The First 100 Days: Barack Obama's Report Card

President Obama's 100 Day Foreign Policy Review

President Obama’s first 100 days of foreign policy engagement were without equal in America’s modern presidential experience. Inheriting a foreign policy agenda in disarray and widely condemned in capitals around the world for its strident unilateralism, the new administration launched a diplomatic offensive that took President Obama to 23 countries in three months. The new president acquitted himself well, demonstrating the gravitas, discipline and competency needed to manage America’s expanding foreign policy portfolio. In London, he served as de-facto Chief Executive Officer of the G-20 meeting before going on to address the European Union and NATO’s 60th anniversary conference. As Commander-in-Chief he escalated troop levels in Afghanistan, announced an 18 month withdrawal plan in Iraq and battled pirates on the high seas. Acknowledging the rising eastern powers, the President proffered a nuclear arms reduction deal with Russia, agreed to meet China’s Hu Jintao in Beijing this summer and strengthened the bonds of affection with India’s Prime Minister Singh at their London meeting.

President Obama’s superintendence over multiple flashpoints of crisis foreshadows the new reality that the era of America’s unipolar global supremacy is coming to an end. In its place a new multipolar world order of shared decision making by major and emerging powers like Russia, China, Japan, India, Brazil and Mexico is rapidly becoming the source code of international relations. Although the U.S. will remain the principal world power in the near term, increasingly America will require working agreements and real partnerships if its wants to solve global problems. Thus, Barak Obama must not only guide America’s ship of state as president, he is obligated by the confluence of world events to preside as maximum leader over a stormy and uncertain transition to a new global architecture. How he handles the most significant transformation of global security arrangements since the Cold War doctrine was adopted in 1949, is of critical importance. Since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, President Clinton and George W. Bush failed to craft a grand strategy to lead the world toward a more durable era of global peace and stability; the former conducting foreign policy on an ad-hock basis, and the latter on the foundation of militarist unilateralism. The window of Obama’s first 100 days is too small to provide a definitive answer as too whether he will repeat the mistake of lurching from crisis to crisis in the absence of an overarching grand strategy, but it does reveal the outlines of a new framework that is a work in progress.

Arguably, Barak Obama may be the first president since America’s emergence as a world power to effectuate a tactical retreat to reconstitute American power and leadership. The economic recession that reached its nadir in 2008, has drained the nation’s treasury. Economic stimulus spending, bailout packages and the cost of underwriting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ballooned American debt upwards of five trillion dollars. The debilitating impact of the two conflicts on America’s armed forces has “hollowed out" U.S. military strength and severely degraded Washington’s capacity to project power and sustain long-term commitments across the world. As the American peoples’ support for continued U.S involvement in these conflicts remains "soft" and can only be maintained if U.S. troop fatalities remain low, President Obama is walking a thin line with little margin for error on the battlefield.

Similarly, the crisis of globalization has calcified reluctance in the European community to support the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq . Notwithstanding his efforts at the G-20 and NATO summits to combat Europe’s political stasis and incoherence, President Obama will not receive substantial troop additions or funding increases needed to prosecute the war in Afghanistan and support counter-terrorism efforts in Pakistan. The hemorrhaging global economy has Eastern European countries like Ukraine and Hungary teetering on the edge of financial insolvency and has accelerated the number of failed states in the developing world--Somalia being an extreme case in point. As the United States can no longer bear the burden of policing the entire western empire, President Obama will be increasingly confronted with difficult decisions concerning the deployment of American resources.

President Obama’s detractors will undoubtedly decry his scaling back U.S. imperial hubris and condemn some of the compromises he will inevitably make. His strong reorientation of American foreign policy towards diplomacy will be casts as weakness and Obama portrayed as naïve to the realities of raw power. But President Obama is acting in a manner that is prudent and mature. His willingness to concede some ground to stabilize America ’s international position flows from a sobering assessment of the current limitations of American power, the strength of his adversaries and the capacity of America ’s allies to respond to the fluid international situation.

Cognizant of the constraints on American power, President Obama’s foreign policy calculus calls for repositioning America’s diminished but still formidable assets on the one hand, while stress-testing international organizations and institutions to mitigate international crises on the other. The IMF, World Bank and United Nations are Cold War institutions that no longer comport with the times and must be reformed. As articulated by President Obama, his overarching strategy to staunch the trajectory of global destabilization while renewing American leadership rest on a core six- point agenda: withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq to focus on broader issues; eliminating the al Queda and Muslim extremists’ threat in Pakistan and Afghanistan; rebuilding a weakened military; repairing America’s damaged international partnerships; dramatically reducing nuclear weapons and aligning U.S. foreign policy with traditional American values. In his first 100 days President Obama did not deviate from his course and emerged as a popular leader at home and abroad. In the weeks and months ahead he will need all the good will he can muster. His next year will likely be the most dangerous of his presidency.

Over the next year, events in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan will dictate President Obama’s success or failure to stabilize a volatile international situation and halt the slide of American power. President Obama has decided that America’s overall national security interest would be best served by cutting its losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a very risky gamble in both countries. If renewed sectarian warfare can be avoided in Iraq -and that's a big if absent a settlement on the status of Kirkuk--the U.S. can redeploy forces to Afghanistan. The strategy is to launch a major offensive to eliminate enough Taliban extremists and then negotiate with moderate Taliban elements to join the national government. Eschewing grand visions of nation building President Obama hopes to secure support from his allies to finance and train enough national army, police and civil service workers to stand up a functioning country. Like Iraq, the drawdown of U.S. forces would begin as soon as the administration determined the Taliban/al Queda axis lacked the capability to use Afghanistan as a launching pad to attack the U.S and subvert its neighbors. What Obama seeks to avoid in Afghanistan is a long drawn out, demoralizing bloody war that would further stretch the military and divide the nation; hence the surge, strike and negotiate strategy.

While the Obama administration has shifted its focus from Iraq to stopping the Taliban in Afghanistan, it is Pakistan that poses the greatest short-term danger to America’s national security interest. The Zardari-Galani government is incapable of bringing order to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or the Northwest Territories. The Pakistani Taliban and al Queda forces have now moved within 60 miles of Islamabad . Although President Obama continued to authorize limited Special Forces operations within Pakistan and Drone attacks, he cannot commit ground troops to Pakistan to neutralize the terrorist threat. To avoid the government’s collapse which would likely provoke a military response by India, President Obama must make preparations to support a temporary military takeover by Army Chief Kayani. The specter of a Taliban/al Queda inspired takeover of Pakistan would unravel the entire U.S. presence in the greater Middle East and heighten the danger of leaking nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorist elements. It is Pakistan where President Obama will likely meet his first supreme crisis, and he must be prepared to act.

Outside the Middle East and Central Asian hot zone, the Obama administration turned its attention to the east, probing for parameters to engage Russia and China. Neither country has demonstrated enthusiasm to work with the U.S. to mitigate international conflicts. As regional hegemons both nations are seeking to solidify their spheres of influence and are united in their desire to push America out of Central Asia . President Obama came to office determined to recast U.S.--Russia relations with a big initiative. At the G-20 Summit his quiet back channel diplomacy paid off with an announcement of nuclear arms reduction talks. Clearly, President Obama is attempting to generate momentum for positive relations with Russia, whose help he will need in Afghanistan and on the Iranian nuclear issue. It remains to be seen whether Moscow is willing to be a tactical ally or strategic adversary of the United States. As for Obama’s agreement to visit China this year, both sides want to establish ground rules that will lend predictability to solving critical debt, trade and financial issues in the aftermath of the global economic meltdown. This will be critical if Obama has any hope of securing China’s support on broader issues from global warming to North Korea.

Ironically, President Obama’s first one hundred days ended with very little said about Iran. His overtures to invite Tehran to talks on Afghanistan and Norwuz messages have not generated much good will in Iran. With the first round of Iran’s presidential elections coming up in June, what to do about Iran’s nuclear enrichment program is going to move front and center on the foreign policy agenda. In truth, President Obama has few options to prevent Iran from mastering the uranium enrichment cycle, save an attack by Israel that at best could set the program back temporarily. By attempting to woo Syria from Iran’s sphere and offering to shelve deployment of missile defense shield systems in Poland and the Czech Republic in exchange for Russian cooperation to block Iran’s nuclear program, the Obama administration’s attempt to further isolate Iran is going nowhere. Should President Ahmadinejad be re-elected the standoff between the U.S. and Iran will sharpen considerably.

Perhaps the most controversial actions taken by President Obama in the first 100 days of his administration was not the handshake with Hugo Chavez or relaxing travel restrictions with Cuba, but his decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and release documents detailing torture techniques used during the Bush administration. Both actions sparked a furious debate about whether these actions made America safer or were necessary to reestablish that the rule of law and American values will be upheld in "wartime." President Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus and Roosevelt interned Japanese-Americans. It was a gutsy but ultimately correct position for President Obama to take, but one that will come back to haunt him politically if there is a terrorist attack on American soil.

What the first 100 days of the new administration reveals to us is that President Obama came to office with a solid plan and was fully prepared to execute a new foreign policy agenda. He has passed if not exceeded the threshold of competence and shown he is a capable manager of
America’s increasingly complex international affairs portfolio. It will be his response to a crisis that is surely to come, and his ability to craft a long-term grand strategy that articulates America ’s place in the new multi-polar world order that will determine if he is the right leader to match the unprecedented historical moment. **********

Webster Brooks is a Senior Fellow at the Center for New Politics and Policy, and Editor of Brooks Foreign Policy Review-the Center's foreign policy arm.

www.foreignpolicyreview.org
wbrooks@newpolicycenter.org

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