Obama's liberals, realists set to clash
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Just as the foreign policy of former president George W Bush was
characterized by a continuous battle for control between "hawks" led by former
vice president Dick Cheney and "realists" based primarily in the State
Department and intelligence community - and, in its last two years, the
Pentagon - the incoming administration may too find itself split along
ideological lines.
President Barack Obama has succeeded in recruiting a remarkably broad range of
foreign policy advisers, some of whom are being placed in senior policy-making
positions, and others, particularly "greybeards" like former national security
advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and Anthony Lake, and
former representative Lee Hamilton, will likely offer their advice on a more
informal basis.
That range runs from hardcore realists epitomized by Scowcroft, two of whose
proteges, Robert Gates and General James Jones, will become Pentagon chief and
national security adviser, respectively, to liberal internationalists, some of
whom, including Vice President Joe Biden and United Nations (UN)
ambassador-designate Susan Rice, have expressed strongly hawkish views.
The latter camp also includes secretary of state-designate Hillary Clinton,
whose loss of the Democratic presidential nomination to Obama was probably due
as much to her initial support of the 2003 Iraq invasion as any other factor.
In the past several years, and particularly since the Iraq War went south in
late 2003, the two groups have been united in rejecting the unilateralism and
virtually exclusive reliance on the threat and use of military force or "hard
power" that dominated Bush's first-term foreign policy, in particular.
Conversely, they have shared a commitment to multilateralism and the use of
diplomacy and other forms of "soft power", at least as a first resort, in
pursuing US interests abroad, though neither one would shrink from the use of
military power, unilaterally if necessary, if the provocation were deemed
sufficiently serious.
Because the realists, who are predominantly Republican, and liberal
internationalists, who are predominantly Democrats, had a common enemy in the
aggressive nationalists and the neo-conservatives and Christian Right
leadership that made up the Cheney-led coalition of hawks under Bush, their own
differences have often been blurred.
Indeed, the spectrum covered by the two groups should be seen more as a
continuum rather than as two entirely distinct worldviews; Joseph Nye, a
Harvard professor and a senior State Department and Pentagon official under
former president Bill Clinton, called early last year for a "liberal realist
foreign policy".
Nonetheless, there are differences, and just as Bush had to decide which group
to side with, Obama is likely to face similar choices on specific foreign
policy issues.
Liberal internationalists, whose patron saint is former president Woodrow
Wilson, are much more inclined than realists to believe that the United States
is a morally "exceptional" nation and that the liberal-democratic principles on
which its governance is based should be actively promoted in other countries,
preferably through Western-oriented multilateral institutions and international
law. At the same time, some regimes, in their view, are so odious that they
should be isolated, even removed, and unilaterally if necessary.
Realists tend to be more skeptical about US "exceptionalism" (even about the
role of morality in foreign policy) and the universality of liberal-democratic
values and the ease with which they can be transplanted to foreign nations and
cultures. And they generally prefer to engage, rather than isolate, morally
questionable regimes, if doing so would advance US interests.
Their support for multilateral institutions and international law - to the
extent that nations will actually abide by it - is focused more on their role
in fostering and protecting traditional US national interests, such as
preserving stability in key parts of the world, preventing nuclear
proliferation, and preserving freedom of the seas, at the least cost to US
blood and treasury, which is a special concern at a time of "imperial
overstretch".
An obvious difference of opinion between the two groups is likely to arise over
what to do about Darfur. While both groups will no doubt support strengthening
UN peacekeeping or peacemaking capabilities there, they are likely to part ways
over the direct participation by the US military in such an effort.
Clinton and Rice have spoken about enforcing a no-fly zone over the region to
halt what they have called "genocide". However, Gates, Jones and other realists
- not to mention the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael
Mullen - are likely to oppose any such commitment on the grounds that, among
other things, US forces are already too "overstretched", and that Sudan is
peripheral to core US interests in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
Similarly, US strategy in Afghanistan, where the Pentagon and Obama appear
prepared to nearly double the existing US deployment of more than 30,000 troops
over the next six months, could provoke a serious source of contention.
Realists, led by the chief of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus,
favor co-opting those elements of the Taliban that are willing to break with
al-Qaeda and its allies in the broader interest of stabilizing the country. But
how will liberals like Clinton, who stressed her commitment to women's rights
during her confirmation hearings last week, react to a scheme that may
effectively empower, at least at the local level, ultra-conservative militants
opposed to the education of females?
Similarly, concerns about the security of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization's principal supply route to Afghanistan via Pakistan will likely
result in strong pressure from the Pentagon to renew once-strong ties with the
extremely repressive regime of Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov. This, too,
will pose a major problem for liberal policy-makers in the administration.
It is notable in that connection that Biden and Clinton both opposed resuming
military aid to Indonesia after the September 11, 2001, attacks due to its
deplorable human-rights record in East Timor and elsewhere. The leading
proponent of restoring the relationship was none other than then-chief of the
US Pacific Command, Admiral Dennis Blair, who is now Obama's nominee for
director of national intelligence (DNI).
The liberal-realist split is likely to be particularly acute in the Middle
East, the same region over which the realists and the hawks clashed most
fiercely during the Bush administration.
Like their neo-conservative cousins who also see the world through a moralistic
prism, many liberal internationalists have tended to be particularly protective
of Israel (if not of the Likud Party with which most neo-conservatives
identify) in major part due to the strong political backing the US Jewish
community has historically provided to the Democratic Party.
Particularly since 9/11, on the other hand, realists have seen the Jewish state
- or, more precisely, the failure to resolve its conflict with its Arab
neighbors, and especially the Palestinians - as a major and growing obstacle to
such urgent US goals as defeating al-Qaeda and containing Iran.
While the two sides are agreed for now that Obama must pursue more aggressive
diplomacy on all fronts, including direct engagement with Iran, realists will
be far more inclined to exert serious pressure on Israel to make major
concessions for peace agreements with Syria and the Palestinians.
Worried about the possibility of having to fight a third war in the region, the
realists are also likely to favor offering Tehran significantly more generous
incentives to curb its uranium-enrichment program than the liberals, some of
whom believe that any enrichment program - particularly one as far advanced as
Iran's at the moment - poses an "unacceptable" existential threat to Israel.
However these conflicts play out, they are unlikely to be nearly as poorly
managed as they were under Bush, whose intellectual insecurities, lack of
knowledge or curiosity about the world, or even the process by which policy was
made often resulted in victory for whatever side - hawks or realists - was
given the last chance to make its case.
For example, Jones, whose job it will be to ensure that the inter-agency
process runs smoothly and that all pertinent views reach the Oval Office, is
reputedly a much more imposing and experienced bureaucratic overseer than
either of Bush's national security advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen
Hadley. And more importantly, Obama, unlike his predecessor, is known to relish
intellectual combat and aggressively seek out alternative views.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
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