Obama takes sharp turn on foreign policy

Lost in the cacophony of the economic crisis is the issue on which the candidate Barack Obama promised to effect some of the most change: foreign policy.

And yet, as Obama’s presidential term has buzzed with bailouts, stimulus, the budget and now healthcare reform, his administration has been steadily pressing forward with its plans to “reboot” relationships and distance itself from goals and tactics of the Bush years.

{mosads}”Look at general things that have been done,” Robert Hunter, NATO ambassador under President Clinton and now a senior adviser at RAND Corp., told The Hill. “A lot of things have been cleaned up from the past in terms of America’s reputation,” including the decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility for terror suspects and choosing to send the vice president to last month’s Munich Security Conference, he said.

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton sees these initial actions differently.

“It represents a triumph of process over substance,” Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Hill. Bolton questioned whether the administration’s game plan of “simply talking to governments [to] change disagreements about fundamental issues” will prove useful.

Many of Obama’s initial foreign policy endeavors ring familiar to those who remember his stumps on the campaign trail. His pledge to turn the military’s focus back to Afghanistan was jump-started with last month’s announcement that the U.S. will send 17,000 more troops to the Central Asian country, although he still faces challenges in getting cooperation from other NATO coalition partners to dial up the 40-nation effort there. “A sensible question is whether Europe will step up to the plate,” Bolton said.

Obama’s pledge to engage Iran and Syria diplomatically without preconditions culminated in the four-hour Saturday meeting between Jeffrey Feltman, the acting U.S. secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Daniel Shapiro of the National Security Council, and Syrian officials including Foreign Minister Walid Muallem in Damascus.

Feltman emerged to label the talks “very constructive.”

Moves such as this, said Hunter, “get rid of the underbrush we’ve had for so many years — ‘if you want to talk to us, you have to be a friend.'”

And Iran is being invited to a regional conference at the end of this month to discuss Afghanistan. But talks with Iran — which, Israel’s military intelligence chief claimed Sunday, can now build a nuclear weapon — may get a boost from Obama’s upcoming trip to Turkey, a country that had previously been asked by Iran to serve as a mediator between the Islamic Republic and the United States.

“I don’t think the Iranian government is ever going to be talked out of nuclear weapons,” Bolton said. But the former ambassador said Iran “would love to talk to the United States,” feeling that the extended diplomacy would buy them time and lend them legitimacy.

Ironically, Obama’s out-of-the-gate foreign policy is being powered by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the same Democratic presidential hopeful who lambasted Obama’s platform of talks with Iran and Syria as illustrating foreign-policy amateurishness.

Even though Clinton and Obama have found common cause, though, the agenda is still not without controversy.

News broke last week that Obama had sent a letter to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, allegedly offering to drop plans for the Eastern Europe missile defense system if Russia would help bring Iran in line. Obama said the New York Times story mischaracterized this cog in his wider goal to “reboot” the Russian-American relationship.

“What I said in the letter was that, obviously, to the extent that we are lessening Iran’s commitment to nuclear weapons, then that reduces the pressure for — or the need for a missile defense system,” Obama said at the White House last Tuesday. “In no way does that in any — does that diminish my commitment to making sure that Poland, the Czech Republic, and other NATO members are fully enjoying the partnership, the alliance, and U.S. support with respect to their security.”

Hunter said Obama would want to make sure that the missile defense system is cost-effective and capable of stopping an attack before pressing forward on the plan. “Pressing the reset button doesn’t mean Russia is going to do everything we want,” and vice-versa, he said.

“The letter shows [the Obama administration is] prepared to trade [the missile defense system] away,” Bolton said, adding Russia would see it as a sign of weakness.

Another point of controversy last week was Thursday’s meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft — former national security advisers for Presidents Carter and George H.W. Bush, respectively — were the sole witnesses for the “U.S. Strategy Regarding Iran” hearing. “When Brzezinski used his short opening statement to say Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should be cautious about listening to Israel’s ideas, the red flag really went up,” one Jewish leader told the Jerusalem Post afterward.

{mospagebreak}Both Brzezinski and Scowcroft counseled against using any military force to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, advocating talks instead. Brzezinski, who said armed conflict with Iran would “absolutely devastate the historical legacy of the Obama administration,” also said that U.S. policy shouldn’t be influenced by the policies of “interested parties.”

Yet the Obama administration has demonstrated wariness to touch some other foreign-policy hot potatoes.

{mosads}Last week the Interntional Criminal Court, of which the U.S. is not a member, issued a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. On the campaign trail, Obama said Darfur was one of his key foreign policy concerns.

“The strains that have been placed on our alliances around the world and the respect that’s been diminished over the last eight years has constrained us being able to act on something like the genocide in Darfur, because we don’t have the resources or the allies to do everything that we should be doing,” Obama said during the second presidential debate. “That’s going to change when I’m president.”

The White House was muted on the warrant for al-Bashir, though, with press secretary Robert Gibbs calling for calm in the region and refusing to answer a reporter’s question about Obama’s support for the ICC action.

Obama has also said rebooting America’s relationship with the Islamic world is a priority, and some viewed the ICC action as incendiary toward Muslims. Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani called the warrant “a plot against Islam,” adding, “We consider the warrant as a political insult against Muslims; what we expected from changes in the U.S. administration was that we would not witness such stances.”

For his part, al-Bashir was optimistic about working with the administration in a January interview with Asharq Al-Awsat. “If President Obama continues in his positive changes and if we felt a change, then we are ready for all the changes he will introduce toward the Islamic world and toward us,” al-Bashir said.

Global reaction to Obama’s initial moves will become more apparent on Obama’s first trip to Europe next month, where he’ll visit Britain, France, Germany and the Czech Republic, and the to-be-scheduled Turkey visit.

Hosting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the White House last week, though, didn’t win the president fans among the British media when Brown was denied a formal joint press conference with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes in the background. The story has had staying power across the pond, where the Telegraph reported Saturday that White House sources told them Obama was just too tired to properly entertain the prime minister.

Both of the former ambassadors who talked to The Hill agreed that Obama’s foreign policy is already a sharp turn from the policies of the Bush administration.

Hunter said the aims of diplomatic engagement and global respect come “in response to a lot of pent-up demand of the outside world on the United States.”

He sums up Obama’s policy like so: “Try to turn the page and see what can be done together.”

Bolton, however, said he’s worried at the early policy indicators. “[Obama’s] demonstrated that he’d like to run more U.S. foreign policy through the United Nations,” Bolton said, adding that the engagement with Iran and Syria is “trying to buy him points at the Security Council in other areas.”

“It’s not going to pay the kind of benefit for the U.S. he thinks he can get,” Bolton warned.