Campaign '08: Obama's Foreign Policy Advisers | Newsweek The Council on Foreign Relations

The China Conundrum
Robert J. Samuelson 9/19/2009 12:00:00 AM
For years, U.S. presidents have faced a China conundrum: how to deal with a country that has predatory trade practices without unleashing worldwide protectionism? President Obama's recent decision to slap high tariffs on Chinese tire imports for three years, starting at 35 percent and dropping to 25 percent in the final year, captures the dilemma. To do nothing about China's trade policies is to encourage more of the same. But to attack them too aggressively threatens U.S.-China cooperation on other issues (from North Korea to financial regulation) and risks a wider trade war.
All Sound, No Fury
7/6/2009 12:00:00 AM
Translators were baffled by Vladimir Putin's recent response to President Obama. Leading up to his summit in Moscow, Obama had announced that the Russian premier had one foot in the old way and one foot in the new. "We cannot stand v raskoryachku," Putin replied in a steely voice. Everyone understands that this rarely used idiom refers to an awkward position, but not even native speakers can visualize it. For some, it evoked nonconsensual sex. For others, it suggested bowleggedness. The best translation was posted by a BBC Russian Service producer on Facebook: "one leg here, one leg there, with the bottom asking for trouble."
Between Delhi and D.C.
Sumit Ganguly 5/30/2009 12:00:00 AM
Since the Congress Party's huge win in India's elections was announced on May 16, pundits across the country and in the United States have predicted that the warming relations between Delhi and D.C. are now sure to grow even closer. After all, Congress has finally rid itself of the troublesome coalition partners that were holding it back; surely now it will press forward on the issues that matter most to Washington, such as strengthening the two countries' budding security partnership.
Barack Versus Business
Michael Freedman 5/16/2009 12:00:00 AM
Barack Obama may turn out to be the most anti-big-business president in decades. His gentle bank bailouts are obscuring a get-tough stand on corporations, particularly abroad. Obama's choice for U.S. trade representative was the mayor of Dallas, with scant trade experience, suggesting the administration has little real interest in pushing the corporate case for free trade. The Justice Department has vowed to aggressively prosecute companies for bribing foreign officials, even though global money flows are falling and few other nations go after foreign bribery with anywhere near the zeal of the United States. Obama trumpets his ability to prioritize, but personally announced a crackdown on corporate abuse of overseas tax havens like the Cayman Islands. In doing so, he was making good on a campaign promise to rein in what he called "the biggest tax scam on record," but it is hardly a key to the global crisis. And last week his administration signaled plans to go out and break up monopolies, the way the Europeans do. In laying out the Justice Department's strategy, its new antitrust top cop, Christine A. Varney, said Americans were led to believe that markets should be allowed to "self-police" and that they will correct themselves, but that has not happened. Government, she said, "cannot sit on the sidelines any longer." It may be that Obama needs to show a tough side to Americans worried about the trillions he's spent to save the banks. Or it may be that America has not seen a president this skeptical of big business since Teddy Roosevelt first started busting trusts.
Unsilent Barack
George F. Will 4/25/2009 12:00:00 AM
A 19th-century historian called the Middle Ages "a thousand years without a bath." That oversimplified somewhat, but was interestingly suggestive. So is the summation of Obama's opening sprint as 100 days without silence.
EXPERT OPINION
Advice for Obama
7/19/2008 12:00:00 AM
Sometime near the beginning of what many here hope will be the first of Obama's two terms, and at the latest in 2010, the British government will most probably change from Labour to Conservative, from Gordon Brown to David Cameron. But Washington needn't worry: the next lot will be even more pro-American than the last. The Tories adore Obama, NATO, New York and American ways of doing almost everything. A Conservative government will, like the Blair and Brown ones, share Obama's insistence on taking a long-term, multifaceted approach to combating terrorism and his emphasis on the importance of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Britain's armed forces are overstretched and underfunded, but they will still help America as best they can, especially in Afghanistan. London is the place to have a conversation about a joint political, military and economic strategy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan. We have been in those places before. And we're there in several ways now—not just militarily but through our many new Brits of Pakistani origin who live mentally, if not physically, in both countries.