Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy

From Fareed Zakaria's cover story at Newsweek, "The Post-Imperial Presidency":

If you take just one sentence out, Barack Obama's speech on Afghanistan last week was all about focusing and limiting the scope of America's mission in that country. His goal, he said, was "narrowly defined." The objectives he detailed were exclusively military—to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven, reverse the Taliban's momentum, and strengthen the Kabul government's security forces. He said almost nothing about broader goals like spreading democracy, protecting human rights, or assisting in women's education. The nation that he was interested in building, he explained, was America.

And then there was that one line: "I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan." Here lies the tension in Barack Obama's policy. He wants a clearer, more discriminating foreign policy, one that pares down the vast commitments and open-ended interventions of the Bush era, perhaps one that is more disciplined even than Bill Clinton's approach to the world. (On the campaign trail, Obama repeatedly invoked George H.W. Bush as the president whose foreign policy he admired most.) But America is in the midst of a war that is not going well, and scaling back now would look like cutting and running. Obama is searching for a post-imperial policy in the midst of an imperial crisis. The qualified surge—send in troops to regain the momentum but then draw down—is his answer to this dilemma. This is an understandable compromise, and it could well work, but it pushes off a final decision about Afghanistan until the troop surge can improve the situation on the ground. Eighteen months from now, Obama will have to answer the core question: is a stable and well-functioning Afghanistan worth a large and continuing American ground presence, or can American interests be secured at much lower cost?

This first year of his presidency has been a window into Barack Obama's world view. Most presidents, once they get hold of the bully pulpit, cannot resist the temptation to become Winston Churchill. They gravitate to grand rhetoric about freedom and tyranny, and embrace the moral drama of their role as leaders of the free world. Even the elder Bush, a pragmatist if there ever was one, lapsed into dreamy language about "a new world order" once he stood in front of the United Nations. Not Obama. He has been cool and calculating, whether dealing with Russia, Iran, Iraq, or Afghanistan. A great orator, he has, in this arena, kept his eloquence in check. Obama is a realist, by temperament, learning, and instinct. More than any president since Richard Nixon, he has focused on defining American interests carefully, providing the resources to achieve them, and keeping his eyes on the prize.

It's a thoughtful piece, if mistaken in basic thrust. The implication on the cover that President Bush was an imperialist is badly strained, and ideological driven (especially now that Iraq has made oil deals with Russia, China, and other non-American concerns, making the imperialist tag exceedingly hard to sustain). Besides, I do not believe Barack Obama is a realist. U.S. relations with Russia under Obama belie the point. See, "Obama U.S.-Russia Nuke Partnership Belies 'Realist' Foreign Policy Creds."

There are some who thought that Obama broke -- ever so slightly -- from narrow realist pretensions during his Oslo speech, and thus neoconservatives raised the possibility that he might eventually adopt moral clarity as a grounding (rather than apologetic moral relativism). But John Bolton's having none of it:

You have to look at the speech whole, just as you have to look at the man behind the speech whole, and I think that's where he runs into difficulty. This speech in Oslo is filled with some of the most amazing misconceptions about everything from human nature to the role of the United States in the world.

Hmm. Human nature. That's the key focus of the classical realist paradigm, and if Obama's clueless to the lust for power and dominance in the world, his shopworn homilies to restoring trust and respecting international law serve only as preaching to the socialist choir of the global appeasement camp.