'A Really Full IN Box'

Americans have a reputation for isolationism, and indeed, this year's race for the U.S. presidency has focused largely on domestic issues like religion, race relations and unemployment. Yet today's problems, from global warming to terrorism, are more likely than not to require international solutions. As American influence wanes and developing-world powerhouses like India and China grow in importance, whoever sits in the White House next year will have to navigate a challenging international environment. Michael Clarke, a distinguished professor of defense studies at King's College in London, is the director of the Royal United Services Institute and has advised the House of Commons Defense Committee since 1997. He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Barrett Sheridan about what foreign-policy issues will top the agenda for the next administration. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What will be the most pressing issues for the next U.S. president?
Michael Clarke: The next president has got a really full IN box. You've got all of the issues in the Middle East, which is on a knife's edge at the moment. The relationship with Russia is extremely important. And the terms of a new transatlantic bargain are sort of vaguely being developed. These are three huge issues which are actually very urgent and at the top of the IN tray. Not very far below those is an even more important issue but one that's not as urgent: the relationship with China.

When you say transatlantic bargain, what are you referring to?
The transatlantic bargain during the cold war was implicit, and very, very strong. That bargain has been wearing a bit thin since before the end of the cold war, because conditions were changing. Now we've got to really define what we think an effective transatlantic bargain would look like. Everyone in Europe is trying to mend fences with the United States, but there is a sense that there's no point in trying to mend the fences too much with the outgoing Republican administration. Europeans are getting ready for proper engagement with the incoming administration, which won't really begin until the middle of 2009.

Do Europeans have a preference for one candidate over another?
I think there's a sense that [Republican Sen. John] McCain is an experienced player and he will be prudent.

In a way that the Bush administration was not.
Exactly. Nobody ever felt the Bush administration was a safe administration, or an administration that you could rely on to take clear, sensible decisions. I think that hostility was overstated, but that's been the perception. McCain is a safer bet. Among the Democratic candidates, there is a greater attraction to [Sen. Barack] Obama, because he's saying the right things. Hillary represents another dose of Clintonism, which was not very impressive--when [Bill] Clinton was president he wasn't a very popular man, but his popularity has soared as an ex-president. I think there's some skepticism about Hillary and some sense that for all her assertion of experience, she wouldn't represent all that much experience. So of the three candidates, I'd rate them, at least in terms of approval in London and Berlin, as McCain first, Obama second and Hillary third.

The Western world has lately had strained relations with China, especially after protests in support of Tibetan independence. How can the next U.S. president navigate China and all its particularities?
The issue of China is so huge that I don't think any single policy or strategy will fit the bill. If you think back to Nixon's opening toward China in 1971, in a sense that was a relatively one-dimensional policy, because they only had to open up at the strategic level. Now the China issue is strategic, economic, social, it relates to third and fourth parties elsewhere in the world, it's about competition in the Middle East, it's about competition in Africa. The policy can't be articulated in one article in Foreign Affairs. But if there's a single orientation, then it is the orientation of trying to ensure that China exercises its growing strength from within a rule-based system. We have an enormous interest in getting the Chinese to sign up to the rules of the international system as they've been articulated. That is fundamental to the future of the next 50 years. So policy toward China must be based upon engagement on all these different levels, with an emphasis on rules. And of course we can only make that stand if we're confident about those rules ourselves and we seem to be observing them ourselves.