Obama takes sharp turn on foreign policy

And yet, as Obama’s presidential term has buzzed with bailouts, stimulus, the budget and now healthcare reform, his administration has been steadily pressing forward with its plans to “reboot” relationships and distance itself from goals and tactics of the Bush years.
“Look at general things that have been done,” Robert Hunter, NATO ambassador under President Clinton and now a senior adviser at RAND Corp., told The Hill. “A lot of things have been cleaned up from the past in terms of America’s reputation,” including the decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility for terror suspects and choosing to send the vice president to last month’s Munich Security Conference, he said.

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton sees these initial actions differently.

“It represents a triumph of process over substance,” Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Hill. Bolton questioned whether the administration’s game plan of “simply talking to governments [to] change disagreements about fundamental issues” will prove useful.

Many of Obama’s initial foreign policy endeavors ring familiar to those who remember his stumps on the campaign trail. His pledge to turn the military’s focus back to Afghanistan was jump-started with last month’s announcement that the U.S. will send 17,000 more troops to the Central Asian country, although he still faces challenges in getting cooperation from other NATO coalition partners to dial up the 40-nation effort there. “A sensible question is whether Europe will step up to the plate,” Bolton said.

Obama’s pledge to engage Iran and Syria diplomatically without preconditions culminated in the four-hour Saturday meeting between Jeffrey Feltman, the acting U.S. secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Daniel Shapiro of the National Security Council, and Syrian officials including Foreign Minister Walid Muallem in Damascus.

Feltman emerged to label the talks “very constructive.”

Moves such as this, said Hunter, “get rid of the underbrush we’ve had for so many years — ‘if you want to talk to us, you have to be a friend.’”

And Iran is being invited to a regional conference at the end of this month to discuss Afghanistan. But talks with Iran — which, Israel’s military intelligence chief claimed Sunday, can now build a nuclear weapon — may get a boost from Obama’s upcoming trip to Turkey, a country that had previously been asked by Iran to serve as a mediator between the Islamic Republic and the United States.

“I don’t think the Iranian government is ever going to be talked out of nuclear weapons,” Bolton said. But the former ambassador said Iran “would love to talk to the United States,” feeling that the extended diplomacy would buy them time and lend them legitimacy.

Ironically, Obama’s out-of-the-gate foreign policy is being powered by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the same Democratic presidential hopeful who lambasted Obama’s platform of talks with Iran and Syria as illustrating foreign-policy amateurishness.

Even though Clinton and Obama have found common cause, though, the agenda is still not without controversy.

News broke last week that Obama had sent a letter to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, allegedly offering to drop plans for the Eastern Europe missile defense system if Russia would help bring Iran in line. Obama said the New York Times story mischaracterized this cog in his wider goal to “reboot” the Russian-American relationship.

“What I said in the letter was that, obviously, to the extent that we are lessening Iran’s commitment to nuclear weapons, then that reduces the pressure for — or the need for a missile defense system,” Obama said at the White House last Tuesday. “In no way does that in any — does that diminish my commitment to making sure that Poland, the Czech Republic, and other NATO members are fully enjoying the partnership, the alliance, and U.S. support with respect to their security.”

Hunter said Obama would want to make sure that the missile defense system is cost-effective and capable of stopping an attack before pressing forward on the plan. “Pressing the reset button doesn’t mean Russia is going to do everything we want,” and vice-versa, he said.

“The letter shows [the Obama administration is] prepared to trade [the missile defense system] away,” Bolton said, adding Russia would see it as a sign of weakness.

Another point of controversy last week was Thursday’s meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft — former national security advisers for Presidents Carter and George H.W. Bush, respectively — were the sole witnesses for the “U.S. Strategy Regarding Iran” hearing. “When Brzezinski used his short opening statement to say Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should be cautious about listening to Israel’s ideas, the red flag really went up,” one Jewish leader told the Jerusalem Post afterward.