Obama's Foreign Policy Challenge
International Current Events, News & World Affairs
By Henry Kissinger
The first overseas trip of a new president always has a significance beyond its itinerary.
The president has an opportunity to test the impact of his policies; his interlocutors begin to assess the leader with whom they will have to deal over at least four years.
President Obama used the occasion to sketch his specific approach to foreign policy: multilateralism; repeated insistence on distinguishing himself publicly from his predecessor; wide-ranging negotiations on a number of fronts simultaneously; an emphasis on building personal relationships with his interlocutors.
Not since John Kennedy's visit to Europe in 1961 has an American president evoked comparable demonstrations of public support.
Obama's challenge now is to translate his widespread initiatives into a coherent foreign policy strategy.
It took courage to launch negotiations on such a range of subjects. Some, like the strategic dialogue with China, represent ongoing discussions elevated to a higher level; others, like the arms control negotiations with Russia, have been dormant for over a decade; the initiative toward Iran is unprecedented. The Palestinian negotiations have a long history in which fresh initiatives have been defeated by ever new complexities.
Each of these negotiations has a political as well as a strategic component. Each of these negotiations deals with issues peculiar to itself. Each runs the risk that inherent obstacles could obscure ultimate objectives or that negotiating tactics could warp substance.
But they are also closely related.
The arms control negotiations with Russia will affect Russia's role in the non-proliferation effort with Iran. The strategic dialogue with China will help shape the Korean negotiations. The negotiations will also be affected by perceptions of regional balances -- of the key participants, for Russia, this applies especially to the former Soviet space in Central Asia; for China and the U.S., to the political structure of Northeast Asia and the Pacific Rim. The negotiations with Iran will be heavily influenced by whether progress toward stability in Iraq continues or whether an emerging vacuum tempts Iranian adventurism.
The vast agenda that the Obama administration has adopted will test, above all, its ability to harmonize national interests with global and multilateral concerns.
It has come into office at a moment of unique opportunity.
The economic crisis absorbs the energies of all the major powers; whatever their differences, all need a respite from international confrontation. Overriding challenges such as environment, climate and proliferation concern them to a considerable degree and in an increasingly parallel way.
The possibility of comprehensive solutions is therefore unprecedented.
But this reality needs to be translated into some operational concept of world order. And this depends importantly on the perspective of the administration. Its approach seems to be pointing toward a sort of post-1815 style of concert diplomacy, in which groupings of great powers work together to enforce international norms. American leadership in that view results from the willingness to listen and from inspirational affirmations. Common action grows out of shared convictions. Power emerges from a sense of community, not unilateral action, and is exercised by an allocation of responsibilities related to a country's resources.
It is a kind of world order either without a dominating power or in which the potentially dominating power leads through self-restraint.
The economic crisis favors this approach even though there are few examples of a sustained operation of such a concert in history.
The usual case is that members of any grouping reflect an unequal distribution of willingness to run risks, leading to an unequal willingness to allocate efforts on behalf of international order, hence to the potential veto of the most irresolute. The administration need not choose yet between its ultimate options regarding perceptions of world order, whether to rely on consensus or equilibrium. But it must devise a national security structure to judge the environment it is facing and calibrate its strategy accordingly.
The next task of the administration will be to keep the far-flung negotiations led by energetic personalities heading toward an agreed goal. In the process, the administration must navigate between two kinds of public pressures toward diplomacy endemic in American attitudes. Both seek to transcend the patient give-and-take of traditional diplomacy. The first reflects an aversion to negotiating with societies that do not share our values and general outlook. It rejects the effort to alter the other side's behavior through negotiations. It treats compromise as appeasement and seeks the conversion or overthrow of the adversary. The critics of this approach -- now dominant -- emphasize psychology. They consider the opening of negotiations an inherent transformation. For them, symbolism and gestures represent substance.
Diplomacy must seek to turn deadlock into the negotiable. But the ability to do so requires objective circumstances. Changes of position should be guided by clearly defined objectives rather than negotiating technique.
Historically, the United States has had a proclivity to begin negotiations with gestures weakening the conditions that produced the negotiations in the first place. In 1951 in Korea, the United States stopped offensive operations at the beginning of negotiations over an armistice. In 1968 in Vietnam, America stopped bombing of North Vietnam as our entrance price into talks. In both cases, the subsequent negotiations stretched on for years, and their casualties approached those of unconstrained war. In the six-party negotiations over the North Korean nuclear program, after Pyongyang agreed in principle to give up its nuclear arsenal, we agreed to the unilateral restitution of $25 million blocked by the U.S. Treasury in a Macao account. That gave Pyongyang the maneuvering room to defer the underlying problem for a year into a new American administration.
Proliferation is perhaps the most immediate illustration of the relationship between world order and diplomacy. If North Korea and Iran succeed in establishing nuclear arsenals in the face of the stated opposition of all the major powers in the Security Council and outside, the concept of a homogeneous international order will be severely damaged. In a world of multiplying nuclear weapons states, it would be unreasonable to expect that those arsenals will never be used or never fall into the hands of rogue organizations. A new, less universal approach to world order will then be needed. The next few -- and, literally, few -- years will be the last opportunity to achieve an enforceable restraint. If the U.S., China, Japan, South Korea and Russia cannot achieve this vis-à-vis a country with next to no impact on international trade and no resources needed by anyone, the phrase "world community" becomes empty.
North Korea has recently voided all concessions made in six years of talks. It cannot be permitted to sell the same concessions over and over again. The six-power talks should be resumed only if Pyongyang restores the circumstances to which it has already agreed, mothballing its plutonium reactor and returning international inspectors to the site. When the six-power talks resume, the ultimate quid pro quo must be the abandonment of the Korean nuclear weapons program and the destruction of the existing stockpile in return for normalization of relations at the end of the process.
Iran is, of course, a far more complex country with a greater direct impact on its region. With respect to it, the diplomatic process is just beginning. It will depend on whether it is possible to establish a geostrategic balance in the region in which all countries, including Iran, find security without any country dominating it. To that goal, bilateral U.S.-Iranian talks are indispensable.
I have generally found the best negotiating approach to put before the other side to be a full and honest account of one's ultimate objectives. Tactical bargaining -- moving through a series of minimum concessions -- tests endurance via peripheral issues. But it runs the risk of producing misunderstanding about ultimate purposes. Sooner or later, the fundamental issues will have to be addressed. This is particularly necessary when dealing with a country like Iran with which there has been no effective contact for three decades.
By contrast, the issue of proliferation is intrinsically multilateral.
Heretofore, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and now the United States have coordinated by consensus. The price they have paid is that key issues have remained unresolved and even unaddressed. Some are factual: how far Iran is from developing sufficient enriched materials for a nuclear warhead and how far it is from building a warhead for a missile; the degree to which international inspection could verify a limited enrichment program declared as peaceful; and how much warning would be available if the declaration were violated.
While the administration seeks to persuade Iran into dialogue (and there must be some point when reiterated requests turn on themselves), it should energetically seek to resolve the factual disputes among our prospective negotiating partners described above.
It is the only way to sustain multilateral diplomacy.
If no agreement can be reached on these issues, the long-sought negotiations will end in stalemate and wind up, through the veto of the least resolute, legitimizing an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
When talks on arms control with Russia resume, the need to define a negotiating position and its underlying strategy becomes similarly acute. Presidents Obama and Medvedev have agreed to extend the START I agreement, which ends this year, and to reduce the number of warheads from 2,200, agreed in the SORT agreement by Presidents Bush and Putin in 2001, to a lower number. The complexity is that the counting rules (the criteria by which arsenals are counted) differ between START and SORT. By the rules of START I, missiles are counted by their capacity, that is, by the number of warheads they are able to carry, not by those actually installed. SORT counts only those actually installed. By the START criterion, the American arsenal is over 5,000 warheads. To reach even 2,200, almost all multiple warheads would have to be removed from our missiles. This will raise the question of whether they can be stored or need to be destroyed. Before the inevitable numbers game reminiscent of the 1970s is revived, the ongoing review of strategic premises must be accelerated to provide a basis for diplomacy.
The administration has launched the country on an important diplomatic enterprise. It now needs to fulfill its vision with a diplomatic plan.
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