When was the last time you heard anyone enthusing about Barack Obama's foreign policy?
Over the past year, his outstretched hand of friendship has been bitten or brushed aside by China, Russia and Iran. His administration has just been snubbed by Israel. It is not at all clear that his surge in Afghanistan is working, while Pakistan still teeters on the brink. Europe's passion for him has proved as fickle as (we are unreliably informed) Carla Bruni's for Nicolas Sarkozy. His eloquent opening to the Islamic world seems to have run into the sand. The Copenhagen climate-change summit fizzled out in mutual recrimination between the U.S. and China.
Once upon a time, the world thrilled to the Obama chant of “Yes we can!” Now it's shouting back: “No you can't!”
Beyond improving America's popular standing in the world – no mean achievement – Mr. Obama's foreign policy has produced no clear, significant success. Why? Here are some of the explanations offered.
Disappointment was foreordained: Those messianic expectations of his presidency could never have been met by any mere mortal. Rather than being a messiah, Mr. Obama is a first-term President with little personal experience in foreign affairs. As his predecessor showed, the experience of your aides cannot always make up for your own lack of it.
Republicans say his “liberal,” rational, compromise-seeking approach invites the snubs from Beijing to Jerusalem. As he himself said in a speech in Moscow last summer, quoting a Russian student, “the real world is not so rational as paper.” Democrats say his real problem is the unholy mess bequeathed him by George W. Bush: Iraq, neglected Afghanistan, alienated Muslims and U.S. unpopularity abroad, massive debts, and recession at home.
Others point to problems accumulated over a longer period: U.S. consumers encouraged to live beyond their means; domestic infrastructure neglected in favour of imperial expenditures; a dysfunctional system of government. Meantime, the political middle ground of compromise has disappeared in an era of polarized politics. Historic power shifts mean we are entering what Fareed Zakaria calls a post-American world, where the U.S. will find it increasingly difficult to get its own way against the will of rising great powers.
If you examine any particular foreign policy issue and ask why Mr. Obama has not done better, you have to look at the interaction of several of these explanations. Take Iran. The Obama administration has yet to hit on the best policy. Last year, it focused on the offer of nuclear negotiations, while a huge opportunity for political change was opening, then partly closing, inside Iran. Snubbed by Tehran on the nuclear front, Washington is now investing too much political capital in the pursuit of international sanctions that are unlikely to bring Iran to a negotiated renunciation of its nuclear program.
But if you ask why Iran spurned Mr. Obama's outstretched hand, then you have to look at the legacy of the Bush years, including the way in which the Iraq war strengthened Iran's position in the region. If you ask why China is so hard to get, then you have to recall the underlying power shifts, as well as a growing Chinese economy's thirst for Iranian oil. If you ask why the Obama administration is playing it this way, then you have to look also at the pressures from Congress, and the fear that Israel might take unilateral military action against Iranian nuclear facilities. In turn, the priority given to Iran helps explain why Washington has not pushed Beijing and Moscow harder on other fronts, including human rights.
