Obama Offers an Echo, not a Choice on Foreign Policy

[Herb Schaffler]

From Tony Smith, the Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science at Tufts University in the September 22, 2008 American Conservative:

Barack Obama is certainly more critical than McCain of the Bush foreign policy, but he is definitely not embracing the George McGovern slogan "Come Home, America." Speaking to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in April 2007, Obama declared that his administration would open "a new chapter in American leadership" and that our task is to "lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. ...America's larger purpose in the world is to promote the spread of freedom - that is the yearning of all who live in the shadow of tyranny and despair." Accordingly, he called for increased foreign aid to address root causes of poverty and failed states as well as for the expansion of the Army and Marine Corps by 92,000 to have "a 21st century military to stay on the offense from Djibouti to Kandahar."

...neither does he talk about reducing America's role in world affairs, holding the line on the military budget, curtailing foreign aid, or avoiding the occupation of foreign countries in order to democratize them. Just the opposite. Like McCain and similarly to the Bush Doctrine, Obama appears to believe that a strong military backing the expansion of democratic government and free markets should be basic elements of American foreign policy.

...Long before Bush was co-opted by neoconservatives, the notion of America as "the indispensable nation" was announced in February 1998 by a Democrat, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further into the future." There's little reason to think that Albright, reported to be on Obama's foreign-policy advisory team, has revised her opinion.

Those who expect Barack Obama to depart from the outlines of our current foreign policy forget its deep roots on the Left and underestimate the elite cadre within the Democratic Party urging him to embrace the pretensions of the Bush Doctrine. Liberal hawks working under the auspices of the Progressive Policy Institute of the Democratic Leadership Council (sometimes collaborating with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century) include Michael McFaul, Ronald Asmus, Larry Diamond, Philip Gordon, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Kenneth Pollack. Sens. Hillary Clinton, Joseph Lieberman, Joseph Biden, Evan Bayh, and John Kerry have all been publicly associated. The most active member from the House has been Rahm Emanuel.

In document after after document, PPI has pledged allegiance to the task of defending the zone of democratic peace by moving failed states and societies into the camp of market democracies. As a PPI report entitled "Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy" put it in October 2003, the Bush administration has not been ambitious or imaginative enough" when it comes to the "belief that America can best defend itself by building a world safe for individual liberty and democracy." This statement received explicit, public support from Biden, Obama's running mate.

Obama is surrounded by phalanxes of experts bidding to offer him advice that would keep him under the influence of the Bush Doctrine. There is James Dobbins, the director of Rand's International Security and Defense Policy Center, who has worked for both the Clinton and Bush administrations and is the editor of two Rand primers on how to run countries taken over by the "US military: The Beginner's Guide to Nation-Building" (2007), and "America's Role in Nation-Building" From Germany to Iraq" (2003). Or again, Thomas Carothers at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peach in writing that democracy promotion should remain a central theme of the nations foreign policy, indeed that it never placyed a major role in the thinking behind the Bush Doctrine. Other Obama advisors include Ivo Daalder and Michael O'Hanlon at Brookings, both of whom have expressed views aligned with Bush Doctrine thinking.

Thus it came as no surprise that when Russia invaded Georgia, both McCain and Obama were quick to denounce Moscow in terms that failed to criticize the Bush administration's provocotive efforts both to push NATO to Russia's borders by incorporating both Georgia and Ukraine and placing an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic. To be sure, Obama recognized that the Georgians had fired first in South Ossetia, and he did not try to match McCain's assertion that "We are all Georgians now." Still, Obama did make it clear that Russia was the culprit in this affair, reiterated his support for bringing Georgia into NATO, and encouraged Biden to make a trip to Tbilisi to reassure Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili that support for his cause in the US was bipartisan. In his deliberations, Obama relied on advisce from PPI member Michael McFaul as well as support from such Democratic notables as Zbigniew Brzesinski, and Strobe Talbott.

Americans are therefore right to be suspicious of the leaders of both parties. McCain and Obama both continue to talk in terms of American global hegemony based on military might and on a blueprint for reordering of foreign countries into market democracies. They not only fail to renounce the Bush Doctrine - they repeat its folly.