Obama's world
How will a 21st-century president fare in a 19th-century world?
BLISS it is in this dawn to be alive. That will be the reaction of many people around the world to America’s election of a thrilling new president—young, black, with political and intellectual gifts well above the ordinary. But the world that will face Barack Obama when he moves into the White House in January is not very heaven. It is, in fact, a mess.
In his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope”, Mr Obama wrote of America’s need to build a new international consensus to confront transnational threats. The world of great-power rivalry, he argued, “no longer exists”. But is that true? An argument can be made that old-fashioned competition between the powers has come back with a vengeance since the fleeting post-Soviet interlude of the 1990s, when America bestrode the planet unopposed. As Robert Kagan, one of America’s cleverest (and pro-McCain) foreign-policy intellectuals, notes in his book “The Return of History and the End of Dreams”, a 19th-century diplomat would instantly recognise this new-old world of clashing interests and alliances between great powers, will be preoccupations from day one.
And none of it will be easy. If the 200,000 Germans who turned out to cheer Mr Obama in Berlin this summer are anything to go by, he will enjoy terrific global goodwill. But cheering Germans will not send more troops to help in Afghanistan. The world will applaud if Mr Obama closes Guantánamo, the prison that has come to symbolise everything that was wrong with Mr Bush’s “war on terror”. But even if he does, al-Qaeda will not dissolve itself; Michael McConnell, America’s director of intelligence, has told both candidates it will remain “very lethal” for the next 20 years. Mr Obama has a resounding mandate, but polls suggest that 60% of Americans want the new president to focus on domestic issues and only 21% on foreign affairs. And in foreign affairs he will anyway not be able to summon all the familiar, muscular instruments of power available to his predecessors: America’s military machine as well as its money machine is on the rack.
One bright spot is that Mr Obama’s promise to withdraw most combat forces from Iraq by May 2010 looks more achievable than it did when he started campaigning. Mr Bush’s “surge” and America’s exploitation of a Sunni backlash against al-Qaeda have slashed the rate of killing this year. America has at last trained a half-decent Iraqi army, which has boosted the self-confidence of Iraq’s government (so much so that it might order American troops in Iraq into their barracks when America’s UN mandate ends this December).
Even so, Iraq is far from stable. The present calm flatters to deceive. The government is dominated by Shias who have neither accepted a big enough place for the formerly dominant Sunnis nor resolved an explosive argument with the Kurds over the control of Kirkuk. If these flaws remain unfixed, the civil war could resume. Mr Obama may be tempted to get out while the going is good, pocketing a “victory” earned mainly on Mr Bush’s watch. But too fast a rush for the exit might itself be the catalyst for new slaughter.
Mr Obama will also inherit an acute problem in Iran. He has promised to do everything in his power to stop the Iranians acquiring a nuclear bomb. Since Mr Bush’s threats of force and economic sanctions did not make Iran stop enriching uranium, Mr Obama may attempt a feat of diplomatic ju-jitsu, by seeking a rapprochement instead. He says that America should be willing to talk to enemies, Iran included. And a “grand bargain” could solve many problems. Iran and America have some common interests, including regular energy exports from the Gulf, a stable Iraq and hostility to the Taliban in Afghanistan. An Iran at peace with America might abandon its nuclear ambitions, stop calling for the dissolution of Israel and end its support for groups such as Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon, which also want Israel destroyed.
It is a beguiling theory.
But Iran’s intentions are hard to decipher. Does it prize good relations with America enough to drop its nuclear ambitions and accept Israel? How much influence would it demand in return? Or, having watched Mr Bush flounder, does it judge American power to be on the wane and see a chance to master the Middle East without conceding anything? The only certain fact is that Iran has an unsurpassed record of running circles around its interlocutors. Mr Obama will have to guard against the danger of Iran spinning out talks while also continuing to spin the centrifuges making the fuel that could be enriched for a bomb.
Caught in Afghanistan
Finishing the war in Iraq will be hard enough. Winning the one in Afghanistan may prove harder still. When Mr Obama started his presidential run, Iraq looked hopeless and Afghanistan more manageable. But now it is Afghanistan that has started to look unwinnable and to claim the bigger toll in American lives. Mr Obama can reinforce in Afghanistan by winding down in Iraq, but more troops are only part of what Afghanistan needs. Mr Bush hoped for too much and demanded too little from President Hamid Karzai. He has been a thorough disappointment, never daring to tackle the drug-traffickers and former warlords worming away his administration from within.
Afghans now consider the government in Kabul both corrupt and ineffectual, a mixture lethal to its legitimacy. Elections due in 2009 might give Mr Obama an opportunity to promote an alternative to Mr Karzai, but no exceptional candidate has come forward. And the elections could backfire if Taliban control of the Pushtun belt prevents the majority tribe from participating and delivers power to the Tajiks. Mr Obama may hope that General David Petraeus, who took over as America’s regional commander last week, can replicate in Afghanistan the counter-insurgency magic he performed in Iraq. But the general himself has said that the two insurgencies are very different.
One of the most worrying differences is Pakistan. The insurgents in Afghanistan have the advantage of a sanctuary in the lawless tribal areas across Pakistan’s mountainous border. Pakistan itself is a nominal American ally that has lately gone on the blink in a way no American president can ignore. The relationship between America and Pakistan, scratchy enough when General Pervez Musharraf was president, is misfiring under the rickety civilian administration of Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower.
On the campaign trail Mr Obama promised to be tough on Pakistan, threatening to attack al-Qaeda there if he had the intelligence and the Pakistanis refused to take action themselves. This did not win him a lot of friends in this nuclear-armed country of more than 160m Muslims. He has now promised to support Pakistan’s government while compelling it to take on the insurgents. But how to conjure a policy out of the sound bite?
Pakistan has a political crisis, an economic crisis, a jihadist insurgency, a coup-prone army and an intelligence service that may still have links to the Taliban. America’s cross-border attacks often kill civilians and inflame anti-American sentiment. If he undermines the wobbly Mr Zardari, Mr Obama is in danger of giving al-Qaeda a far bigger prize in Pakistan than the one it lost in Afghanistan.
Calls for “engagement” in Palestine, an emblematic conflict that galvanises Muslims everywhere, follow every new president into the Oval Office. Candidate Obama reiterated America’s customary support for the Jewish state (a “fundamentally just concept”) and called its security sacrosanct. At the same time he has shown more sympathy than most previous presidents for the plight of the Palestinians, perhaps influenced by the friendship he formed in Chicago with Rashid Khalidi, a prominent Palestinian-American scholar.
Whether Mr Obama can transform this support for Israel and empathy for the Palestinians into a peace initiative is another matter. History suggests that presidents who tackle Palestine late in their term make no progress. And even presidents who try hard can fail. Bill Clinton’s abortive summit at Camp David in 2000 haunts would-be peacemakers. In the wake of that failure a Palestinian intifada set Israel and the occupied territories on fire. The incoming Mr Bush took one look at the smoke and chose not to get his hands burned. And once al-Qaeda attacked America Mr Bush had too much else to do.
Gummed up in Gaza
The scene facing the incoming Mr Obama is quieter: the West Bank is locked down by Israel and in the Gaza Strip Hamas is patchily observing a truce. But conditions are not much riper for diplomacy. Israel’s elections next February may return a hawkish religious-right government in place of the centrist Kadima. And whereas Yasser Arafat once spoke for most Palestinians, they are now split between Hamas and Fatah. Mr Obama may judge it wiser to concentrate first on seeking a deal with Iran—or splitting Syria from Iran by getting Israel to return the Golan Heights—than to grasp the thorn of Palestine right away.
The crescent of instability from the Levant to Pakistan consumes the present White House and will dominate the thinking of the new one. By contrast, relations with Europe will need less maintenance. Americans like to say that, thanks in part to their efforts, Europe is at last “whole and free”, undivided by an iron curtain and with democracy ascendant everywhere. Though not yet the political power some members want it to be, the European Union has taken over the responsibilities that fell to America during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. To many in Europe the Obama presidency offers a chance to sweeten a relationship that soured under Mr Bush, and so shore up both the soft and hard power of a West in apparent decline.
And yet if Mr Obama hopes to coax bigger contingents for Afghanistan out of his NATO allies, he will have trouble. The Afghan war, not just the Iraq war, is unpopular in Europe. The Dutch (and Canadians) may leave Afghanistan soon. Even the faithful British, overstretched by the investment Tony Blair made in the “special relationship” with America, are demoralised. Europeans want to preserve NATO, but are no longer sure what it should mainly be for: Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August persuaded some members that the alliance should be preparing again to defend Europe, not taking on new responsibilities as an instrument of America’s far-flung wars against terrorism.
John McCain’s gut told him that Russia is dangerous. Mr Obama’s cautious reaction to the war in Georgia suggests that he has not yet made up his mind. That is forgivable: the world’s professional Kremlin-watchers are also still scratching their heads over how to read Russia’s swaggering demeanour under Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin. Was the invasion of Georgia evidence that Russia is on the march again, fired up by its energy riches? Or were the Russians dragged into a war they did not want by the adventurism of an American protégé, Georgia’s intemperate Mikheil Saakashvili?
Either way, America can no longer take Russia’s grudging acquiescence for granted. An ugly nationalism is abroad in Russia. It wants to be accepted again as a great power and will resist a further enlargement of NATO. With its nuclear arsenal, its threat to remobilise conventional forces, its control over gas supplies to Europe, its arms sales to the likes of Iran and Venezuela and its ability to gum up the Security Council, Russia has plenty of ways to make trouble. Its mood swings like a pendulum between feelings of victimhood and an instinct to bully—which makes it hard to strike a balance between appeasing and confronting it. America’s European allies are divided on this. Some favour a tough line; others want Mr Obama to reverse Mr Bush’s plans to base missile defences in Poland and put Georgia and Ukraine on the path to NATO membership.
How far into the future must an American president look? With two wars and a recession on his hands, Mr Obama will have less attention to devote to the slower, deeper cycles of global change. The presidency of George Bush senior coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. He and Mikhail Gorbachev started the process of reducing the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals—a job Mr Obama could usefully take further. That Mr Bush also started to talk and think about the need for “a new world order”, one that would reflect the profound changes ushered in by the end of the cold war. But his attention was distracted by America’s first war against Saddam Hussein, and an ailing economy contributed to his defeat by Mr Clinton in 1992.
Life in the top dog yet
Mr Obama will also take office at a time of big changes in the underlying world order. The rise of Asia means that the 21st century will not be dominated as the last one was by the Atlantic powers. America, to be sure, remains the world’s strongest military force; America and the EU have the world’s biggest economies. But although the main aim for now of a China fixated on its own growing pains is to preserve stability, its economy could surpass America’s by 2030 (see chart), and America’s director of intelligence predicts that it will start to become a global military power by 2025.
That may not be long after Mr Obama’s watch. So a far-seeing president would use this transition to make certain that, by the time China does achieve its full potential, it and the world’s other rising powers are bound into what they consider a just international system in a way that enables the West to continue to prosper too. That will require not only a thorough overhaul of institutions from the United Nations to the IMF but also a change in America’s mentality: above all, a greater willingness to heed, not just hear, the views of others.
Easy to say. The economies of America and China are complementary: America borrows China’s savings to buy what China makes. But many policy issues—trade, exchange rates and global warming—set them at loggerheads. One of the new president’s big jobs will be to stop a Democratic Congress from taking refuge in protectionism and China-bashing as the American economy slumps. And one of his hardest sells will be persuading India and China to curb carbon emissions while the average American pumps four times more carbon into the sky than the average Chinese.
American co-operation with China will be hampered not just by conflicting interests but also by values. The president of the United States continues to be, as the cliché has it, the leader of the free world. Mr Obama cannot be true to his own principles or to America’s vocation and simply ignore the fact that China is authoritarian, or turn the blind eye China does to gross abuses of rights in places such as Myanmar or Sudan. He dare not forget that not just Taiwan but also Japan and South Korea still depend on America to defend their freedom if China one day turns aggressive.
At the end of the 19th century, Britain was the world’s superpower. By the end of the 20th it was America. The transition was preceded by two world wars. Some time in this century, the balance of power will change again. Mr Obama has inherited a world of pressing troubles. But as he tackles them he will have to keep an eye on the longer game: how to prepare for the day when America may no longer be sole superpower and only the first or maybe the second of many big powers. To manage that transition peacefully and still promote the spread of free markets and liberal democracy: that will be the mark of a truly great president for the 21st century.
US election 2008
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