Transcript of session
American Foreign Policy: What will change?
Catherine Mayer, London Bureau Chief, Time
Sunder Katwala, Fabian Society (Chair)
Dr. Timothy J. Lynch, Co-Author of After Bush
Robert Cooper, Director-General for External and Politico-Military Affairs at the Council of the European Union
Baroness Shirley Williams
Jim Sciutto, ABC News
SK
I think we’re ready to get up and running with our first panel which is about change in America. We’re pleased it’s coming, now we want to know what it is. So what will change mean in America? What will it mean especially in foreign policy, and this afternoon we’ll be discussing how Europe can respond but first we’ve got to have an analysis of the situation in America. We’ve got an absolutely all star panel here to debate this question. We’ve got Dr Timothy Lynch from the Institute for the Studies of the Americas, who might be here to warn us that it’s more difficult to bring about change than you think because he wrote a book called After Bush on that theme. We’ve got Catherine Mayer who’s the London Bureau Chief for Time Magazine. We’ve got Shirley Williams, very well known to you all as a former Fabian Chair and former Fabian General Secretary but has gone on from that to everything else that she’s done including as a key member of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords. We’ve got Jim Sciutto of ABC News, their Senior Foreign Correspondent based in London. And Robert Cooper who’s got perhaps the most impressive title on the panel – Director General for External and Military Affairs at the Council of the European Union – but apart from that Robert’s been perhaps the best thinker about foreign policy I think in the last 10 or 15 years, inside and outside of government and is one of those people who works in institutions and still tells us what he thinks on the outside which is what we’re going to need today.
I’d like to frame the question around, what can we expect in America? What are the barriers, what are the challenges for this administration’s policies and especially abroad? But also this question of hope, and hope is good and important in politics and there’s a lot of hope and there’s a lot of expectation. So is that going to be a force for change or do we have a crisis of immense and unrealisable expectations? I’d be interested to know what the panel think about that and how that will play out.
Catherine, I’d like to start with you. At this moment of change the entire world looked to the United States, the Economist was running an electoral college world map and nowhere in the world do they want McCain, so we’re expecting a lot of change and hope and are we expecting too much?
Catherine Mayer
I will say on the nowhere in the world wanting McCain there were some exceptions – Georgia, Israel – but there were a few countries that had their own reasons for not wanting Obama. But this question of expectation is really interesting. I got told off by a Labour MP yesterday, we’d been emailing about it and I said to her at this point, having gone round the TV studios and confronted these huge expectations that everybody had of Obama, that I was beginning to try and bring people gently back down to earth. And she emailed me back and I’ll read you what she wrote: ‘Don’t do that!!! All the great romantic moments in my lifetime – the Berlin Wall falling, South Africa’s election, 1997 – disappointed in time but I would not give them up for a second.’
Now I found it interesting that 1997 was in that list – I’m sure that’s something we’ll come back to later. But in that spirit of the excitement of this let me say that I think we are in a better world than we were at the beginning of the week. Just to show you that I really not only am prepared to admit that in spite of being in theory a neutral member of the press, but that I understand it in a very visceral way, my whole family came here propelled by Vietnam and other issues that meant that he really became very disillusioned with America and what it’s role in the world was supposed to be and he became a self-hating American. He’s going to be 80 in two weeks’ time and at five o’clock in the morning he climbed up to the top of his house with an American flag I would never in a million years have believed he owned and hung it from the roof. So I really do understand the magic, but I am also really worried about the scale of expectations and that’s a worry obviously that Obama himself shares because that acceptance speech that he gave was a very interesting one. It was quite muted and he talked about not thinking that government could do everything, about the fact there would doubtless be disappointments and missteps and he emphasised the scale of the challenges that he was representing. David Lammy earlier talked about how Obama at various campaign meetings would say ‘It’s not about me, it’s about you’, and that always reminded me of that scene in Life of Brian where he talks out of the window and says ‘you are all individuals’ and they go ‘yes we are all individuals’. [Laughter] Nobody’s really ever been listening to him on this and I think that the expectations are pretty much untethered from all sorts of realities.
But before I go into that, let me talk about how he wants to be a different President, how he promises to be a different President in foreign policy terms. He made all sorts of pledges during the campaign which show a kind of radical move away from some of the Bush doctrines. He promised multilateralism, he emphasised it; he promised a more judicious approach to the use of military intervention; he talked about climate change as being a key issue and promised to wean Americans off their dependency on fossil fuels; obviously the idea of withdrawl from Iraq was absolutely central to his foreign policy so too the idea of a surge in Afghanistan, and not just that but the idea that Afghanistan and Pakistan’s fates are intimately connected. There are all sorts of ways in which he was also talking about building on one of the undisputed parts of the Bush legacy in Africa. He talks about adding to the Petfar health plan, he talks about actually creating some kind of transition team to look at societies where there have been new elections or where there have been conflicts that have been resolved. He also talked about committing America to the Millennium Development Goals. The Rapid Response Fund for Societies in Transition…that idea reflects the belief that there aren’t purely military solutions. He is somebody who is hoping to make some kind of rapid progress in the Middle East of course, where his hinterland, that the Muslim connections, the Muslim middle name which seem to disturb some of my fellow Americans, possibly give him an opportunity, although of course you’ll have heard the response from some members of Hamas for example who say that he’s just as bad as McCain would have been. So funnily enough the expectations among some more extreme elements there aren’t quite as high.
But he’s coming to power at this time of unprecedented turbulence and his first priority’s going to be the economy. The economy has always been seen as a domestic issue. What we have witnessed in the past few months actually proves that it’s Obama’s biggest foreign policy headache as well as a domestic issue, it’s something that affects everybody here. It also means that when he starts making his trips to Europe, because the budget deficit is going to immediately start restricting him in some of his ambitions, it also means that the pressure he comes to Europe with, when he asks people for assistance in Afghanistan, he’s not just going to want warm words, he’s actually going to be looking for real commitments. He’s going to maybe rather more dangerously disappoint Peter Mandelson and some other people by falling into easy protectionism that the popular sentiment in America supports at the moment. I think temperamentally he’s very different from Presidents you’ve seen, I don’t think he’s going to try to look deep into Medvedev’s eyes and look into his soul, I don’t think he’s going to worry what kind of toothpaste Gordon Brown uses. He is somebody who – and this represents a bit of a change for this country – is going to look for allies everywhere but I don’t think he’s going to be as bothered about special friends. Some people may think that’s a good think but he’s going to be in some ways, I think again temperamentally more remote and slightly harder to read than previous Presidents. But if he disappoints it’s not going to be because he’s different, it would be quite the opposite. The appetite for change you saw in the American electorate is clearly reflected abroad. In terms of the difference he can make: Washington is famous for thwarting initiative and stifling innovation; on the other hand he does have this big majority now in Congress, he has this huge burst of good will. Can he do it? It’s not as snappy as his campaign slogan – maybe he can.
SK
Jim I’d like to come to you. Catherine has given us an important list of things that we’re looking for progress from Obama on – climate change, the Middle East, security and global development, Iraq and trade and hanging over all, the economy and an equally long list of priorities that American voters will have. What do you think the great challenges are to this administration and are we overestimating how much attention there’ll be for the international?
Jim Sciutto
I tell friends that I think that there will be probably less change on foreign policy than they expect. That’s partly because the expectations are so high and if you look at the key issues that drove antagonism towards George Bush, the Iraq war for instance, certainly withdrawl is a priority for the Obama administration but I can’t imagine it will happen as quickly as some certainly in the Muslim world expect it and many Europeans. That will depend on the security situation on the ground and I think one of the troubles is, as an example of these lofty expectations, is that in reality it can’t happen quickly enough based on how quickly people want it to happen. And on Afghanistan, as you mentioned Catherine, a surge there is a priority for Obama, he thinks it’s a focus, he might well take troops from Iraq and send them there. There are certainly some in the Muslim world who won’t be happy with that, to see an even greater foreign presence there and I think there are some in Europe who share that as well. Many in Europe propose a surge in foreign troops in Afghanistan, many in Britain actually favour a withdrawl, especially as the US, if it is building better ties with its European allies, request, demanding a greater contribution from European countries in terms of combat troops, not just money, not just troops, but combat troops in the most dangerous parts of the country, that’s going to be a potential for division because that’s as you know not very popular, France, Germany’s troops being sent into harm’s way there. It is change but it’s an example of less change than people imagine on the principal foreign policy challenges facing this administration.
Catherine, you talked about some exceptions to Obama’s warm welcome across the world and one of those is I think the most glaring one is in the Muslim world where the image of America is so wounded that their expectations are so low and while I saw smatterings of positive feeling, even excitement about Barack Obama, there’s a lot of polling that shows that people are deeply sceptical, and I’ve heard this as well from many of my contacts in that part of the world. Pakistan, for instance, only 10% of people – this is in a Pew Poll – believe that Barack Obama would make a positive difference in terms of US policy towards Afghanistan. Only 6% thought that John McCain would make a difference but just 10% for Obama. In Egypt and Jordan – two of America’s allies – in these two countries people thought that the next US President would actually be worse on foreign policy in their countries. I don’t think that is necessarily a well thought out position but I think it reflects this deep anger and resentment, just a knee-jerk reaction saying ‘no new President is going to make a difference, you know what they might even make it worse than it is today’, and I think that is a demonstration of the hole the US has dug itself in that part of the world and that’s going to be a principal challenge for Barack Obama because his name and his face and his rhetoric is not enough to dig the US out of that hole, it’s not nearly enough. The people in that part of the world are very much in a ‘show me’ mood, show me the change and how it’s going to be different in my life, and if there is a honeymoon there it’ll be extremely brief and that’s why I mentioned at the beginning when you look at Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly in that part of the world, you have the potential for great disappointment. We saw just one demonstration of that this week when Barack Obama chose Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff, all the editorial writers in Egypt and the West Bank were saying ‘Barack Obama’s Israeli Chief of Staff – we knew it was going to be the same, now it’s worse than we could have imagined’. Israeli because he served one year, not really in the Israeli military, but he was an observer in the Gulf War. That kind of thing demonstrates the depth of trouble there. Why’s that important? It’s not just a feel good factor, the principal US foreign policy channels are in this part of the world and you’re facing that sort of scepticism, it’s probably because most US goals in that part of the world are made much more difficult when interaction with the US is still viewed as toxic, as it is.
Now I don’t say this to depress us, there will be real change, it’s just about bringing people down off the heights of their expectations to give a demonstration of where he might have the potential to disappoint.
SK
Jim, thank you. I think we might get more into the Middle East but another way of looking at what you say is that in a part of the world where they expectations are low they might be exceeded while everywhere else the expectations are through the roof.
Robert, the hidden secret I think since 2004 in some ways the Bush administration has been more multilateral than people realise because it’s had to be I suppose having had the expectations. But what we’ve been trying to say in the debates we’ve been having about the world after Bush in the Fabian Society for the last four or five years is actually it’s when it will get more difficult for those of us who’ve known what we’re against to be clearer about what we’re for. Henry Kissinger always had this question about who he’d phone in Europe, but just as important, what will European leaders be saying when they pick up the phone? Do we have our priorities straight?
Robert Cooper
Before I answer that there’s two things I want to say. One is that I think we should, in spite of Vietnam, I think we should honour LBJ for the civil rights legislation which after this time shows that political change in a big society is possible. Second, I wanted to disagree quite profoundly with what Jim said. What changes? I think everything changes. In the US administration only one person is elected and everything depends on them. It’s not a question of what their policies are, if you look at the policies they aren’t in fact different, what McCain was saying and Obama was saying don’t sound that different, partly because Obama was trying to avoid sounding too different. But the character matters and the experience matters. He’s been accused of inexperience but actually he’s had a lot of experience – he’s live outside America for a start, which is a useful experience for foreign policy; he’s got relatives outside America and that makes him different from anything we’ve seen before. And the character is very different as well. I was very struck, impressed, by the announcement he gave to the press conference today. He was asked how he would react to the letter of congratulations from Ahmadinejad and he said ‘no reaction, I’m going to think about it.’ That strikes me as extremely sensible. Actually what he’s doing is he’s saying ‘I don’t know that much about Iran, I don’t know how to interpret this and I’m not going to react until I’ve had time to consider it’. And throughout all of the interviews and debates I’ve never once seen him give the impression that he’s speaking without thinking, and that’s completely different. [laughter]. Who you have as President really matters – is it Goldwater or Johnson? Is it Reagan or Carter? Is it Kennedy or Nixon? It changes the whole character of America.
As for your question, in Europe, the fact is that Europe exists. If you don’t know who to call, well today you could call President Sarkosy, on another day you could call my boss who is always available – except that he’s usually on an aeroplane going somewhere. That has changed a little bit over the last eight years, if you look at the Middle East there’s the European Union involved, if you look at Iraq there’s the European Union involved, if you look at Georgia it’s the European Union. The European Union exists so, well, you find someone…
JS
If I could just say briefly…I certainly don’t think there is no difference between McCain and Barack Obama. What I was drawing attention to was the gulf between expected immediate change in foreign policy and likely change and the potential gulf then between the high expectations and what’s likely to be delivered. I don’t mean to give the impression that it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, but I think it is an important point that the expectations might not match the results.
SK
Let me just ask Robert a short question. I thought what Catherine said was very interesting about… your reflections on Obama’s character match in a sense ‘work with allies everywhere but no new best friends’. We’re going to have this competitions everywhere, especially between President Sarkozy and Gordon Brown – perhaps others – to be the new best friend. Do you think there’s any chance of Havia Salana persuading them, and Angela Merkel perhaps, to go and see the new President together?
RC
No [laughter]. But he seems to me to be about the coolest, most reflective person that I’ve seen in politics on either side of the Atlantic. For people for whom Nicola Machiavelli is a hero, maybe there’s even a little bit of that.
SK
Shirley, you’ve obviously worked very heavily on non-proliferation issues and a whole range of foreign policy issues. I’m interested to know what you see as the chance of change in some of those particular areas, but also what you think will happen to anti-Americanism? Will it go away and we will have less of it and for how long?
Shirley Williams
Well first of all let me say that I think that some aspects of anti-Americanism have literally changed overnight. The view, I agree with Robert Cooper that we should take our hats off to LBJ as we go by because, you may remember, that when he signed the Civil Rights Act back in 1965, one of the things he said was ‘gentlemen, we have lost the South for a generation’. In other words he consciously knew that he was taking a huge political risk, that he would not get thanked for what he was doing for very many years and, to his credit – because he gets much to his discredit – he was a man who thought a bit about history and not just about the next election. I also agree with what Robert has said about the character of…the very different thinking character of Obama. Let me pick up one thing also that was said by Catherine, just to show the depth of what we’re up against. On the bus coming here, there was a dispute between the bus driver and a member of the public who was on the bus, and the bus driver, who was clearly from some Islamic country, was saying down his telephone very loudly, ‘all you bloody Brits and Americans are any good at is shooting and killing innocent people’. That shows what we’re up against – the images of killing Afghans, of killing people across the border in Pakistan because you’re trying to attack the Afghans, is a very deep image in a very substantial part of the world. And I agree with what was said by Mr Sciutto that it’ll take a long time to root that out.
Now let me go quickly to the thing that worries me. Firstsly, I of course share the view that expectations are phenomenally high. Secondly, I have some hopes of it because of the dramatic way in which Obama has changed the political structure in the United States. Here is a man who succeeded in funding his campaign with huge sums of money, almost all of them drawn from ordinary people. An average of $86 a head – that’s not rich money. And I think Hilary Clinton failed in her campaign partly because it was a 20th century campaign and not a 21st century campaign. She failed to use the Internet to democratize the whole process. That carries one thing with it which is to a greater extent than we realize, Obama is going to have to carry a large part of the American public behind his foreign policy initiatives if he has them, because he has brought in the younger American people to be part of the policy-making process. There’s a long, long way to go in Britain to get anywhere near there.
The issues of foreign policy very quickly. I think many of the things we can obviously all widely welcome, for example the new emphasis on multilateralism, the new recognition that the United States can’t do everything on its own, the setting out of goals, most of which we would fully accept, and, to pick up what Robert said, recognition of the importance of working with partners, the EU being one of them.
What are the problems? If you look – and I’ve got it with me here – at the Barack Obama/Biden plan and you read it very carefully, let me give you instances of where I fear it might be living slightly in a different age. Secure loose nuclear materials, it says, from terrorists. I quote the words exactly: “Obama and Biden will secure all loose nuclear materials in the world within four years. Obama and Biden will negotiate a verifiable global plan on the production of new nuclear materials etc etc, I could pick up several more. I’ll pick up two more, one on the Middle East – it expresses the support that was given by Obama specifically as a Senator for the continuation of the Lebanon War and opposing the attempt to get a ceasefire which I think frankly is almost indefensible. And the other one is the phrase ‘Barack Obama and Joe Biden will address the challenge posed by an increasingly autocratic and bellicose Russia.’ Now there’s a clear contradiction there. You cannot clear out all the loose nuclear materials, 95% of which are in Russia. You cannot reduce nuclear arsenal, 95% of which are the United States and Russia together. You cannot create a new powerful nuclear proliferation treaty if you don’t carry Russia with you, and you cannot in the end deal with Iran at a time when Russia is sending air defence forces to surround all the potential nuclear sites in Iran, to protect them from a possible Israeli or American attack. You have got to have a new partnership with Russia. All the other things that are listed here depend upon that new partnership, especially in the nuclear field. And what worries me about this document, much of which I agree with, is that it has a completely false estimate of the ability of the United States to carry its will without beginning to bring in many of the most significant powers of the world, and those particularly significant powers are Russia and China.
Another word about Russia. I think Russia has some justification for its anger. It feels itself to be increasingly surrounded by powers that are not friendly and are nuclear weapons powers. The effect that Biden and Obama refer for example to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, which is very unclear – it’s clear that Russia behaved with extreme disproportion, nobody denies that, but it’s by no means clear that the whole of the beginning of that war rested on Russia. It’s fairly clear that Saakashvili probably listened very much to Mr Cheyney in deciding to take a chance in moving into South Ossetia and the South Ossetians didn’t particularly like it and many of them made it clear they would rather leave than live under Georgian rule because Georgia has a bad record of ethnic intolerance.
So, to add up. Biden and Obama are going to learn from the hard knocks of foreign policy, from what was called by Max Weber, ‘politics is the boring of hard boards’. No more than in the field of foreign policy. What that means is they’re going to have to be more patient, they’re going to have to involve partnerships, they’re going to have to bring on board countries they don’t much like if they’re going to achieve what they want.
Turning for one moment to the Middle East. Obama and Biden again – and I do repeat that basically this document is a huge relief, a big improvement but it does still have these islands of problems in it – they both talk about the need, and we all agree most of us, to a two-state solution to the problem between Israel and the Palestinians. The trouble is that one of those states is no longer beginning to be viable. Gaza and the West Bank are neither of them beginning to be economically viable countries. Gaza is a hell hole, rapidly moving towards a humanitarian catastrophe with infection, diseas, with sewage systems breaking down. It’s only a few months off now. So you can’t talk about a two-state solution unless you address the absolutely crucial necessity for an exchange of land for security between Israel and what was the potential Palestinian state without which it’s useless and indeed hypocritical to talk about a two-state solution. I would go on longer but those are the problems that I worry about. An excellent new approach, a much more internationalist approach, a more multilateral approach – but still an overestimate of American power and still an overestimate of the necessity for America to have partners if she’s going to deliver in this world some of these outcomes.
SK
Thanks very much Shirley….[applause]
Even in the course of the discussion, president-elect Obama, now he’s a future president of America again and many of the same questions arise.
Dr Lynch, interested to know, we cast forward four years or so, will people have experienced much change or much less change than we think?
Timothy Lynch
Thank you. I’ve been studying American history and politics for over 20 years now and, just to join the general mood of adulation, I never thought I’d live to see Gordon Brown win a by-election…[laughter]. What I think we lack in these discussions – which is no fault of the panelists – is the broader historical context to American foreign policy. People tend to live in the now without appreciating that it’s a product of over 200 years of gestation. I’d ask you to consider that since the end of the Cold War America has killed foreigners abroad, intervened on at least nine separate occasions, it’s deposed at least six regimes in those nine interventions. The terms of three presidents in both parties in two distinct historical eras – before 9/11 and afterwards. Ladies and gentleman, this is an intervention abroad, about every 18 months. Now I put to you that as much as you believe that Obama this great visionary, there’s nothing to suggest that he’s going to buck this trend. If anything, what saved the world has been George Bush’s pronounced humility – he’s invaded only two countries in his last eight years. Now, Barack Obama has many things, but humility is not one of them. He’s very like the crusading war mongering Democrats that have marked American history in the 20th century. Consider: every major war that America has fought has been instigated or joined by a Democratic President. World War One, World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Kosovo…the idea that this will suddenly evaporate I think is to misread American history. What Barack Obama has won is a mandate for the third Bush term, only a competent one. He buys into the consensus that George Bush in some ways created. He’s a hard power Democrat. He believes in the application of force to bring security to his country, to the United States. Let me quote George Bush’s articulation of this consensus: ‘This century’s greatest threats are at least as dangerous as those we’ve confronted in the past. They come from weapons that can kill on a mass skill, they come from rogue states allied to terrorists.’ On Guantanamo Bay – ‘now the majority of folks in Guantanamo I suspect are there for a reason. There are a lot of dangerous people.’
Two facets, basic features of the national security consensus. Except these aren’t lines from George Bush, these are lines from Barack Obama. He believes that American security comes from reducing the capacity of terrorists to wage war against his country. He believes that the Iraq war was tactically deficient but he accepts the strategy it was designed to serve is appropriate. He’s a hard power Democrat. He wants to remove troops from Iraq and not turn their swords into ploughshares; he wants to remove them and put them on the more appropriate front, in Afghanistan. He doesn’t want to bring them home and have them turn into school teachers and social workers and community activists. He wants them to visit violence abroad more appropriately. He is George Bush, only a more competent vision of it.
And I’ll say one more thing and keep it brief because I’m aware that the only thing that stands between me and the chorus of adulation that will come from the audience for Barack Obama….During the 1990s, under the administration of the last great liberal hope to occupy the White House, Bill Clinton, America waged a series of wars, de facto, that had the effect of liberating Muslims, ethnic Muslims, from bad government. If you want you can go back even further to George Bush senior, with Kuwait in 1991, Bosnia in the middle 1990s, Kosovo in 1999. Kosovo exists as a sate, a nominally Muslim state in Europe, because of American foreign policy. Now I put to you, what was the reward for this American military activism on behalf of, coincidentally, Jihadist interests? Was it the end to Jihadist loathing of America? Was it the downing of terrorist tools? Was it Islamist approbation? No it wasn’t – it was the plotting and planning of 9/11, plotted and planned under the last Democratic administration. So I put to you that if America can wage war on behalf of Muslim interests and get 9/11, what consequence is better public diplomacy going to have? In some ways I find it deeply patronizing to suggest that American foreign policy is the sole determinant of Jihadist ideology. They hate America not because of the colour of its President, or the party he represents, but because they hate America as a system. They dispute America’s right to exist. So the notion that you can simply change tac and present a more hopeful vision, and then bring into line your enemies I think is an illusion.
I’ll finish with one more line. There is a very important Romanian proverb which I think is worth reminding ourselves of in the current context and that is ‘a change of leaders is the joy of fools’. [Applause]
SK
So we’ve found out that America hasn’t elected a pacifist but some of us in Europe are quite pleased that FDR entered World War Two….
TL
All wars I support…
SK
…and I suppose one of the debates we’d have is sometimes you intervene too late or too little in Bosnia, or not at all, in Rwanda, or sometimes you intervene when you shouldn’t or in the wrong way, in Iraq. Catherine did you want to come back on that…
CM
A couple of points. The skepticism about how addicted hard power Obama is likely to be comes from all parts of the spectrum. While I was standing watching the results come in, a famous left-winger sidled up to me and said ‘oh he’ll invade Iran very soon you know’, he said all lefties have to send in armies to prove that they’re tough enough. Now, I mentioned 97 before. Clearly this person in particular was thinking about what happened with Tony Blair. I would say that I don’t think that the reason the great hopes in 97 eventually met with some level of disillusion is entirely about Iraq. I suspect that’s a debate that will be had for quite a long time. But I do think that what Timothy said is wrong on a lot of levels. One things is that rhetoric and vocabulary actually matter. Obviously what people do matters more than what they say, but the tone with which they say things – whether they use phrases like the ‘war on terror’ – all of these things matter in the world. I would also say that it is absolutely right, as Shirley said, that there is still clearly an overestimation of America’s power in the world. But there is a new emphasis on at least a combination of soft power and hard power, and that is something that is very important – again that even aspirations, what aspirations people have, are really very important. And on Russia, yes clearly, Russia is something we’ll be watching with a great deal of interest to see how he deals with it. The fact of the oil price fluctuations is making Russia probably more dangerous and unpredictable now and even more difficult for him to deal with and that, in terms of the speed with which he can learn and the speed with which he can react to those changes, is going to be very interesting….
SW
Two very quick comments. The first is that I think if you compare Bush 2000 with Obama 2008, I think the differences are very large indeed. Let me just give one example. At the center of his foreign policy – although I still think it overestimates American capacity to bring about its own policy goals in the world – there is the concept of the legitimation provided by the United Nations. Absolutely central. Rejected by Bush Jnr from the beginning of his administration, when walked out of the ABM Treaty, when he regarded the United Nations as irrelevant to the Iraq war. In other words, the legitimacy of the rule of law internationally – call it soft or hard power, I don’t mind which – is right back in the middle of this American policy. I think it’s nowhere near there in the case of the first Bush administration and was only faintly being put back by the second Bush administration. So I can’t accept what Timothy says, I think it’s too extreme and I don’t think it’s right.
The second thing, and it’s an important part of my argument with Timothy, is that you have to distinguish between countries and imperalism. Yes sure, the United States for a century has been the biggest hegemon in the world and it’s behaved by intervening, by being a world policeman, by sometimes behaving ludicrously badly. So did the United Kingdom in the 19th century when it was the hegemon, so did Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century when it was in eastern Europe probably the most powerful economy of all. So we cannot lump on the United States, because it’s the United States, what are characteristics of these superpowers in all times – the superpower varies, its behaviour varies much less. So I think a good deal of what Timothy has launched at the United States, I agree with him about some of the things he complained about, but they follow from being the most powerful power in the world and interventions are no more characteristic of the United States before it was the most powerful country in the world than they’re characteristic of say Germany today. You have to put people in their context and that context is one of how you view power and how you use supreme power which is often much more extreme.
RC
It was just to come back to the question of Russia. It was not Barack Obama who said ‘we are all Georgians nowBarack Obama who said ‘we are all Georgians now’, actually he was rather cool about this as I suspect he will be cool about many things. He has a substantial arms control agenda which can’t be realized without Russia, I think he’s probably smart enough to see that. Substantial nuclear reductions are part of his programme, very important in terms of maintaining the non-proliferation system, needs to be done with Russia and actually that would be an important piece of the relationship with Russia because the Russians are difficult and sometimes unpleasant people to deal with, but the framework they understand for foreign relations is arms control. It’s a very good place to start building confidence with Russia, establishing a more functional relationship than the one that exists at the moment.
JS
The danger is swinging between the impression that Barack Obama will bring dramatic, life-changing, second coming differences and no difference at all. And I think that both are not true. We’re all disagreeing with Dr Lynch – and I hate to gang up on you – but I think the danger is that what Dr Lynch does is he turns some of the very real differences into throwaway lines. I mean, for instance you look at Iraq, yes not all the troops from Iraq are going back home but it’s also incorrect to say that all 150,000 troops from this country are going to Afghanistan. It might be tens of thousands which is significant but it’s not the whole shebang. But I think you can see with Obama the sending to the dustbin of history the Bush-Cheyney doctrine that got us into the Iraq war which is preemptive strikes, the haunted sense that you could rewrite the political map of the Middle East by creating a democracy there. Those are significant changes. On Iran, we can’t underestimate the idea of talking to Iran – that’s a big difference. I’m not saying that that’s going to lead to the grand agreement that covers all things warm and fuzzy with the Iranians, but that is a significant diplomatic move.
I think that when we speak about Russia as well, Barack Obama, it remains to be seen how he will respond, especially this week, to Russia announcing it might be dropping some missiles into the Baltics to counter our ABM placements in Poland, but what Obama said on the campaign trail is he’s somewhat skeptical of the missile defence system in Poland. His idea is to support it if it works, which is to say that he’s not so sure it works. That’s at least an opening. But what it also is is a significant change from the way the Bush administration approached this policy which was coming to office and summarily dismissing one of the grounds of US/Russian relations which was the Anti-balistic Missile Treaty. That’s significant change. There is somewhere in the middle – he’s not the Second Coming, all things are not going to change tomorrow, but it’s also wrong to say there’s no difference whatsoever, especially on foreign policy questions.
SK
Thanks. Let’s take comments and questions and points.
Question
I’m Chris, I’m a university student here. I’d like to highlight the failure of the mention of Africa, especially with Darfur, the Congo. I was wondering if anyone had any views on what America’s foreign policy meant for these two issues.
Question
I’d like to be a little provocative and take the long-term view….Influence of China, India etc. How is the Obama administration going to adjust itself to changing circumstances?
Question
My question relates to the last one, about the influence of China and the sovereign wealth funds, surely that’s going to constrain Obama….
Question
My question is about South America. Whether the Obama perspective on the American geo-strategic interest will change.
SK
Robert, could you address the issue of the Congo and Africa…
RC
I don’t think that’s something that Obama or anybody else is going to solve, not quickly. These problems can be solved but they can only be solved over a very long time. I actually don’t know about Obama and Africa, but what it does seem to me is that this is not just the relative power of America that’s declining – that’s been happening since 1945 anyway but it’s happening more visibly now – it’s also the relative power of Europe, particularly of the medium-sized European states in a world of continents. In a way Obama, who embodies globalization, who is somebody who’s lived in three continents, is a sign of what is…Obama is the post-American president. And I think he will have a more global view and many of the problems that will be high on the agenda are more global problems. I think the idea of American leadership still remains important but it’s not going to be leadership on their own now. At some point that will include Africa as well, perhaps through the Africa Union.
JS
Two brief points. One is a question because it was not an issue on the campaign at all, but what will Barack Obama’s priorities with respect to Latin America? Bush was elected speaking about Latin America as a priority and playing up his Spanish-speaking roots and then it was completely neglected, much the chargrin of Latin America, Mexico in particular. In the course of that time China very much took the lead in terms of building relationships, raw material trading relationships but also investment relationships. I wonder if Barack Obama will see that as a priority because it’s the old Munro Doctrine thing – it’s our hemisphere and they should be on our side, not be slipping away.
Just a brief thing that struck me, reading the Middle Eastern columnists I tend to read but also talk to…the editor of the Daily Star in Lebanon, skeptical, like many Muslims I spoke to, about Barack Obama, but he said something interestingly historically which is this is America 4.0, he says that America has this ability to rise from the ashes. After the civil war, the Emancipation Proclomation…it was something that could have easily ended the US as we know it…In the Great Depression it created the New Deal and then went on to join the war in Europe. So out of this whole possibly….having chosen such an unconventional man with such a different outlook and personality and personal story from the previous president, can it rescue and maybe slow the relative decline? To hear hope from someone like that that this might turn this around to some degree was interesting to me.
SK
Tim, we’re grateful to you for shaking the discussion up but I wonder if this question of relative decline does in the end change things for you?
TL
No. America, depending on what period of the academic debate you plug into, has been in decline since at least 1920. 1970 it was very much in vogue, the 1970s gave way to the 1980s and Ronald Reagan. I predict that the decade we’re currently in will give way to the 2010s. So there’s nothing in American history to suggest it’s in terminal decline. The economic situation is not inconsiderable.
I can’t address all the errors of judgement we’ve heard in the last little while…but let me suggest that this absurdly misplaced faith in the efficacy, in the morality of the UN is something we really should do without. And importantly, it’s something that I think Barack Obama, at least implicitly, has rejected – this notion that international communitarianism has a morality greater than American national security. If you go back and read his Berlin speech, the one that got us all salivating in July of this year, he didn’t mention the United Nations once. The one international institution he did mention, and mentioned recurrently, was NATO. And why? Because NATO has efficacy on its side, it has a history of liberation of unfree peoples on its side in a way that the UN has never had and never will because of the way it is structured. It’s an absurd notion that he’s going to revamp the UN. He will circumvent the UN in the same way that Bill Clinton circumvented the UN in order to bomb Serbia, the same way that George Bush circumvented the UN in order to fulfil UN resolutions by removing Sadaam from power.
CM
I do actually share some level of skepticism about the possibility of institutional reform at all. If you’ve looked at any of the institutions, you know that they do need reform, this is one thing where Gordon Brown, if you look at speeches he’s given over a 10-year period, he’s been sounding the same note for 10 years. It’s very hard to sell on the doorstep why they IMF needs reform or why the UN needs reform – it’s even harder to get them to do it, they don’t even agree on tiny changes.
On American decline, I think one of the interesting things – somebody also mentioned China and the sovereign wealth funds – you had a big debate a very short time ago about whether it was ok to have these outsiders coming in and investing in ports and other key things. Now everyone’s going to go to them with begging bowls and ask for that. That may not be decline in the sense that we’re talking about but it certainly represents a shift in what people think they’re able to do on their own. American leadership I think is being renewed but it’s being renewed very much in a context where America has to recognize its limitations and that’s where I have hope about the sort of disconnect there is at the moment between what they had…the Biden/Obama pledges there…
On Africa, I did mention at the beginning that I was talking about really development issues more than those conflicts. I have had some very interesting conversations about what Obama’s likely to mean for Africa with people that are working in the NGO sector, people who have been lobbying him very intensively on Africa, and actually they’ve all been very downbeat about it. They think that it would, even before the economy started to rearrange priorities, they thought that Africa would probably be an area that, although he was making a lot of the right noises, he might not do as much as people hoped, precisely in a way because he was worried…they sensed some concern about him identifying himself too much with Africa because of his Kenyan heritage.
I think with DLC and with other conflicts, Darfur, that he probably will come out with some fairly strong statements. But one of the other things that’s happening there is today you’ve got African leaders talking about sending in their own forces there and I don’t think he’s going to come in and try and say ‘no, you don’t do that, we’ll go in and solve it’.
SW
First of all it’s quite clear from the Obama/Biden policy statement that again they are promising more than they can deliver. For example, stopping the genocide in Darfur, passing legislation to improve stability in the Congo etc etc. These are all wonderful intentions, but the question is can they be delivered. The view that by bringing pressure to bear on Sudan you can suddenly change the position in Darfur flows against the fact that China has become the key economic factor in Sudan and has sowed up a great deal of the access to raw materials there because it needs it for its own development. Therefore unless you can change the attitude of China, you can go whistle for ending the issue in Darfur. It shows a lack of understanding I think of how significant certain other countries can be. The same with the Congo…I think to a great extent intervention to try to stabalise the Congo would depend upon an African Union, European Union, understanding between the two, because the one thing the European Union has got is quite a lot of money which the Africa Union hasn’t got. I think this is an area – as passionate as I am about the EU - where the EU has fundamentally somewhat failed. An example – at an earlier stage the provision of an adequate number of helicopters could have carried the Africa Union forces right into Darfur. Those helicopters were never bought, never provided, though the EU certainly had the money to do it. To leave that to the United States is I think to escape our own responsibilities which are profound because these countries which were partly wrecked by the French and British empires over many decades and we have a responsibility to work with modern Africa to try to put it right. For example Zimbabwe is an area where the United Kingdom could do far more than it is doing.
The last thing, on the change of balance of power in the world. First of all, I agree completely about that, it’s right that we’re moving into an Asian century, not another American century. But having said that, China has behaved astonishingly responsibly about sovereign funds. It has not attempted to undermine the value of the United States dollar, it holds something like two-thirds of all the Treasury bonds that are out there, that belong to the United States and it supports the United States in that way. And the same is true about its attitude to North Korea where it’s been absolutely essential in trying to claw North Korea back from being a rogue state using nuclear weapons. I can say something of the same about other countries.
Final point. India is a country which the United States actually has tried to support, partly for anti-Pakistani, anti-terrorist sorts of reasons. I have to however add that the Indo-US pact was utterly irresponsible, drives a coach and horses through the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty and that means it’s open to Obama I think to press now for there to be at least recognition that India must accept what everybody else as a nuclear power has to accept, partly in order to get Israel on board, partly because it’s very dangerous for Pakistan to have the example of a country out with the international rule of law on nuclear issues….
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