Obama foreign policy spotlights engagement

Over the past 100 days, President Barack Obama has recast policy toward Russia, reached out his hand to Iran, dispatched a Middle East peace envoy, announced new strategies towards Iraq and Afghanistan and embarked on charm tours of Europe and Latin America that also struck a note of humility.

Sometimes his administration’s engagement with unconventional interlocutors has taken place in the glare of cameras, as when he grinned and gripped the hand of Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez. Sometimes it has been behind the scenes, as when the State department’s top diplomat on the Americas held two quiet meetings this month with the head of Cuba’s interest section in Washington.

Throughout, Mr Obama has made clear his belief that engagement itself is the abiding theme of his foreign policy.

“The US remains the most powerful, wealthiest nation on earth, but we’re only one nation and the problems that we confront … can’t be solved just by one country,” he said when asked this month to set out an ‘Obama doctrine’. “If you start with that approach, then you are inclined to listen and not just talk… If we are practising what we preach and if we occasionally confess to having strayed from our values and our ideals, that strengthens our hand.”

Still, when the discussion moves from tone to substance, administration officials acknowledge a certain continuity with the administration of former president George W. Bush and admit many of the new policies are still works-in-progress.

Mr Obama’s Iraq policy, unveiled in a speech barely a month after he took office, visibly took up from where Mr Bush left off – an extraordinary development for an issue that had once been so divisive. In the dog days of his administration, the former president agreed a deal with Baghdad that would pull US soldiers out of Iraqi cities at the end of June this year and out of the country by the end of 2011. Mr Obama added a new intermediate stage, a commitment that the US’s “combat mission” would finish by August next year.

On Iran, Mr Obama has brought both continuity and change, inheriting the Bush-era policy of both incentives and sanctions and the practice of acting in concert with the world’s other big actors, but also breaking with the past. Among the biggest shifts so far, he has addressed the country by its name of the Islamic Republic of Iran – a form of words that put “regime change” off the agenda – and signalled Washington’s appetite for bilateral contacts.

US diplomats also hope to win greater scope for international pressure on Iran by fostering warmer ties with Russia. At the end of Mr Bush’s time in office, particularly after last summer’s Georgia-Russia war, Moscow and Washington’s relationship had become bitter and little short of antagonistic. The Obama administration’s declared intention to “press the reset button” and its appetite for a big arms-control deal with Russia this year, of the sort the Bush administration balked at, are intended to change that.

Just as substantial a change is Mr Obama’s stance on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. On his second day in office, he appointed a Middle East envoy – a step Mr Bush always resisted – and in subsequent days he has not shied away from baring his differences with Israel, notably over his support of the two-state solution.

Yet much needs to be filled in. Last week John Kerry, chair of the Senate foreign relations committee and an ally of Mr Obama’s, said the administration still lacked a “real strategy” for Pakistan, despite the president’s announcement of a high-profile Afghanistan-Pakistan plan last month. That plan is intended to focus on benchmarks for the two countries’ governments, but the benchmarks do not yet exist. Robert Gates, defence secretary, said last week he was “not quite sure where they are.”

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, has left her mark on the administration’s approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan at least as much as her cabinet colleagues have. While vice-president Joe Biden championed a minimalist approach to the war geared to avoiding another Vietnam, Mrs Clinton spearheaded a much more expansive approach – and won the internal debate. A day after Mr Obama announced the new policy she declared that “assisting women’s development in those two countries is part of America’s strategy” in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

There have been other signs of increased State department influence, including Mrs Clinton’s success in winning back partial control of China policy from the Treasury. The picture is still far from complete. But the message the administration intends to give is clear: under Mr Obama, diplomacy and dialogue are back.