If ever the world would have forgiven a man for not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time, it would have been now. No one would blame US President Barack Obama if he focused exclusively on the economic crisis, pushing the foreign policy in-tray to the back of his desk. After all, there’s only so much even a Messiah can handle.
But last September, when a panicked Senator John McCain suspended his campaign to return to Washington and deal with the financial turmoil, Obama refused to follow, saying: “Presidents are going to have to deal with more than one thing at a time.”
In that spirit, he has advanced a program of Rooseveltian ambition at home — while not forgetting that his job description also demands he be the lead actor abroad.
It’s not been easy: There are reports of flashes of irritation, as well as streaks of gray on the presidential head. By all accounts the president often looks like he needs a cigarette. Badly.
For all that, he has crammed a slew of foreign policy moves into his first six weeks, any one of which would have made big news in normal times. Instead, in the age of global economic meltdown, they have had to fight for more than fleeting media attention.
Most visible have been the big declarations, whether announcing the beginning of the end of the Iraq war, avowing that “the United States of America does not torture,” or ordering that Guantanamo be closed. In just the last week, we’ve had US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dispatching officials to Syria as well as inviting Iran to talks on the future of Afghanistan — extending a hand to two states previously consigned to outer darkness.
REVELATION
The start of the month brought the revelation that Obama had written a secret letter to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, hinting at a deal in which Moscow would lean on Iran, urging it to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons, in return for the US scrapping its planned installation of a missile defense system in Russia’s eastern European backyard. A gesture to cap it all — the Obama administration has moved to ease trade and travel restrictions with Cuba.
So there’s no shortage of activity. The question, 50 days into the administration, is — What does it all amount to? Is there a common thread of logic running through these moves, one that we might describe, however prematurely, as the Obama doctrine?
The first unifying theme, sounded minutes after he took the presidential oath, is a repudiation of the legacy of his predecessor. Obama is determined to signal to the world that he is the anti-Bush. Some on both the left and right have suggested that this is more symbolic than real, that in fact the basic lineaments of US policy remain in place. Obama would rather keep a lot of troops in Iraq until the end of 2011, just as the former administration of George W. Bush planned to, he has intensified US involvement in Afghanistan, sending 17,000 more troops and Robert Gates, Bush’s defense secretary, remains in his post under Obama.
Put that to the Obama team and they don’t wholly deny it. The US did not become a different country on Jan. 20, they say; its interests have not changed overnight. It’s true, they concede, that in its second term the Bush White House did become more “realist,” opening up lines of communication with the likes of Iran. The difference, the new team in Washington says, is that while the Bush folk were “forced” into realism after seeing their ideological dreams in ruins, “this is our starting point.” What no one denies is that there is a clear advantage for the US in the rest of the world believing that a profound change has come about. Which is why Vice President Joe Biden’s declaration that the US is pressing the “reset button” has become the current catchphrase of US diplomacy.
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