The Ambiguity Of An Obama Foreign Policy

Christopher Badeaux is Senior Editor of The New Ledger.

The usual people who don't understand foreign policy - which is to say, the sorts of people who are well-received, if not employed, by the State Department (which hasn't understood foreign policy since Kissinger, or perhaps Dulles) - are of course charmed by the President's playacting on the global stage. This is probably because the kabuki-dance of Metternichian diplomacy, though likely to allow untold millions to die of starvation, rape, genocide, torture, ethnic cleansing, and imprisonment, is more visually appealing than war and open conflict - not least because all of that starvation, rape, genocide, torture, ethnic cleansing, and imprisonment tends to happen in countries that don't allow cameras near the atrocities.

This terrible conflation of form over substance elides the fact that Baron von Metternich developed the balance of power system he did to avoid a repeat of the devastation of Napoleon, and that ultimately, that very system of diplomatic communiqués, bows, negotiations, dinners, and playacting not only failed to avert the First World War, it positively accelerated and worsened the Second. In other words, the modern system is a shell of a remnant of a means of preventing a disaster that has long-since passed, and that failed miserably both times it was really well-tested. It is, in short, a system intended to devolve larger conflicts into smaller, more manageable ones, and is instead a method for preventing small conflicts by accumulating them into larger ones. Perversely, the whole, nominal point of the modern system of international diplomacy is to provide channels through which substantive foreign policy - that is, the real goals and desires of nations and nation-states - can flow without having more wars than necessary. Its loveliness should be secondary to its effectiveness.

Applauding what President Obama has delivered - a foreign policy with better aesthetics than President Bush's, without President Bush's substance - is like wanting a faster car always stuck in the driveway: There's no point if it's not going anywhere.

This inability to separate substance and appearance - oddly appropriate for a President who has never shown much of an ability to do so since he began putting the finishing touch on his resume in 2004 - is nowhere better on display than in his dealings with China.

One would be hard-pressed to identify anyone who is neither a member of the Administration, a member of the American press corps (insofar as that isn't the same thing), one of the aforementioned lovers of Metternichian avoidance, or a member of the government of the People's Republic of China who thinks President Obama's strolling photo-shoot through Asia was a success. The heretofore-unbroken foreign policy consensus of three decades has been that America wants to control a rising China to bring it into the community of nations - as a free and open society, trading freely with the world and keeping its torture to the bare minimum a quasi-fascist regime can accept as it transitions into something vaguely resembling a democratic empire. Because this requires a delicate dance of threats, cajolings, ingratiations, brute shows of force, and speeches about strategic partnerships while everyone clenches their teeth; and because that sort of thing is beyond the ability of any elected American President since Reagan if not Washington; Sino-American relations tend to look like a bizarrely schizophrenic bumble that extends the length of an Administration.

This is why President Clinton - in that way that only Bubba could - alternated between overlooking Chinese espionage at Los Alamos and sending a carrier battle group to the Taiwan Straits; why President Bush thanked China for capturing an American plane in international airspace on the one hand and met early and often with the Dalai Lama and made clear that America's future strategic partnership lay with India, as an explicit counterweight to China.

The critical feature to all of this, however ineptly done, is that the carrot and the stick are closely joined. American Presidents praise a free, prosperous China. They speak of strategic partnerships while directing carrier battle groups in the Pacific. They talk about One China while approving arms shipments to Taiwan and hugging the Dalai Lama. They let China know that it faces no threat from the United States, but that it could.
Yet President Obama is home today with nothing to show for it other than some non-committal statements on the importance of an uncensored internet (which statements were largely censored) and a great deal of commentary about a failed trip. He put off any meeting with the Dalai Lama before traveling to China; he spoke not a word about human rights; he let himself be used as a prop at a press conference in which no questions were allowed.

In return, he got, perhaps, a lovely set of lacquered chopsticks.

President Obama has been called our first foreign President - a title in which he seems to bask abroad - and though there may be something to that (he came from a corrupt political machine, he seems incapable of connecting with most of his constituents and appears not to care, his wife benefited from targeted government funds, and so on), it is also insulting to any American President, including this one. It is more that he had so little grounding in everyday America before coming to the mainland to attend college that he acquired only half of an American personality: He got that inordinate desire to please others without the attendant refusal to budge when pushed that even Midwesterners display when lectured. The one, without the other, is simply incapable of using the Metternichian system for more than symbolism, because there must always be the threat of force to go with the tea service. The absence of that complete, American personality was fully on display from ASEAN through Korea: Amid all of the ultimately pointless genuflection, there was no demand for anything, of any kind, or even substantive movement, on any goal to advance American interests abroad.

The Asia trip is merely indicative of the norm. I defy anyone reading this to tell me what goals the Obama Administration actually has. An end to the Israeli-Arab conflict? Surely not, for if there is anywhere this team has truly failed, it is in that tiny corner of the world: Israel has told America to pound sand more thoroughly than in decades, and there's no sign of sanity breaking out in the Palestinians or indeed, any of the neighboring Arab countries. Triumph in Afghanistan? As we sit here, President Obama has promised to move past his initial premise on Afghanistan - that we should focus our efforts on winning that war - and past his subsequent, slightly modified position - that we should focus our efforts on that war - to some indeterminate position (complete with "exit ramps"), to be disclosed soon, though when is a bit up in the air at the moment. Win concessions from Iran to avoid nuclearization? I believe the current status of that effort is pending resolution, although Iran has informed us that if we turn our backs on Israel and side with Iran, it may hold the football still for us to kick, this time. (Doubtless, abandoning Israel to cozy up with Iran will poll well in the heartland.) Get Russia to side with us on anything at all?

Concededly, months of reassuring a country dying faster than Japan, South Korea, or China - no mean feat - that it still counts for something hasn't accomplished much, but surely that's coming along any day now. Convince Kim Jong Il to … do something, presumably? While I yield to my colleague Josh Stanton on the Hermit Kingdom and its schizophrenic, baby-free neighbor to the South, I'm not certain as we sit here that the President has even identified what he wants from the DPRK, let alone accomplished a first step. Convince China to keep buying our currency so we can run even bigger deficits and debts? What are they going to do, stop?
Perhaps, some might say, President Obama is banking goodwill for future foreign policy endeavors. Certainly, one would only have had to pay attention to Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush on the campaign trail to have some idea about their preferred foreign policy outcomes, while

President Obama remains a cipher; but I'm game: What are they? Perhaps something from the American Left's hobbyhorse closet: Ending carbon dioxide emissions? I'm sure all of the self-important folks gathering in Copenhagen next month will laugh at that. Get China to lower its greenhouse emissions? More laughter. End a genocide? The President has been very clear since before he took office that he embodies the New Left's strange, unwavering belief in the inviolability of post-Westphalian borders; or if you prefer, how is the Administration dealing with the Sudan? Ending nuclear proliferation? While doubtless on the President's agenda - he has said as much in yet another well-received speech - the actual work of ending nuclear proliferation appears to be less important to the President than whether he's given a well-received speech this week. (Ask Pakistan. Or Venezuela. Or North Korea. Or…) Reform the international economic system? In fairness, President Obama has shown a greater willingness to re-enact Smoot-Hawley than any President in decades, though whether this is desirable is a different question. Whether the rest of the world is on board is, thankfully, not yet known.

The Obama Administration's foreign policy appears premised on the idea that the Carter Administration was not inherently wrong on anything, just well ahead of its time. A left-wing, Latin American dictator is ousted by every other branch of government, following from an attempt to seize power in defiance of his country's written constitution? Back the status quo ante. The Soviets - pardon, the Russians - are flexing their muscles in Eastern Europe? Give them breathing room. China is asserting its hegemony in Southeast Asia (concededly without invading Vietnam this time)? Let all of the region know that we don't even understand what that means, and we certainly don't intend to get in the way. India? At best, a neutral party, and never an ally.

If its foreign policy approach is merely the revenge of the rabbit-stalked, its grand strategy appears to be providing President Obama chances to appear before cheering crowds composed of non-Americans. Concrete effects simply do not matter, because they are not the goal. The President is the message; the President is the medium; the President is the goal. It is not coincidence that the word "I" appears more often than the words "a," "an," and "the" combined in the President's speeches abroad; it is not coincidence that the only things anyone noted of the President's tour were his bow to a figurehead Emperor and his announcement that he is the first Pacific President.

Taking this in the most charitable way possible, this represents a complete failure of understanding by the President. I say the President and not his foreign policy team, as some of his partisans are wont to do because, as an internet commenter noted the other day, what the Unitary Executive really means is this: When someone in the Executive Branch screws up, there's only one man to blame.

Whether that man even knows it is, like everything else about his foreign policy, an open question.

By Christopher Badeaux:
Reprinted with permission from The New Ledger.