American Power, Obama Style
President Obama is returning U.S. foreign policy to its firmest foundation: American power. His critics disagree. Former Senator Rick Santorum believes that Obama's European tour proved that our commander-in-chief is "contemptuous" of America, while neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer accused President Obama of celebrating our decline. One hears similar sentiments from other right-wing commentators.
They are lucky they have this dead-horse to beat: their exercise of power surely failed to beat anything else.
Laboring under the weight of President Bush's foreign policy failures, the Obama administration has a long list of crises to address. More important than any discrete challenge, however, is President Obama's overall approach to foreign affairs, which is driven by a very specific notion of American power.
Power is the ability to get what you want. By denying any limitations, and diminishing American leadership, the right failed to achieve critical American goals. Their exercise of power was undisciplined, undefined, and unsuccessful. They championed American power, but failed to understand it. In eight years, conservative leadership squandered our nation's strength without strengthening our national interests.
The Obama administration operates on a simple, double premise, illuminated in Les Gelb's recent book Power Rules. First, the United States is the most powerful nation on earth. This is good. It gives us the ability to lead other nations-without which very little action takes place. Second, there are limits to our power. We cannot bomb Britain to take out terrorists living there, while we rely on other nations' roadways to re-supply troops in landlocked Afghanistan.
Whether we like it our not, many of the problems we face today simply cannot be solved by the U.S. acting alone.
As Truman Democrats who support a strong, powerful America, the "Obama Doctrine" is just where this country should be heading. President Obama's pragmatic take on power recalls America's most successful foreign policy presidents. His approach to world affairs is remarkably similar to that of Harry Truman. President Truman resisted calls to expand the Korean War into China or start a war with the Soviet Union. He knew that such actions - which we could have taken - would have undermined American power by embroiling us in conflicts we could have no confidence of winning. What we could do was check Communist aggression through NATO, the United Nations, and the reconstruction of Europe and Japan.
In all these endeavors, the United States led the international charge against Communist expansion. But we led with allies. We retained the greatest military in the world, but we could not have moved quickly enough to stop a Soviet invasion of Europe: we had to help our allies reestablish their own military deterrents. We boasted the greatest economy in the world, but we could not have outperformed the Soviets if we had not rebuilt the economic power of our allies.
American power led the way, but only because presidents like Harry Truman understood what power meant and how to use it successfully.
The Obama administration takes a similar approach to today's world. The President's decisions to deploy more troops to Afghanistan and to use deadly force to rescue Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates are proofs that he is ready and willing to use American force.
Yet his outreach to other nations - in the context of U.S. leadership - proves that he understands the immense power of our example, and the limits of what we can and cannot do on our own.
With this approach, President Obama has scored major successes. NATO allies are set to send 5,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Russia is reportedly willing to allow the NATO to transport military supplies to Afghanistan through its territory. China agreed to reactivate U.N sanctions against North Korea, while Russia is deploying its foreign minister to Pyongyang to bring the North Koreans back to the nuclear negotiating table. And in response to Obama's loosening of U.S. sanctions on Cuba, Raul Castro announced that Cuba is ready to engage the United States in direct talks with everything on the table, including human rights and political prisoners.
Real challenges remain. North Korea will be trouble under any strategy; the Israeli-Palestinian problem deepens. Yet the fact that President Obama, unlike his critics on the right, understands the difference between power and pomposity bodes well for the United States.
