President-elect Barack Obama traveled to Europe in July where he was
enthusiastically received. (Courtesy Photo)
By Zenitha Prince
Washington Bureau Chief
(November 25, 2008) - In addition to domestic challenges at home, President-elect Barack Obama will walk into a foreign policy quagmire that could bog down the most experienced of executives.
“George Bush has left Barack Obama one of the biggest messes in foreign policy in American history,” said Allan Lichtman, an expert on presidential history and professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C. “Relations with Russia are at a low ebb. He’s got to deescalate that tension while maintaining relations with countries on Russia’s border. He’s got to deal with a very bad international financial system. Relations with China are up and down. The nation of Iran continues to be an extreme provocation to the U.S. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not been resolved. Wars continue in Iraq and Afghanistan—and that’s just to mention a few.”
Muddying the prospect even more is the international financial crisis, which was precipitated by home foreclosures and the resulting crash of Wall Street firms in the U.S. Already, the Institute for Policy Studies said, the U.S. and European governments have committed approximately $4.1 trillion to aid struggling banks and other financial in¬stitutions, money now diverted from social concerns like poverty.
“George Bush has left Barack Obama one of the biggest messes in foreign policy in American history.”
Whether an Obama administration can work miracles is in doubt, Lichtman said, but there is at least one thing he can pull off with some success.
“We can get out of Iraq; that’s the one thing he can do,” the historian said. “That’s what he promised. That’s the test of this administration.”
Obama’s White House advisor David Axelrod said Sunday on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” that this is a test the new administration will not fail.
“The president-elect was clear throughout the campaign that when he became president, he was going to give the secretary of defense a new mission. And that mission was going to be to wind down our involvement in Iraq,” Axelrod said. “Nothing has changed….Our supporters can be—and the entire nation and the world can be—assured that the commitments that he's made are the commitments he's going to keep.”
Keeping that commitment will require overcoming the resistance of the commanding generals, which can prove a major obstacle in resolving the Iraq war, Lichtman said, but the effort is worth it. “If you’re out of Iraq you can deal with Iran, you can focus on Afghanistan and you have more money to address other policy concerns,” he said.
Whether this new U.S. regime will robustly address any other foreign policy concerns—especially those involving the African continent—is a worry among some advocates. “As far as U.S. presidents go, very little is usually said about Africa,” said Roxanne Lawson, director of Africa Policy at TransAfrica Forum.
While pointing to optimistic signs indicating Obama’s interest in Africa beyond ‘National Geographic,’ Lawson said Africa policy advocates are concerned that Obama’s Africa approach, like Bush’s, will amount to a “masterful PR push” that is “pretty and shiny on the outside” but riddled with internal problems.
At heart, are trade and development issues and conflicts.
During his campaign, Obama promised to double aid dollars from $25 billion to $50 billion in four years, support Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015 and invest at least $50 billion by 2013 for the global fight against HIV/AIDS.
The president-elect also promised to support debt cancellation for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries to provide sustainable debt relief. But that can only happen, Lawson said, if the new administration abandons the debt relief vis-à-vis aid model.
Lawson praised Obama’s commitment to including African immigrants in U.S. policy and diplomatic structures but called for increased consultation with local civil society organizations.
And, she also said while the African Growth and Opportunity Act is a good start, it needs to be broadened beyond oil, gas and mining; and labor and environmental standards need to be built into agreements. And America also needs to adopt a broader approach to conflicts in Africa, the TransAfrica Forum representative said.
U.S. advocacy in this regard has been concentrated on Darfur because “the U.S. is not the bad guys in that situation,” Lawson said, adding its hands are not as clean on the Horn of Africa, where the U.S. has a base in Djibuti, a training ground for its fight against terrorism, and in Ethiopia where they have “equipped Ethiopian soldiers, who then invaded (in 2006) and are occupying Somalia.”
Overall, the new president will need to look at Africa through “new lens,” Lawson said. “President-elect Obama’s election signals a new day for people in America but its foreign policy approach to Africa seems to be predicated on the old way of doing things,” she criticized. “If we’re still attached to neo-liberal economic policies and military policy that’s about securing U.S. interests at the expense of Africans and African interests, we’re not going to see sizable change.”
The selection of former first lady, Sen. Hillary Clinton as secretary of state appears to fly in the face of that notion of change, Lawson and Lichtman agreed.
“That’s a very perilous appointment,” Lichtman said.
During the Democratic primaries campaign, Clinton and Obama were at odds on foreign policy, including differing opinions on Iraq and diplomatic outreach to both ally and enemy states. Some pundits have predicted that with this appointment, Obama has essentially given over the White House to the Clintons.
Axelrod, Obama’s campaign and now White House advisor, squelched those rumblings in his “This Week” appearance, however. “People need to understand one thing: There's one person who's going to be in charge of American foreign policy…and that's Barack Obama,” he said. “He's going to set the direction, and he's going to assemble a group of talented and brilliant people to help execute that vision.”
Obama’s pick of his chief adversary in the Democratic race for president is based on the “team of rivals” concept, borrowed from President Abraham Lincoln’s inclusion of erstwhile opponents in his cabinet.
But that’s the “worse historical model” Obama could have used, Lichtman said, given the disparity in circumstances. “The Republican Party was six years old—there were no experienced leaders in the party so he had to put those people in leadership,” the presidential historian said. “And back then, conflicts could be worked out in private. [Today], the first between Hillary Clinton and Obama will be all over the news.”
Additionally, Lincoln was elected with 40 percent of the vote and didn’t have the mandate for change that Obama is charged with. While he understands Obama’s reasons for picking experienced hands, given the gravity of the nation’s domestic and global challenges, Lichtman said, the president-elect should model President Franklin Roosevelt who brought in “a mixture of experienced and fresh leadership.” “This is supposed to be a new generation of leadership and I haven’t seen that yet,” he said.
One old-timer most political analysts seem pleased with is New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who has been tapped as chief of the Commerce Department.
Richardson, another Obama rival during the primaries, served as Energy secretary in the Clinton administration and as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He may prove an important player in framing U.S. foreign policy, especially as it relates to U.S. trade with developing nations in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
“More than Hillary Clinton he seems more suited to this role. He’s well-respected around the world,” Lichtman said. “Usually, Commerce is a graveyard. But, seeing how the world has to come together to solve this financial crisis, he’s going to be one of the most important Commerce secretaries in modern history.”