YOU CAN TELL A FOREIGN POLICY EXPERT...:

The Making of George W. Obama: 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. (Christian Brose, January/February 2009, Foreign Policy)

[O]bama 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.

...because they believe the imploding former Soviet Union is resurgent, but between the lines he's right that W made universal liberalization into the core of even the pragmatist approach.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 5, 2009 9:28 AM