ANALYSIS:The world awaits a shift in how the States deals with global affairs while guarding its own interests, writes Paul Gillespie
THIS WAS a global election, its winner has a remarkable global profile and, with its first black president, the United States suddenly looks much more like a global nation. So among the principal challenges Barack Obama faces will be how to respond to expectations of radical change in US foreign policy from all around the world. He will need to balance that great expression of good will against the US interests and primacy he is pledged and determined to protect. Inevitably this will open up a gap between expectations and capabilities in the international sphere matching the parallel delivery question in domestic policy. Similar communications and analytical skills will be required to manage these - which the campaign shows Obama has in abundance.
That Obama is not George Bush is undoubtedly a major asset, given how the outgoing president came to symbolise an uncaring and incompetent US approach. But this may well conceal large elements of foreign policy continuity from Bush's second term, which saw a shift away from unilateral to a more co-operative diplomacy in partial recognition that many international questions are not capable of being solved by US power alone. This was variously manifested on North Korea, Iran and in dealings with the European Union, for example, even though it was obscured by the attitudinal overhang from his first term and the continuing unipolar instinct represented by Dick Cheney.
The legacy of hostility towards the US and loss of influence flowing from the Bush years is palpable and readily measured in opinion polling around the world. This is most marked in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, much less so in Asian states like India, China and Japan where Bush was more acceptable or favoured. But a significant finding of this research, especially in Europe, is that highly positive attitudes towards Obama are not necessarily matched by similar ones towards particular US policies, which have far less support. That speaks of a desire to reorder the framework of international power and institutions to bring them more into line with what is becoming a multipolar world, in which US political and military primacy is no longer taken for granted or easily imposed.
It will be simpler for Obama to retrieve the loss of international goodwill than reverse the decline of US influence. In tackling that decline, he will rely on a broad group of foreign policy advisers assembled over the last two years around a smaller core of specialists. These closest advisers, including previous Clinton administration figures Susan Rice and Anthony Lake, say they reject standard dichotomies of realist power politics versus liberal idealism, but foresee a different kind of world characterised by interconnectedness and diffuse power.
They identify three priority issues facing the US that governments cannot handle on their own: counter-terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and climate change along with oil dependence. Another two are regional: the Middle East and East Asia.
Significantly missing from that list is any reference to the credit crunch, and the financial and now economic crisis afflicting US and world capitalism which erupted with such ferocity during the campaign and probably gave him his victory.
Their report barely mentions great-power diplomacy, the traditional core concept of statecraft. It is, as Nicholas Lemann writes in the New Yorker, "not just post-Cold War but post-war on terror and, arguably, post-American hegemony. (It makes a point of describing the war in Iraq as a bad idea, rather than as a good idea poorly executed.) It isn't dovish or sanguine, exactly - those top three strategic priorities are all threats - but it definitely does not envision American military power, or even power combined with diplomacy, as the only effective tool of foreign-policymaking."
This emphasis on soft power, exemplary action and networking will help Obama retrieve lost US influence as he faces into urgent negotiations on all these issues, and especially on the economic ones. The transition period between now and the end of January will be challenging. It will probably include efforts to test US resolve on Georgia, Iran and Afghanistan/Pakistan, all of which are neuralgic points, in addition to the Group of 20 meeting on November 15th which is set to arrange a renegotiation of the Bretton Woods financial agreements reached in Washington at the end of the second World War.
Whether Obama can deliver on these more far-reaching objectives will depend in good part on his appointments to the state department, the treasury and the Pentagon. His broader group of political advisers include Clinton and Republican realists as well as liberal interventionists. This tells a somewhat different story from his conceptual framework - of pragmatic caution and the need to demonstrate his security credentials.
That preoccupation is grounded in his record of support for intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan, his commitment to maintain US military primacy or his support for Nato enlargement towards Ukraine and Georgia. These must be put alongside his readiness to talk directly to Iranian, Cuban and North Korean leaders, in a sharp break with Bush's approach. Withdrawal from Iraq will be phased and negotiated, and will coincide with a military surge in Afghanistan.
This particular policy will bring him sharply up against European reservations about sending extra troops to Nato's Afghan operation.
European leaders need to use the transition period to formulate their own views about how to solve the financial crisis, rescue Nato's Afghan mission by diplomacy, deal with instability in Pakistan, counter Russia on Georgia and manage China's emergence, in addition to dealing with international terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and Middle East instability.
They could then put a common plan of action to Obama, reflecting both convergence and divergence of transatlantic interests and values rather than a shopping list of demands.
Otherwise, they are likely to be put on the defensive by an incoming Obama administration.
In a recent column for the International Herald Tribune, columnist John Vinocur usefully recalled Denis MacShane's description of Bill Clinton as "a social democrat who put Europe on valium, who could schmooze Europe, talk European".
He also recalled how Obama's veteran foreign policy expert and vice-president-to-be, Joe Biden, caricatured European leaders, telling him they could have done things better in Iraq: "Blah blah blah, international co-operation. Give me a break, huh."
As Vinocur put it, "Obama is not Michael Moore transmogrified. He will fulfil no one's dreams of a capitulating, apologetic United States."
Moore's description of the US party system as "Tweedledum and Tweedledumber" needs revision domestically in the light of this result - but it might be more apt to describe the likely continuity of Barack Obama's foreign policy.