My piece on Obama’s foreign policy team and why I’ve come around to it is up over at GlobalComment.
For a while, people scoffed at Barack Obama’s run for the presidency, writing him off as a naïve idealist who could never make it halfway through the primaries, let alone into the Oval Office. His rival Hillary Clinton criticized his foreign policy suggestions as simplistic and even dangerous.
Yet over and over again, Obama has overcome obstacles with what seems to be an inner talent for realpolitik that could impress even the likes of Bismarck. Unlike Bismarck though, Obama seems determined to shape the future of the U.S. not through war, but through diplomacy.
So his foreign policy team at first seems to be an odd bunch for Obama to choose to enact his plans. His former rival, the one who chided him on the trail for being inexperienced and naïve, and perhaps lost her bid for the presidency because of her hawkishness on Iraq, is now his Secretary of State. He’s retaining the Defense Secretary of the current administration, the one he so often harshly criticized at rallies. And his national security adviser is a retired general who has worked for both parties.
At first, peaceniks like me had our hackles raised by these choices.
We’d campaigned against Hillary Clinton primarily because of her foreign policy differences with Obama, and as Yglesias noted, there were indeed substantive differences. And keeping Bush’s defense secretary? We’d rather have Sarah Palin in charge of energy policy.
Read the rest.
So I have 8000000000000 things to do right now, but I’m going to take just a moment to comment on something because I think it’s important to note.
The New Yorker’s Obama endorsement makes many excellent points. You should read it. But to my mind, the most important point it made was this one:
Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.
See, the presidency is largely a symbolic office. Congress is the body that’s going to have to actually make and pass these tax cuts and health care policies–all the president can do is encourage and sign. One of the reasons I was an early Obama supporter was that he seemed to have a much better grasp of and less warmongering slant on foreign relations. And foreign relations are carried out by, yes, talking. Words. Speeches.
There’s a huge place for performative language in all of this. Timothy Cook outlines this whole process expertly in Governing With the News. The president makes a speech, and policy changes. Need an example? Remember the “Axis of Evil” comment, and how suddenly after that we seem to be dealing with North Korea and Iran increasing their nuclear capacities?
Every time the president makes a speech, it is news. Even now, when the candidates make a speech, it is news. That news gets carried not just to voters, but to other countries and other governments. The reason McCain keeps harping not on Obama’s willingness to go into Pakistan in search of Bin Laden, but his willingness to talk about it, is that he knows that by making a statement the president has to back it up.
A popular president’s speeches could buoy Wall Street just by pledging support; it is a measure of Bush’s lame duckitude that he can’t. Any president can screw foreign policy up majorly just by mistaking the names of countries or leaders; just ask Richard Nixon about Mauritius and Mauritania.
The president has to know when to speak and when to shut up, what to say and what not to say, and yes, be willing to talk to other leaders. Talk doesn’t prevent action, or require some sort of soul-selling to Ahmadinejad like McCain seems to think it does. But it does indeed have an effect on what happens.
So having a president who is a man of “mere” words, as opposed to one who regularly mistakes one country for another (or one Supreme Court Justice for another–ask Justice Breyer if he’s slightly insulted at being confused with Alito this morning) is actually rather important when you think about it.
And after watching those debates, which candidate do YOU think is more likely to shoot himself in the foot while attempting diplomacy, whether it’s face to face or through the press?
I went to a forum with Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers yesterday. Dr. Susan Rice, Denis McDonough, Paul Bucha and Richard Danzig were at Penn, taking questions from whomever wanted to come sit down with them for two hours.
What an excellent campaign strategy. Granted, most people don’t want to sit down and discuss international law with a bunch of policy wonks, but for those of us that do get a rush out of it…how nice to be included in the discussion. How different from the way the current administration–and really, any administration–works.
Dr. Rice (a way cooler Dr. Rice than Condi) pointed out that we need a multifaceted, complex approach to problems.
Paul Bucha impressed me the most, I think, when near the end he said that the different thing about how Obama thinks is that he doesn’t believe in binaries. He doesn’t have to be black OR white, he can be both. Countries don’t have to be with us OR against us. We can talk to them about the things we like and try to work on the things we dislike. The world isn’t black and white.
That warmed my little feminist heart. Especially coming from an old white guy.
This is, again, why I like Obama so much. Foreign policy is the number-one area where the president has real control. They can talk all they want about health care plans, but those have to get through Congress. But the idea that we have people who have real interest in looking at foreign relations in a complex way, not reducing them to good and evil, is very impressive. The idea that we have nothing to lose by talking to Cuba, for instance, is long overdue.
