Obama

If you read back through the archives of my blog, you will see that I have been very interested in Barack Obama ever since his election to the Senate. I subscribed to his weekly podcast in which he would spend 10-15 minutes talking about a particular policy question. I remember watching him on CSPAN during Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings. He was a freshman senator on that committee, but he always was the most impressive. He used his time to ask questions, rather than make speeches disguised as a question like most of his colleagues. The questions he did ask demonstrated to me that he was extremely knowledgeable about the topic at hand, and his questions were designed to help him even better understand the topic that was the subject of the testimony.

(The Editor - I knew you were a nerd, but watching Foreign Relation Committee hearings on CSPAN? Really? Hey, this was when my dog was recovering from his ACL replacement and on bedrest, so I had to sit on the couch with him all day to keep him still. The fact that I enjoyed watching those hearings has nothing to do with how much of a nerd I am!)

Because of that background, I wanted Obama to be our next president long before he began campaigning. I like Clinton well enough, and think she has been an excellent senator. Her biggest drawback, I believe, is that she brings out the worst in Republicans. I think that all of the Republicans who have been able to work with Senator Clinton these past 8 years, would be completely unable to work with a President Clinton. It would be suicide with their base. It's not her fault, and it's unfair, but it's reality.

I actually have not been following the campaign as closely as some of my friends, who know how much of a political junkies I am, have expected. (George Will has claimed that running a presidential campaign is good preparation for being president, and provides some insight into how able a person might be as president. Since George W. Bush ran pretty good campaigns, I think we can pretty much dismiss Will's theory.) It's been amusing to me to read people who are concerned that Obama is all style and no substance. The style is fun, but his substance is absolutely there if one is interesting in looking.

On that note, Spencer Ackerman has a good introduction to how Obama approaches foreign policy questions.

Obama is offering the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades. It cuts to the heart of traditional Democratic timidity. "It's time to reject the counsel that says the American people would rather have someone who is strong and wrong than someone who is weak and right," Obama said in a January speech. "It's time to say that we are the party that is going to be strong and right." (The Democrat who counseled that Americans wanted someone strong and wrong, not weak and right? That was Bill Clinton in 2002.)

But to understand what Obama is proposing, it's important to ask: What, exactly, is the mind-set that led to the war? What will it mean to end it? And what will take its place?

To answer these questions, I spoke at length with Obama's foreign-policy brain trust, the advisers who will craft and implement a new global strategy if he wins the nomination and the general election. They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering "democracy promotion" agenda in favor of "dignity promotion," to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It's both and neither -- an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.

Obama has surrounded himself with stellar foreign policy advisers who share an extremely important trait. They were correct on the most important foreign policy question we faced during the Bush presidency, what to do in the aftermath of 9/11. Not only did they oppose the Iraq war, but they predicted what would unfold if we engaged in that distraction. We live in a crazy world in which people who were right about Iraq are the not ones seen as experts in the media, but the New Times gives a hack like Bill Kristol a weekly column in the most important newspaper in the country. Obama has experienced some of that insanity:

Most of the members of Obama's foreign-policy team expressed frustration that they had taken a well-considered and seemingly anodyne position on Iraq and suffered for it. Obama had something similar happen to him in the spring and summer of 2007. He was attacked from the left and the right for saying three things that should not have been controversial: that if he had actionable intelligence on the whereabouts of al-Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan but no cooperation from the Pakistani government, he would take out the jihadists; that he wouldn't use nuclear weapons on terrorist training camps; and that he would be willing to meet with leaders of rogue states in his first year as president. "No one [of Obama's critics] had thought through the policy because that was the quote-unquote naïve and weak position, so they said it was a bad position to take," recalls Ben Rhodes, the adviser who writes Obama's foreign-policy speeches. "And it was a seminal moment, because Obama himself said, 'No, I'm right about this!'"

The key concept of an Obama administration's foreign policy would be dignity promotion. He recognizes that no matter how many al-Qaeda opperatives the US kills or captures, unless we make it difficult for them to recruit new members, we have not made any progress.

What's typically neglected in these arguments is the simple insight that democracy does not fill stomachs, alleviate malaria, or protect neighborhoods from marauding bands of militiamen. Democracy, in other words, is valuable to people insofar as it allows them first to meet their basic needs. It is much harder to provide that sense of dignity than to hold an election in Baghdad or Gaza and declare oneself shocked when illiberal forces triumph. "Look at why the baddies win these elections," Power says. "It's because [populations are] living in climates of fear." U.S. policy, she continues, should be "about meeting people where they're at. Their fears of going hungry, or of the thug on the street. That's the swamp that needs draining. If we're to compete with extremism, we have to be able to provide these things that we're not [providing]."

This is why, Obama's advisers argue, national security depends in large part on dignity promotion. Without it, the U.S. will never be able to destroy al-Qaeda. Extremists will forever be able to demagogue conditions of misery, making continued U.S. involvement in asymmetric warfare an increasingly counterproductive exercise -- because killing one terrorist creates five more in his place. "It's about attacking pools of potential terrorism around the globe," Gration says. "Look at Africa, with 900 million people, half of whom are under 18. I'm concerned that unless you start creating jobs and livelihoods we will have real big problems on our hands in ten to fifteen years."

Obama sees this as more than a global charity program; it is the anvil against which he can bring down the hammer on al-Qaeda. "He took many of the [counterinsurgency] principles -- the paradoxes, like how sometimes you're less secure the more force is used -- and looked at it from a more strategic perspective," Sewall says. "His policies deal with root causes but do not misconstrue root causes as a simple fix. He recognizes that you need to pursue a parallel anti-terrorism [course] in its traditional form along with this transformed approach to foreign policy." Not for nothing has Obama received private advice or public support from experts like former Clinton and Bush counterterrorism advisers Richard Clarke and Rand Beers, and John Brennan, the first chief of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Not only is this a much more realistic approach to the "war on terror," but it also is a blueprint for dealing with Africa, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the rest of the developing world. While it might not apply as directly to our dealings with China or Russia or North Korea, by rebuilding the respect of our allies, we will in general have a much stronger hand to play in future conflicts.

This post is much longer than it ought to be (The Editor - maybe you should offer a prize to anyone who has actually bothered to read all the way to this point. Hmm, I'll think about that), but Ackerman's article about The Obama Doctrine is a great overview and ought to be required reading for anyone wanting to understand how Obama would be different from either McCain or Clinton in leading the US's interactions with the rest of the world.