The Obama Revolution: From Hustings to Reality

The Obama campaign turned American politics upside down. His approach to campaign financing revolutionised the rules of the game, and his use of the Internet and mobile web stirred unprecedented interest, brought people to the polls for the first time and produced a larger, more sceptical and informed electorate. Barack Obama portrayed himself as transcending politics, as a national reconciler, and as the harbinger of change in a disaffected country. No doubt President Obama has transformed American politics, but will he revolutionise American foreign policy as well?

Considering the nature of American politics, we may not be able to predict the tenets of President Obama’s foreign policy until after his official inauguration and after he has appointed the key decision-makers in his administration. What we do know is that campaign rhetoric rarely turns into presidential policy and that Obama’s policy will depend, of course, on how events unfold in the coming months.

Few President-elects have stirred so much emotion in America and risen to prominence with such high international approval ratings. Obama is a great symbol of change and progress in America, and his message is especially powerful considering the American and global public’s dissatisfaction with the George W. Bush administration. As such, President Obama is likely to respond to these expectations early in his presidency with a series of highly symbolic foreign policy decisions. He will shift the rhetoric away from Bush’s first term unilateralism and excessive reliance on military might. Obama’s first decisions will aim to repair America’s foreign relations and its reputation in the world. He will decide to close down Guantánamo Bay detention camp, end America’s policy of torture, reconsider extraordinary rendition and re-engage America as a leader in multilateral negotiations for a global climate regime.

Such decisions will be easy for Obama to promise and they will earn him much applause around the world. When the applause dies down however, challenges will abound. Closing Guantánamo will require him to jump through a complex set of legal and political hurdles, while concluding negotiations on climate change will require unprecedented co-operation between the big emitters as well as leadership and vision. Obama’s campaign provided few signposts for a new direction in foreign policy. Generally speaking, he will define the war on terror more narrowly and he will broaden the foreign policy agenda to include human security concerns, climate change, public health and organized crime. In a symbolic shift, the war on terror will no longer dictate the means and ends of American foreign policy. In a sense, his approach recalls the Clinton years – which focused on globalisation and humanitarian concerns – and the post-Vietnam era, when Republicans clung to Cold War thinking and Democrats acknowledged the Sino-Soviet split and the environmental agenda.

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Lisa Aronsson is Head of the Transatlantic Programme at RUSI and a Fellow of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Project

Well Done America: Now it’s Europe’s Turn to do its bit.

Barack Obama’s landslide election brings with it impossible expectations of, according to the front page of the Times, “The New World”. In his speech last night Obama promised a new dawn of American leadership based on the enduring power of American ideals. Yet one man’s beneficent leadership is another man’s ignoble imperialism, and talk of universal values and American leadership could well have come from the mouth of George W. Bush. If Obama is to realise the hopes contained within notions of American leadership and avoid the traps of leading without followers he will need to work with Europe, but Europe must also be prepared to fulfil its side of that particular bargain.

Nicholas Sarkozy has pledged that Europe “will find a new energy to work with America”. It needs to. Multilateralism is not just about shared decision making but about sharing the responsibilities entailed by those decisions. And good leadership is not just about bringing others along with you, it is about delegating roles and responsibilities. In the post-Cold War world to date Europe has not given the United States the opportunity to be a good leader because Europe has been a negligent multilateralist – demanding American activism but unwilling to back those demands with significant contributions of its own. The Clinton administration derived very little political capital at home from leading where Europe asked – in Bosnia and Kosovo – and an Obama administration would be wise to demand more from its European allies in return for activism.

So Europe must expand its capabilities, be prepared to contribute, and above all refrain from the kind of petty, electorally expedient ad hoc anti-Americanism that characterised much of the Bush era. In Robert Kagan’s phraseology, if Europe wants American foreign policy to be sprinkled with a touch of Paradise, then Europe will have to bring some Power to the table.

The opportunity is there. Obama won this election, not by moving his party to the centre-right, the modus operandi of Bill Clinton, the great triangulator, but by asking the American people to move themselves out of their political comfort zone. The American public feel that George Bush squandered the goodwill of the world that followed September 11th, and wants America’s prestige restored and its alliances rebuilt. Rebuilding the global financial system is the first major task, an area in which Europe is already possessed of both power and ideological authority.

But Europe should be warned: fail to fully engage, fail to back fine words with the means to help achieve them, and the United States will have little option to continue upon the unilateral pursuit of its interests rather than embrace a shared approach to our shared transatlantic goals. The Bush Doctrine was not so much of an aberration as many in Europe believe, and we would be wrong to assume that with Bush gone enlightened liberal multilateralism will simply fall into being. For that to happen Europe must be prepared to step up to the plate.

Nick Kitchen is a Fellow of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Project

The Power of Pictures

By now everyone has seen it, right? The Obamas in the Oval Office, Barack in a djellabah and turban and his wife Michelle as a gun-toting Black-Panther. An approving Osama Bin Laden looks down on the couple’s fist bump as an American flag burns in the fireplace. The New Yorker’s cartoon has provoked outrage on the left and the right, with both presidential candidates condemning the depiction.

Of course, it is just a cartoon. But there is an argument to say that the New Yorker, in opting for such an close-to-the-bone lampooning of the misgivings many Americans have about Barack Obama’s candidacy, has actually done him something of a favour.

Last week a Newsweek Poll revealed the following false beliefs Americans hold about Obama. Twelve percent of voters think he was sworn in as senator on the Qur'an. 26 percent believe the he was raised as a Muslim and 39 percent believe he attended an Islamic school as a child growing up in Indonesia. Prior to Newsweek’s poll, the Pew Center found at the end of June that 12% of voters believe Obama to be a Muslim.

The Republicans would have been expected to encourage these false beliefs, engendering mistrust of the opposition candidate. Yet the New Yorker’s cover renders such tactics far more difficult. By putting the issue of Obama’s religion into such contrast, and drawing condemnation from the McCain camp, it now becomes almost impossible for the Republicans to question Obama’s suitability for office on the basis of his religious outlook. The merest hint that Obama’s background renders him unsuitable for high office forces its advocate into a defense of that New Yorker cover, and in no way can that benefit McCain. Thus the effect of the extremity of the New Yorker’s take may be to render the entire issue of Obama’s religion off limits, even when the campaign – inevitably – descends into personal slurs and dirty tricks.