[Peace-discuss] Perdurance of policy

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I've suggested that we'll see a lot of continuity between Obama and Bush 2.2 
(when the realists took the USG back from the neocons), but I certainly don't 
think "that may be just what we need." Two generations of "realism" and 
"bipartisan consensus on foreign policy" have spread destruction and death 
around the world, even endangered civilization itself.  And we're getting more 
of it with the "new" gang.  We should be clear enough about what it is to oppose 
it. Here's an account from an establishment journal. --CGE]

	The Making of George W. Obama
	By Christian Brose
	Foreign Policy
	January/February 2009

	The 2008 U.S. election was all about change.
	But that’s not what we’re going to get on foreign policy,
	says the longtime speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice.
	Instead of a radical departure from Bush, we’re	
	likely to end up with a lot more of the same. 				
	And that may be just what we need.

On December 1, Barack Obama, who won the U.S. presidency as the candidate of 
“change,” announced his national security team: President George W. Bush’s 
secretary of defense (Robert Gates), Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s 
special envoy for Middle East security (James Jones), and the doyenne of 
Democratic centrism (Hillary Clinton). Some saw this as the political cover 
Obama needs to lead U.S. foreign policy in an entirely different direction after 
Bush. Perhaps. But I doubt it. My hunch, and my hope, is that Obama will be a 
successful president, not because he’ll totally change the foreign policy he’ll 
inherit from Bush, but because he’ll largely continue it.

Until just a few weeks ago, I was a part of that foreign policy. As Rice’s chief 
speechwriter and policy advisor, I traveled with her to 24 countries. And I 
helped write (and rewrite) her remarks—a body of work I’d estimate to be north 
of 150,000 carefully chosen words. For four years, I watched as a foreign policy 
took shape that was quite different from that of Bush’s first term. It was a 
pragmatic internationalism based on enduring national interests and ideals for a 
country whose global leadership is still indispensable, even as the world is 
becoming more multipolar.

Unfortunately, the election didn’t shed much light on what this inheritance 
means for Obama. The campaign was a two-year referendum on the Bush presidency 
in which Obama ran against a caricature of Bush’s first term and John McCain ran 
desperately away from the whole thing. It was as if the past four years never 
happened.

But because they did, Obama will inherit a foreign policy that is better than 
many realize. Yes, there will be changes ahead—most likely, to energy and 
climate change policy (thankfully), to the war in Iraq (winding it down), to the 
war in Afghanistan (winding it up), and to the detention facility at Guantánamo 
Bay, Cuba (closing it, which some in the Bush administration tried to do but 
couldn’t). But despite all that, Obama’s foreign policy likely won’t depart 
radically from Bush’s.

Take the three states Bush once labeled an “axis of evil”—Iran, Iraq, and North 
Korea. After changing the regime in Baghdad, his administration in the second 
term fully committed to changing the behavior of Pyongyang and Tehran. As a 
result, Obama will receive the baton on a multilateral negotiation with North 
Korea that has been and will be a frustrating marathon, but he will likely pick 
up where Bush leaves off, simply because there are no practical alternatives. On 
Iran, Obama will almost surely proceed with Bush’s policy of sticks and carrots 
that seeks a diplomatic solution—a third option between acquiescing to Iran’s 
behavior or attacking Iran to change it. To have a better chance of success, 
this policy will need sharper sticks and sweeter carrots, including the direct 
engagement Obama has advocated. And if that fails, Obama will have to weigh his 
options—none of which, he has said, he’s taking off the table.

As for Iraq, Obama will inherit a war that Iraqis themselves are mostly ending 
for him. The pace and size of the U.S. troop reduction may be hotly debated, but 
few in Baghdad or Washington dispute that such a withdrawal is now appropriate. 
This effort to end the war in Iraq will enable Obama to try to save the war in 
Afghanistan, employing many of the lessons learned from the surge strategy he 
opposed in Iraq.

A challenge for Obama will be to knit the Iraq endgame into a broader approach 
to the Middle East. But here, too, it likely won’t look all that different from 
Bush’s: support for an independent Lebanon; attempts to elicit responsible 
behavior from Syria; and security cooperation with Sunni Arab regimes that may 
not love freedom, but definitely hate what Iran, and al Qaeda, are doing to the 
region.

Another part of this strategy for Obama is continuing Bush’s engagement on the 
Middle East peace process. A real insight of Bush’s first term had been that the 
Israeli-Palestinian conflict was more than a border dispute, as Bill Clinton had 
framed it. Bush argued that peace required a successful Palestinian state and 
economy. But the first-term policy amounted to telling the Palestinians to put 
their house in order first, and then the United States would talk about ending 
the Israeli occupation. Only in the second term were both efforts pursued 
simultaneously. And because of it, Obama will inherit a Middle East peace 
process finally proceeding on both tracks at once: state-building and peacemaking.

Just as importantly, Obama will find a changing Middle East where freedom, 
opportunity, and the longing for dignity are bubbling up in ways that no one can 
control, Washington included. Something tells me that the leader of the 
Democratic Party isn’t going to give up on supporting democracy, both in terms 
of institutions and elections. Obama may rebrand Bush’s poorly named “freedom 
agenda”—he may expand it, as some of his advisors suggest, into a “dignity 
agenda”—but the basic approach will likely continue.

So, too, will there be little change on issues of global grand strategy. A 
refrain from the campaign was rebuilding damaged ties with America’s allies. But 
those ties have largely been rebuilt already—in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. 
Obama can certainly improve these relations further, especially with real action 
on climate change. But another challenge may be managing the bubbles of 
overinflated expectations for his presidency that will soon begin bursting in 
allied capitals.

Bush will also bequeath to Obama a realistic strategy for managing the rise of 
great powers. By pushing China, India, Japan, Brazil, and others to be 
responsible stakeholders in the international order, the Bush administration 
showed that “the rise of the rest” need not be synonymous with America’s 
decline. In fact, it might actually enhance U.S. influence. In Asia, the most 
geopolitically dynamic part of the world, the United States now has better 
relations with each major power than they do with one another. Every state wants 
to hedge against the others, and the partner of choice is Washington. Obama’s 
task will be to continue inducing these emerging powers to share a greater 
burden of managing a new set of global challenges that no country, including the 
United States, can manage alone.

The asterisk here is less a rising China (though the question is still open) 
than a resurgent Russia. And with Russia, too, Obama will inherit a strategy 
that he’s likely to continue, simply because it’s better than the alternatives. 
It seeks neither to isolate Russia (which is impossible) nor to give Russia the 
blank check it wants in its old imperial stomping grounds (which is 
irresponsible). Rather, this policy seeks to balance cooperation with Russia on 
many shared interests with competition when interests diverge. Maybe this 
balance could have been struck better on issues such as Kosovo or missile 
defense, but that doesn’t signal the need for a new policy, just a recalibration 
of the current one. And if anything, the Georgia war showed that, if the United 
States wants Russia to be a responsible stakeholder, encouragement won’t be enough.

There will even likely be a great deal of continuity in the fight against al 
Qaeda. There’s a consensus now that preemption is necessary to fight terrorism; 
Obama himself has advocated for it. But in Bush’s second term, the 
administration basically converged on a new mantra: “We can’t kill our way to 
victory,” a key tenet of counterinsurgency strategy. The focus became not just 
fighting terrorists but building conditions of security, opportunity, and 
justice for the societies that terrorists seek to radicalize. It was even 
accepted that the United States might have to reconcile with some terrorists, as 
it did in Iraq and as some now support doing in Afghanistan. Obama most 
likely—and correctly—will not refer to a “war on terror” as the organizing 
principle of U.S. foreign policy, but that doesn’t mean he won’t approach 
terrorism in much the same way.

Such a strategy depends, as the Bush administration eventually conceded, on 
embracing nation-building as a national interest. There is now a consensus that 
the United States is threatened as much by failing and poorly governed states as 
strong, aggressive ones. Obama’s challenge will be to continue the Bush 
administration’s effort to make nation-building a civilian-led effort—to 
demilitarize U.S. foreign policy by trying to prevent states from failing in the 
first place. This effort will require a transformation of U.S. institutions of 
“soft power”—a goal that former Secretary of State Colin Powell, then Rice, and 
most famously Gates made into a personal crusade. Obama will inherit the start 
of it—an enlarged diplomatic corps, a rudimentary civilian expeditionary force, 
and foreign assistance that has been increased more than at any time since the 
Marshall Plan—and he looks poised to carry the torch.

The pragmatic internationalism that Bush will pass to Obama was largely defined 
through changes made during the past four years. And for that reason, there 
might be more continuity between the second term of Bush and the first term of 
Obama than between the two terms of Bush himself. This foreign policy is a 
valuable inheritance. And if Obama avoids spending his early years in office 
pursuing change for the sake of change—simply trying to disassociate himself 
from his predecessor, as Clinton and Bush too often did—he could create the 
makings of a new bipartisan consensus on foreign policy.

Obama might realize this, but the Democratic and Republican parties, I fear, 
will not. They could each pretend as if Bush’s second-term foreign policy never 
happened. At worst, Democrats could swagger righteously into power, believing 
their predecessors were rubes who screwed everything up, and now is the chance 
to do everything differently. For their part, Republicans could tell themselves 
the comforting lie that they lost because Bush abandoned a real conservative 
foreign policy—that his second term was all capitulation to the striped-pants 
appeasers of the State Department.

One of my regrets about my work at the State Department is that we were unable 
to convince the American people that Bush’s pragmatic internationalism had 
within it the makings of a strong, sustainable global leadership for the 21st 
century—and that, as such, it had the potential to heal some of the fraught 
divisions over America’s role in the world that have plagued the country since 
the end of the Cold War. My hope is that Obama will not only continue this 
foreign policy, but strengthen it and expand support for it among all Americans. 
Were he able to do that, it would truly be a change I could believe in.


Christian Brose is a senior editor at Foreign Policy. He served as chief 
speechwriter and policy advisor for U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice 
from 2005 to 2008, and as speechwriter for former U.S. Secretary of State Colin 
Powell from 2004 to 2005.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com