Grading Obama’s Foreign Policy
By Heather Hurlburt
January 23, 2012 | Foreign Policy
Barack Obama’s list of achievements on foreign policy and national security is long, but also diffuse. Many are good starts on works in progress. The misses, while smaller, are specific and painful.
Achievements:
1. Winding down the Bush wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. Making counterterrorism quieter and more successful — decimating al Qaeda central, including Osama bin Laden.
3. Activating the G-20 and using it to keep the world economy out of recession in 2009.
4. Resetting relations with Russia –even as we fight in public, cooperation continues on Afghanistan overflights, nuclear arms control and disarmament, and getting Russia into the WTO.
5. Steadying relations with Asia — not just the much-ballyhooed “pivot” but specifically building a new confidence among our core Asian allies — Australia, Japan, South Korea — while managing a very challenging period with China and making innovative moves in Burma and economic policy.
6. Moving U.S. military strategy and funding into the post-post-9/11 era with a considered strategic refocusing, a reconsideration of the role and scope of U.S. nuclear and ground forces, while keeping our promises to veterans, funding and defending the New GI bill, and undertaking the most significant Veterans’ Administration reforms in a generation.
7. Rebuilding U.S. multilateral credibility, at the United Nations and elsewhere.
8. South Sudanese independence, which went off relatively peacefully in no small part due to Obama and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice’s intervention at the U.N. last fall.
9. Infusing U.S. human rights policy with new credibility on responding to mass atrocities, LGBT issues, women in conflict; using U.S. activism in the U.N. Human Rights Council to improve its effectiveness dramatically.
10. Keeping the United States relevant to the Arab Spring. By choosing to ease out Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, play a key enabling role in the Libya intervention, and work hard if not so successfully behind the scenes in Bahrain and Yemen, Washington kept itself relevant to the conversation in a changing Arab world — no small achievement, despite how far short it falls of hopes both there and here.
Missed Opportunities:
1. A durable legal architecture for counterterrorism. Few in or out of the administration foresaw the ferocity of opposition to closing the Guantánamo Bay prison or to civilian trials for terror suspects. In response, the administration decided not to expend political capital to finish cleaning up its inherited mess, or to release advisory opinions and decision-making processes on drones, targeted killings, and other features of the new counterterrorism approach. However politically sensible these choices in the short run, they create both legal and political vacuums that have allowed its opponents to put even torture back on the table — and may open the door for actions by future administrations that we will all live to regret.
2. Middle East peace. Nothing Obama did in 2009 and 2010 could have made Benjamin Netanyahu or Mahmoud Abbas a different politician, but the United States did not have to wind up in quite as deep a hole as we now find ourselves.
3. Civil-military rebalancing. The time legions of good people took to write new diplomacy and development policies, and staff up USAID, absorbed the moment where significant resource and issue transfers to the civilian agencies were financially possible. Sure, this is a boring bureaucratic issue, but, in a world dominated by economic power, also a vital one.
4. Foundations of U.S. strength. As with Guantánamo, Congress must bear the lion’s share of the blame for last summer’s embarrassing debt-ceiling posturing and the even-more embarrassing failure of the “super-committee” set up to find budget cuts palatable to both sides of the aisle. But given the black eye the fracas (not to mention the too-small stimulus and its too-small results) has given to confidence in U.S. leadership abroad as well as at home, the administration must share the blame.
The Jury Is Still Out:
1. Iran, North Korea, and nonproliferation writ large. Can the combination of pressure now and promised inducements later pay off in peacefully moving either Iran or North Korea off the nuclear track? Can a second-term president with a solidly conservative Congress make good on the expansive promise of his 2009 nonproliferation agenda?
2. The global economy. The 2009 activism was major — but can a second-term Obama begin to enunciate a vision for globalization after the crash, and muster domestic support for U.S. leadership in it?
3. Climate change. Both international and domestic processes are in sore need of a new spark — can this administration provide it, or respond productively if someone else does?
Heather Hurlburt is executive director of the National Security Network.
For the original piece, click here.
