Obama should make change cautiously
By Alexander Pherson
Nov. 12, 2008 9:00 p.m.
President-elect Obama faces a difficult balancing act when it comes to keeping the country safe and trying to improve America’s image in the world.
Last Tuesday’s election was, among other things, a call for a new approach to foreign policy in the post-Sept. 11 world. The War on Terror has convinced many people that the Bush administration’s spoken desire to spread democracy was just a pretense for greater power and foreign domination.
Nowadays, the average liberal American kindles up crude images of America. They replay the death count in Iraq (which still pales in comparison to all of our other wars) so as to quantify our indifference to human lives. They campaign for civil rights for terrorists and simultaneously, accuse our soldiers, as John Kerry did, of “going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids.” They insist that the world hates us. And they blame it all on Bush.
Obama will try to use popular disillusionment with the Bush Doctrine to turn a new page in American foreign policy. He will try to harken back to the days of JFK, extending his hand to foreign leaders and ingratiating himself with flattery. He will court them with his “citizen of the world” claptrap, as he did in his Berlin speech ““ and as Kennedy tried to do in his “Ich bin ein Berliner” (“I am a Berliner”) speech.
But those who think that the world will prostrate itself at Obama’s feet will be sadly let down. Decades-old problems won’t go away simply because Bush does. Iran is not going to drop everything once a new candidate ““ albeit a “goodwill” candidate ““ takes office. Ahmadinejad will continue to deplore Israel and revile it as a “stinking corpse,” and Iran will stop at nothing to cultivate nuclear weapons.
Russia, in turn, will still work to piece together the lost Soviet empire ““ that chimera of Russian dreams that its leaders will never fully let go of.
And Muslim extremists will pursue the holy war they have waged for centuries.
Certainly Obama’s attempts to reach out to these entities will be lauded and probably reciprocated in the short-term for political expediency. Countries that were shut out during the Bush administration will quickly vouchsafe their willingness to normalize relations and re-engage with us. Of course, they will not remain so complacent. As they have been known to do for decades, these countries will exploit our trust and bleed it dry.
Hence, global realities will hedge Obama’s ability to create a sea of change in U.S. foreign policy. Ultimately, he will have to take a hard-line approach to the grave challenges that face this country, challenges that cannot be solved by flabby rhetoric and tete-a-tetes with rogue dictators.
Obama can’t risk a war by relaxing the current administration’s forceful confrontation of terrorism, either. As Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith warned, “he will realize that any legal climb-down that is later perceived as even indirectly responsible for an attack would be a personal and political disaster.”
Obama has tried to assure us that he is not averse to force in the abstract. He qualifies his anti-war stances (on Iraq) by insisting, for instance, that he would consider intervening in places like Darfur. However, he will be reticent to proceed militarily, as he risks a mutiny from a core part of his fan base that, since Iraq, has become almost religiously anti-war.
Despite the country clamoring for change, Obama would be wise to take a more conservative approach to the challenges he inherits. He should start with Iraq.
Bush’s purpose in Operation Iraqi Freedom was noble, and his resolve to stay there in the face of trying conditions was only necessary. It is certainly nobler, and more practical, than Obama’s call to withdraw troops as soon as circumstances permit ““ a course that would almost certainly doom the fledgling democracy to a precarious future. Let us not repeat the grave mistakes of the Carter administration, whose slipshod attempts to generate rapid liberalization in Nicaragua left that country on the verge of collapse.
Instead, Obama should heed the words of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy adviser Jeane Kirkpatrick, who admonished that “decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits (of a democratic society.)”
In an environment where global cooperation is required to adequately address problems such as terrorism and poverty, it’s important that America opens itself to new alliances that could be beneficial to our interests. However, it’s equally imperative that we refrain from using solely the kind of soft-power diplomacy that has been pernicious in so many cases in the past. We must always be cognizant of the forces that wait on us to avert our eyes, and who will use our inattention to further some immoral purpose. That said, Barack Obama will not ““ and should not purport to ““ remake the world in the next four years. All we should hope for is that it is still largely intact when he leaves office.
E-mail Pherson at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected].
