American Center Interview
July 15, 2008
Do you think the upcoming U.S. presidential election will bring a significant change to U.S. foreign policy?
It could, at least in the beginning of an Obama presidency. If Obama does what he says, he could pull US troops out quickly from Iraq, which could destabilize not only Iraq but the entire region. John McCain would not do that. Obama could be more protectionists in trade than McCain, and would likely try to call a regional security conference with Iran, which McCain would be unlikely to do. Obama's biggest challenge would be to weather the inevitable challenges from Russia, China, Islamist terrorists and others who will interpret his policies of accommodation as weakness. After a year or so as President, I suspect a President Obama would find that he was "mugged by reality" and have to attenuate his more inflated promises of change as embarrassing relics of the campaign. McCain, on the other hand, would likely continue many of Bush's policies. His major differences would be on climate change, where he would likely try to forge an international agreement. On Europe, Iraq, and Iran, McCain would not dramatically break new ground.
If you should list five major challenges for the future president, what would they be?
The most important challenges of the next President will be as follows: What to do about Iran's nuclear weapons program? How to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan? How to deal with Russia and China? And how to get the WTO Doha round of trade negotiations going again.
Can you imagine the United States increasingly partnering with the European Union rather than with respective states on a bilateral basis?
The US should take a pragmatic approach to the EU, working with the EU in some cases and with individual European nations in others. It should not take the EU as an ideological project, as some Europeans do. What matter is a result, and whether the EU works with or against US values and interests. The EU appears to be at a crossroads, finding both the Lisbon Treaty and expansion stalled. Moreover, the EU is not a player in Afghanistan. NATO is. Also, it's important to remember that NATO, not the EU, acted to solve the Balkan crisis in the 1990s. Finally, the EU appears to have moved beyond its original purpose of economic liberalization and political integration, becoming a force instead for centralization and unaccountable and even undemocratic decision making that has produced a backlash in some nations.
