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President Obama departed Washington, D.C. last week for a 10-day visit to India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan following the Democratic Party’s historic defeat in the 2010 midterm elections. It’s a routine foreign trip, like others the well-traveled president has made since he took office, unless it marks a new beginning of President Obama’s personal involvement in foreign policy.
It’s not uncommon for presidents, when opposition-party majorities in one or both houses of Congress stymie their domestic policy agendas, to spend more time on foreign policy. It’s the domain of presidential power least fettered by Congress. President Obama can use the second half of his term to build a list of foreign policy accomplishments he can run on in the 2012 election as Republicans seek to dismantle his domestic policy agenda at home. There’s only one problem — he must record some extraordinary foreign policy accomplishments for that strategy to work.
The president by no means will abandon his domestic policy objectives. He feels too strongly about them. He’ll reach out to Republicans much as he did before the election. He’ll tell them by his actions, if not his words, that he expects them to compromise, and that they can expect that he expects them to compromise. Soon, however, he will grow frustrated by his inability to do what he set out to do — fundamentally transform America. Pressing foreign policy issues will both demand his attention and provide him with opportunities.
Nevertheless, despite his considerable foreign travel as president, Barack Obama is not a foreign policy president. He lacks the background and instinct for it many of his predecessors had. He has demonstrated neither a passion for nor a great interest in it. Rather, he ran for office on a domestic policy agenda and has focused the overwhelming majority of his attention on domestic issues — both those that required urgent attention and those that did not.
On the international stage, with the exception of his September 23, 2010 United Nations speech, he has apologetically expressed his view that the United States should strive less to be the world’s preeminent political, economic, and military power and more to be a cooperative member of the world community. That’s hardly a leadership style or a foreign policy doctrine that’s likely to result in extraordinary foreign policy achievements.
Beyond Obama’s foreign policy skills are the issues themselves, which aren’t amenable to much progress during the next two years. For the United States in the second half of Obama’s term in office, the top foreign policy issues include the ratification of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, Middle East peace, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and the international community’s growing appetite for global governance and the international redistribution of wealth.
With regard to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, Democrats will still control the Senate, but a two-thirds vote is necessary to ratify what many believe is a fatally flawed treaty. It links missile defense to offensive weapons, it prohibits the U.S. from converting missile silos and missile-launching submarines into launch platforms for defensive missiles, and it creates an unaccountable commission that will allow unelected bureaucrats to change definitions and agreed statements in the treaty. Chances for ratification in its current form are remote; and Russia is unlikely to agree to the modifications that the U.S. Senate would require.
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