10/20/08

For the past thirty years, the Republican party’s foreign policy establishment has consisted of an uneasy alliance between Neoconservatives and pragmatists.  The Iraq war put the alliance under great strain.  The decision of Colin Powell, long a leader in the pragmatic conservative camp, to endorse Barack Obama is the strongest of recent signals that the alliance is broken for good. Powell is not the only pragmatic conservative to express support for Obama’s ideas.  Senators Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel, former national security officials James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, and foreign policy pragmatists such as Fareed Zakaria have all either endorsed Obama or lent support to many of his foreign policy ideas.  There are still significant differences between the pragmatic conservatives and many progressives  However, what is clear is that the gap between progressives and the traditional conservative foreign policy camp is much smaller than the chasm that has opened up between pragmatic conservatives and Neoconservatives.  

Former Secretary of State General Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama signals foreign policy shift by traditional conservative realists.  Powell’s endorsement caps off a movement by traditional conservative realists away from the neoconservative principles advocated by John McCain.  Powell remarked that Obama “speaks with great insight into the challenges we're facing of a military and political and economic nature,” but he also expressed his concern over the fact that the Republican Party “has moved even further to the right.”  The New York Times reports: “Mr. Powell, who is of the pragmatist camp and has been critical of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, was said by friends in recent months to be disturbed by some of the neoconservatives who have surrounded Mr. McCain as foreign policy advisers in his presidential campaign. The McCain campaign’s top foreign policy aide is Randy Scheunemann, who was a foreign policy adviser to former Senators Trent Lott and Bob Dole and who has longtime ties to neoconservatives. In 2002, Mr. Scheunemann was a founder of the hawkish Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraqi exile and Pentagon favorite, Ahmad Chalabi, who was viewed with suspicion and distaste at the State Department when Mr. Powell was secretary of state.” [NY Times, 10/19/08. Colin Powell, 10/19/08]

Senator Richard Lugar, Republican Co-Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, endorsed Obama’s approach to diplomacy.  Last week, Lugar, one of his party’s senior voices on foreign affairs, broke with the Bush-McCain hardliners to endorse Barack Obama’s approach to diplomacy.  In a speech to the National Defense University, Lugar said, “He correctly cautions against the implication that hostile nations must be dealt with almost exclusively through isolation or military force.  In some cases, refusing to talk can even be dangerous.”  Congressional Quarterly reported that “Lugar also used his speech to underscore his concern that U.S. foreign policy has become too reactive. ‘If most U.S. foreign policy attention is devoted to crises fomented by hostile regimes, we are ceding the initiative to our enemies and reducing our capacity to lead the world in ways that are more likely to affect our future,’ Lugar said.” [CQ Politics, 10/15/08]

Brent Scowcroft endorses Obama’s approach to foreign policy. This April, Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush, said he agrees with the position stated by Sen. Barack Obama that the U.S. would benefit from having direct talks with the leaders of countries including Iran.  When asked by The Huffington Post whether he thought the next president should meet with the likes of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Scowcroft said "Absolutely, it's hard to make things better if you don't talk."  Scowcroft has been a leading voice on the pragmatist side of the foreign policy debate within the Republican party, often critical of such Bush-McCain policies as invading Iraq and creating a League of Democracies.  In July, Scowcroft said he would be remaining “neutral” in this year’s presidential campaign, not endorsing or supporting his party’s candidate. [Huffington Post, 4/28/08. Huffington Post, 7/23/08. NY Times, 4/10/08]

Concerned about diminished U.S. global prestige, foreign policy realists Powell and Zakaria reject adversarial McCain approach and move toward positions favored by Senator Obama.  Before endorsing Obama, Powell outlined a bold agenda for restoring worldwide confidence in American leadership, saying: “And so I think what the president has to do is to start using the power of the Oval Office and the power of his personality to convince the American people and to convince the world that America is solid, America is going to move forward, and we're going to fix our economic problems, we're going to meet our overseas obligations.  But restoring a sense of purpose, a sense of confidence in the American people and, in the international community, in America.”  Realist foreign policy expert Fareed Zakaria put an even finer point on this argument, arguing that only Obama would meet this challenge: “On foreign policy, Obama is cool to McCain's hot, discriminating about the fights he wants to pick. He argues for greater international cooperation and the aggressive use of diplomacy. He sees a world in which America doesn't have to get adversarial with everyone and tries instead to work with other countries—of whatever hue—to solve the common problems we face.” [Colin Powell, 10/19/08. Fareed Zakaria, 10/18/08]

Republican Secretaries of State Kissinger, Shultz and Baker reject core elements of McCain’s foreign policy.  On key foreign policy issues, including U.S.-Russia relations and Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, several Republican former Secretaries of State have rejected McCain’s positions.  In a statement that seemed to reject the confrontational position toward Russia taken by McCain, James Baker argued that we have to look at the U.S.-Russia relationship “in a strategic context not tactically…we have some big-picture issues to be conscious of” and that while the U.S. should support democratic governments “these are little flash fires that we need to be aware of and deal with properly, but that should not be cause for rupturing the entire big relationship.”  Kissinger and Shultz went further, penning an op-ed that argued for ending “the drift toward confrontation,” and that “isolating Russia is not a sustainable long-range policy.”  Kissinger, a McCain advisor, also took a position closer to Obama on Iran, saying “I am in favor of negotiating with Iran. And one utility of negotiation is to put before Iran our vision of a Middle East, of a stable Middle East, and our notion on nuclear proliferation at a high enough level so that they have to study it . . . . But I do not believe that we can make conditions for the opening of negotiations.” [Former Secretary of State James Baker, 9/15/08.  Former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, 10/08/08. Former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, 9/15/08]

Quick Hits

The U.S.-Iraqi security agreement is in doubt again, as an alliance of Shiite parties called for a strict timeline for U.S. withdrawal as a condition of the deal.

President Bush and European leaders proposed to convene a December summit of world leaders on the financial crisis.

Worsening violence in Afghanistan: A suicide bomber killed two NATO soldiers and five children in northern Afghanistan;  a female aid worker was shot dead in Kabul;  the Taliban beheaded 30 civilian bus passengers in southern Afghanistan, claiming they were undercover soldiers;  Afghan and NATO forces killed 34 Taliban militants in a battle in Helmand province.  

The former Russian ambassador to Afghanistan spoke about lessons that the United States may learn from the Soviet occupation.

Pakistani officials will meet with the IMF tomorrow and may ask for financial assistance.  U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher is in Pakistan for high-level meetings.  China will help Pakistan build two nuclear reactors, a “counterweight” to the recent U.S.-India nuclear deal.

China’s growth is the slowest in five years.  The government announced a major land-use reform that is designed to lift incomes for farmers.  The former vice mayor of Beijing and received a death sentence for corruption.

North Korea reported that it would make an important statement today, possibly on the status of Kim Jong-il, suspected to be in ill-health, but South Korea sees “nothing unusual” in North Korean activities today.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni received an extension and has two more weeks to try to form a government.

Zimbabwe’s opposition party “shunned” talks on the power-sharing deal after Morgan Tsvangirai was denied a passport to travel to the meeting.