The Real Security Challenge

But how to demonstrate "change" in other areas of U.S. foreign and defense policy? Even the "gimme" gesture of shutting down Guantánamo Bay will, in practice, take months to effect, and will involve tricky negotiations with the nations to whom internees belong. The reality is that the current administration—obeying Churchill's mordant remark that "the United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative"—has, in Bush's second term, zigzagged its demoralized way to a set of centrist policies (a situation due largely to the efforts of an alliance of Gates at Defense, Rice at State and the underrated Stephen Hadley as national-security adviser.)

What would constitute change on U.S. policy toward Iraq? America's withdrawal now has a timetable agreed upon by the Iraqis. North Korea's nukes? Rice, by shrewdly enlisting Beijing's help, has come tantalizingly close to a settlement. Iran? Nothing is possible unless the mullahs can somehow be pressured into contemplating a deal. Israel and the Palestinians? Nothing suggests either side is close to accepting the agonizing compromises necessary for any settlement. Arguably, U.S.-mediated negotiations have become an alibi for evading those decisions.

On the long list of pressing foreign challenges, only Afghanistan would seem to offer Obama a real chance for a fresh approach. But the Mumbai terrorist attack, and its inevitably dire impact on India-Pakistan relations, doubles the challenge of devising a plausibly workable Afghan strategy.

So, what can President Obama do? Announce a series of grand initiatives, perhaps. Nuclear weapons; global warming; the future of energy after oil; perhaps some sort of Euro-Russian security conference—big topics that would generate the necessary international headlines. Susan Rice's nomination as United Nations ambassador certainly points to this. She is well-suited to push "big initiatives," if less equipped for the cut-and-thrust of Security Council bargaining (so she, too, will need an able deputy.)

This strategy would have the value of buying his new national-security team the months they will need to figure out what precisely any such initiatives might actually entail. And that, in turn, would leave President Obama free to focus for his first year on the one truly urgent foreign and security crisis: the economic one.

© 2008