Foreign Policy and the Presidential Candidates

McCain and Obama going at the foreign policy stuff. Well, just Iraq but a couple things caught my eye on the subject.

I read David Ignatius' Going Their Own Way in The Mideast: as pointing out just how hard it will be to frame a foreign policy debate and as indicating more failure of the Bush Presidency.

"The new power dynamic is clear in two developments over the past several weeks -- the Lebanon peace deal brokered by Qatar on May 21 and the Israel-Syria peace talks, with Turkish mediation, that were announced the same day. Both negotiations could help stabilize the region, albeit not on the terms the United States might prefer.

This independence from American tutelage is arguably one advantage of the new diplomacy: It is grounded in realism among the Middle Eastern nations about their own interests, rather than in wishful thinking about what the United States can accomplish. It reflects, as well, the growing strength of Iran and its radical allies, and the diminished clout of the United States -- and in that sense, it accords with the altered balance of power in the area.

The best explanation I've seen of this rebalancing came from Beirut-based Daily Star columnist Rami Khouri: 'We are witnessing the clear limits of the projection of American global power, combined with the assertion and coexistence of multiple regional powers (Turkey, Israel, Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, Hamas, Saudi Arabia, etc.),' he wrote. This new alignment, he added, 'is not a full defeat for the United States -- more like a draw.'"

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The American-Israeli split on Syria has been widening for the past several years. One point of difference was what to do about the nuclear reactor the Syrians were secretly building at Al Kibar, in the northeastern desert, with help from North Korea. The Bush administration wanted to confront the Syrians last year with the intelligence and use the issue to pressure them to dismantle the facility. The Israelis decided they couldn't wait -- and bombed the suspected reactor site on Sept. 6.

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The Bush administration was dubious about the Turkish negotiating channel, just as it had balked at the airstrike. But here again, the Israelis ignored their superpower patron. They want to exploit tensions between Syria and Hezbollah, open at least a small gap between Syria and Iran -- and in the process enhance the clout of Turkey as an alternative to a rising Iran. In this intricate dance, Washington has been essentially irrelevant.

America isn't withdrawing from the Middle East, despite its recent difficulties -- that's an Iranian fantasy. And in the long run, it's surely to America's advantage if regional powers can create a stable security architecture -- even if it isn't precisely the one we would have designed for them. We've tried imposing our own solutions, and frankly that hasn't worked very well.

Meanwhile, Jim Hoagland's The Orthodoxy of Hope takes Senator Obama to task for being less than bold in his foreign policy:

My point here is not to accuse Obama of more-than-standard political tailoring of positions or to urge him to commit hara-kiri by needlessly taking unpopular stands. The point is that he is largely right in arguing that new thinking is desperately needed in U.S. foreign policy -- but he is failing to show how an Obama presidency would produce and apply such thinking to the policy disasters he decries.

But if Obama is less than bold about the Cuban embargo (and what American presidential candidate is either bold enough to propose a rational relationship with Cuba with all those electoral votes of Florida at stake?), is he also not a bit behind the times if one accepts the premise of the Ignatius article? Certainly, McCain appears behind the times in Jeffrey Goldberg's interview of McCain. See McCain on Israel, Iran and the Holocaust and this:

JG: What is the difference between an American president negotiating with Ahmadinejad and Ehud Olmert negotiating with the Syrians?

JM: You don’t see him sitting down opposite Bashar, do you? (Bashar al-Assad is president of Syria.) I mean, that’s the point here. It was perfectly fine that Ryan Crocker spoke with the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad. The point is you don’t give legitimacy by lending prestige of a face-to-face meeting, with no preconditions.

I am not so sure that Obama has not got a great idea here. It gets McCain's knickers in knots and that has to give it some points. Bush talks about an Axis of Evil and refuses to talk to Iran. Which provides nothing but support for Ahmadinejad (yeah, remember the nutjob gets elected). I seem to recall that the Iranian economy is going sour, the president was unpopular until our George W. began running his mouth. Don't talk to them and we get the situation described in Ignatius' column: we, the United States, become irrelevant.