commanders and said that the recent security pact with Iraq “points us in the right direction.” Our straight-shooting commander on the ground in Iraq, Ray Odierno, opposes a 16-month withdrawal, while the U.S.-Iraqi security pact envisions a U.S. exit in three years.
A kind of continuity is also possible for Obama because the caricature of Bush foreign policy as dangerously radical never accurately reflected reality.
Bush wants U.S. troops to “return on success” in Iraq — so does Obama. Bush supports a buildup in Afghanistan — so does Obama. Bush wants a larger military — so does Obama. Bush has launched raids against al-Qaeda into the tribal areas of Pakistan — Obama wants to do the same. Bush wants to close Guantánamo Bay, but has been bedeviled by the difficult choices inherent in its shuttering — Obama will be, too. Bush has put out diplomatic feelers to Iran, while warning of the unacceptability of its nuclear program — Obama has done the same, although with more of an accent on diplomacy.
Obama’s national-security choices signal that he’s going to build off the late-second-term “realist” Bush foreign policy, giving it a fresh branding as “change” internationally and augmenting our tools of “soft power” (something Secretary Gates has repeatedly plugged). The one true progressive on his team, Susan Rice, has been relegated to ambassador to the United Nations, where wishful thinking is mostly harmless and soothes the bureaucrats.
Perhaps Obama is simply bowing to the exigencies of American foreign policy, defined by a few ineluctable realities: We are the sole superpower in a dangerous world, full of enemies that only we have the military resources to defeat and of rival powers with interests divergent from ours.
And here’s Brooks:
Over the past year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has delivered a series of remarkable speeches echoing and advancing Rice’s themes. “In recent years, the lines separating war, peace, diplomacy and development have become more blurred and no longer fit the neat organizational charts of the 20th century,” he said in Washington in July.
Gates does not talk about spreading democracy, at least in the short run. He talks about using integrated federal agencies to help locals improve the quality and responsiveness of governments in trouble spots around the world.
He has developed a way of talking about security and foreign policy that is now the lingua franca in government and think-tank circles. It owes a lot to the lessons of counterinsurgency and uses phrases like “full spectrum operations” to describe multidisciplinary security and development campaigns.
Gates has told West Point cadets that more regime change is unlikely but that they may spend parts of their careers training soldiers in allied nations. He has called for more spending on the State Department, foreign aid and a revitalized U.S. Information Agency. He’s spawned a flow of think-tank reports on how to marry hard and soft pre-emption.
The Bush administration began to implement these ideas, but in small and symbolic ways. President Bush called for a civilian corps to do nation-building. National Security Presidential Directive 44 laid out a framework so different agencies could coordinate foreign reconstruction and stabilization. The Millennium Challenge Account program created a method for measuring effective governance.
Actual progress was slow, but the ideas developed during the second Bush term have taken hold.
Some theoreticians may still talk about Platonic concepts like realism and neoconservatism, but the actual foreign policy doctrine of the future will be hammered out in a bottom-up process as the U.S. and its allies use their varied tools to build government capacity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, the Philippines and beyond. Grand strategists may imagine a new global architecture built at high-level summits, but the real global architecture of the future will emerge organically from these day-to-day nation-building operations.
During the campaign, Barack Obama embraced Gates’s language. During his press conference on Monday, he used all the right code words, speaking of integrating and rebalancing the nation’s foreign policy capacities. He nominated Hillary Clinton and James Jones, who have been champions of this approach, and retained Gates. Their cooperation on an integrated strategy might prevent some of the perennial feuding between the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom and the National Security Council.
As Stephen Flanagan of the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes, Obama’s challenge will be to actually implement the change. That would include increasing the size of the State Department, building a civilian corps that can do development in dangerous parts of the world, creating interagency nation-building institutions, helping local reformers build governing capacity in fragile places like Pakistan and the Palestinian territories and exporting American universities while importing more foreign students.
Given the events of the past years, the U.S. is not about to begin another explicit crusade to spread democracy. But decent, effective and responsive government would be a start.
Obama and his team didn’t invent this approach. But if they can put it into action, that would be continuity we can believe in.
It has been said that conservatives would like to live in the 1950s and liberals would like to work in the 1950s. But the reality is that we can do neither. The high tech nature of today’s planet combined with a global economy have rendered the world flat. Trade barriers aren’t going back up, and neither are the walls to Fortress America. As such, interventionism isn’t just smart foreign policy, it’s the only kind that makes any sense, despite what Paul and Buchanan might have to say.
What’s so interesting is that as power is transferred from Republican White House to Democratic White House, both parties seem to have reached consensus on the general direction that U.S. foreign policy should take. With isolationism no longer an option and with the idealistic interventionists discredited due to the early moves of the Bush Administration, realistic interventionism is really the only game left in town. And that leaves the parties with very little to argue about. At least for now.
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:16 pm
I tease my liberal, Bush-hating friend that Bush’s policies aren’t going to look so stupid to liberals after Obama adopts 3/4 of them.
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Yeah, that’s about right, I think. Obama is also giving himself quite a bit of cover in the national security policy arena by keeping Gates that the Pentagon and bringing in Jim Jones at NSC. The yet to be named DNI/CIA director may be another indicator. Obama was considered to be from the ideological liberal wing of the Dem Party and he and his senior political advisors seem quite aware of the problems that the national security arena can pose for liberal Democrats. He seems to be trying to forge a majority consensus from the middle. Similar moves on the economic policy front as well.
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Well it’s easier to make good foreign policy decisions if you’ve learned from 4 years worth of foreign policy mistakes…
In any event, Obama may yet be a good president. /crosses fingers
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:39 pm
One other thing, the Obama political captains have read the political demographic trends of the last few years, and they are quite aware that as long as they don’t screw up and as long as the GOP still wants to focus on the stale culture war stuff, they (Obama/Dems) will have a lock on the Electoral College.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Who you callin’ discredited, buddy?
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Obama, the Manchurian Candidate. Placed there by a conspiracy of conservatives, apparently.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:25 pm
#1 – MetroIndependent, were you previously MetroRepublican on this site? Just curious. If so, expound on the reasons for the change in your moniker.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:38 pm
“as long as the GOP still wants to focus on the stale culture war stuff”
Actually the Left is the one waging the culture war. But, until the Right figures out a way, or comes up with the will to fight through the fog of the Left wing media, the GOP will be blamed for the “culture wars” even thought they are not the ones who started them.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:48 pm
In truth, though, one can put the best possible foreign policy and national security teams together, but if he’s the one at the top, and lacks the instincts and experience to make the correct decisions, what does it matter? I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:09 pm
It looks like Obama lied about his views on foreign policy during the campaign. If so, thank God for that. If I was an anti-war liberal I would be livid. I’m pretty happy the way things are shaping up, but we’ll have to see what really happens when the rubber hits the road.
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:20 pm
The idealistic interventionists succeeded in Iraq.
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:26 pm
You guys are crazy. Obama had no choice but to hire these people, as moderate republicans and Clinton administration staff are the only people alive, who have not worked in republican administrations, who are available and qualified.
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:46 pm
#7: I changed back to MetroIndependent because most Republicans have fallen for the demographic diviseness represented by Sarah Palin.
Republicans won’t win, and should not win, by ridiculing urban dwellers and other “elites.”
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:12 am
“see Obama pursuing a surprisingly smart foreign policy for the country and, hopefully, for the world as well.”
Not surprising to anyone who has been paying attention.
Y’all really gotta stop believing your own campaign rhetoric.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:14 am
“It looks like Obama lied about his views on foreign policy during the campaign.”
Huh? In what way keven? What is he doing different than he promised?
DO you actually know what he was promising all along? Or did you just go with the comic book version?
December 3rd, 2008 at 2:07 am
to me a success is something that was worth it. just because there are some things in iraq that are better than how terrible they were before does not make it a success. iraq was not worth it in the end. GOP will not win trying to claim success in iraq.
December 3rd, 2008 at 7:06 am
“I changed back to MetroIndependent because most Republicans have fallen for the demographic diviseness represented by Sarah Palin.”
Why don’t you hold your breath and stomp around for a little bit as well? I’m sure that will change things. You are acting just like the childish socons who were threatening to not vote because Sen McCain was the nominee, despite the fact that his record is pretty strongly supportive of them. They were wrong and harmful to Republicans and their electoral chances, and so you are being now.
“Republicans won’t win, and should not win, by ridiculing urban dwellers and other “elites.””
Nor can they or should they win by ridiculing rural inhabitants and other “hillbillies.” The key to remember here is the 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” Don’t want Gov Palin to be the nominee in ‘12? Support another candidate, don’t repeat Nat’l Enquirer stories. Believe she’s currently incapable of seriously handling the Presidency? Join the club, as I don’t think she’s capable (yet). Should she run in ‘12, and if she’s unable to express a clear and sensible argument for why she should be Pres, she won’t win the nomination. There will be no need to smear and defame her on a personal level. All you accomplish now is to further split the party.
December 3rd, 2008 at 7:33 am
I agree. But it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. If Lorelli and his ilk weren’t constantly looking for ways to push Palin down our collective throat there wouldn’t be nearly as much knee-jerk reaction to her. As long as a certain segment of the party is hell bent on crowning her queen, her major shortcomings notwithstanding, there is going to be a need to squash the sentiment before it festers.
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:30 am
Adam, you just don’t attack enthusiastic segments of voters and their candidate. All you end up doing is encourage more of what you’re trying to stop (i.e. “blind” support for a “flashy” candidate), and the process creates a civil war that tears the Rep party apart (this applies to the voters for Govs Romney and Huckabee as well). Cheerleading this far out will inevitably hurt the respective candidates’ chances at the nomination, and by letting them vent, they feel like part of the process even when their candidate doesn’t win. Show a little faith that the voters will make the right choice.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:27 am
Richard M, it’s because this phenomenon has redefined what it means to be a Republican, for non-Republicans.
Totally and completely. We’ve turned from a party of ideas during the Reagan/Gingrich period into a party of demographics.
Non-Republicans (and former Republicans) now see you as an entirely different creature if you label yourself a Republican.