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July 07, 2007
Tides and Winds
By Barry CasselmanOver the last few months the United States has seen the tides and winds of governments of many nations dramatically change the international landscape.
In Great Britain, it is unlikely that the new prime minister, Gordon Brown, will be as strong a friend to the U.S. as his predecessor, even though he is known to harbor pro-American sympathies. Because the British people have signaled their disaffection with Tony Blair's Iraq war, Brown will have to show a willingness to break with the Americans.
The situation is much the same in France, which has similarly changed its leadership to a known pro-American politician, Nicolas Sarkozy. The previous president, Jacques Chirac, best known here as deliberately hindering President Bush, helped create an enervating ambivalence in the Atlantic alliance's approach to the threat of Islamofascism. It's true that Sarkozy, an outspoken friend of the United States, won't follow on his predecessor's obstructionism to American leadership in the war on terror, but we need to be careful not to exaggerate what the new French leader can do in the next two years.
In Russia, President Vladimir Putin, flush with huge oil and gas revenues, has continued to position his foreign policy increasingly in a manner reminiscent of the Cold War -- that is, not as a economic and political partner of the U.S., but as its rival.
Meanwhile in the Middle East, Israel is undergoing profound internal political tensions. The largely ceremonial president of Israel has just resigned in disgrace. The current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, is incredibly unpopular and his coalition government could fall at any time. The continued hostility of Iran and Syria to Israel combined with the tumultuous recent changes in the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank have made Israel even more anxious than usual. Come 2009, the prospect that the new U.S. president might be a Democrat who is less supportive of Israel than President Bush has been, or than most previous Democratic presidents have been, also has to be profoundly unsettling for an Israel consumed with internal political crises and preparing to face a nuclear-armed Iran.
Closer to home, recent elections have placed friendlier heads of state in Canada and Mexico. However, the inability of Congress to enact legislation to resolve at least some of the immigration issues facing the U.S. has made it harder for Mexican President Felipe Calderon to make needed reforms in his country that might ease the tensions between the two nations.
Another of our strong allies, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, faces a tough re-election in the relative near future. Good allies in Central Europe, too, have uncertain political futures. As in the case of Spain in 2005, when the Spanish electorate threw out the pro-U.S. government, dependable allies can become neutral or virtually hostile overnight.
The emergence of Hugo Chavez as the anti-American dictator of Venezuela, and his seeking co-conspirators among his neighbors, has only made the long-term goal of improving U.S. relations with South America more difficult. In spite of Venezuela's oil riches, Mr. Chavez's policies are rapidly bankrupting the country and isolating it from many of its neighbors, but he still has enough resources and allies to make trouble.
In Asia, the U.S. faces irrational behavior in North Korea, unstable governments in Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand, as well as a difficult but important relationship with emerging China, and the economic challenge from democratic and friendly India (which has a deep long-term enmity with our ally Pakistan).
The United Nations is now mostly a caricature of its own charter, and of its original intended purposes. Every day, it becomes more and more an obstacle to the national and regional interests of the United States and the West.
Facing these changing tides and winds, President Bush, now a "lame duck" at home, is limited in his foreign policy options, due primarily to Congress' and the American public's opposition to the Iraq war. It will be up to the next president to confront this shifting and tumultuous international landscape.
Normally, however, presidential candidates from both major parties try to avoid serious foreign policy discussions in a presidential campaign, uttering only harmless platitudes or demagogic slogans. Unfortunately, the U.S. cannot afford to fly blind into the next four or eight years, nor have as its commander-in-chief someone unable to grapple successfully with the great complexities of foreign affairs.
As voters, we need to insist on knowing how each of the presidential candidates sees this complicated world. We can't, to be fair, expect to know how they will act in each and every trouble spot and confrontation. But we can expect to know how well they understand the world we're now in, and how they might act when new tides and winds of the world change once more.
