Did you miss Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh’s presentation at the Hudson Institute July 22?

Weinstein, Lynch, Singh and Kaplan

I did. But my colleague Sadhika was there, and it was a fantastic discussion.

The event was moderated by Hudson CEO Kenneth Weinstein, and World Affairs editor Lawrence Kaplan provided commentary.

Luckily for those of us unable to attend, the Hudson has graciously taped and videotaped the whole thing, available to stream or to download.

Watch and listen!>>

Pretty interesting argument, right?

Tim Lynch will be around for a couple more months, so we’ll be hearing more from him.

In recent days Barack Obama has sought to establish bluer water between himself and John McCain over Iraq.

Did he succeed?

Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh

Obama and McCain duel over foreign policy in this NY Times article

Yes, he has succeeded to a degree. He has made it clear that Afghanistan will be the first front in his revised war on terror. By wrapping up Iraq quickly – most US brigades, save for a residual force, to depart with sixteen months – he is promising to redirect US violence on the Taliban. McCain, alternatively, says that the Iraq war should not be judged according to a timetable established in a US electoral campaign. If winning takes time then time it shall take. The war on terror is not a debate between Iraq-firsters and Afghanistan-firsters. It is a global war on multiple fronts that demands attention to all those fronts.

Two features are worthy of note. First, despite what elements of his domestic base may be hoping, a President Obama is not seeking a withdrawal of US forces from the Middle East theater. Rather, he is pledging to redeploy American troops so as to better advance the war on terror. His initial caution over the Iraq liberation was not grounded in a leftist pacifism. It was, instead, the product of his empiricism. The Iraq war was a tactical misstep which he is pledged to correct. But the essential strategy of Bush’s war on terror has not been disavowed. President Bush stands accused by the Illinois senator not for being a warmonger but for being an incompetent war monger. ‘Make me commander in chief,’ Obama is saying, ‘and I will make violence abroad more effectively. Pakistan watch out.’
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Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh

Barack Obama is now the repository of the hopes and dreams of all those cosmopolitans and sophisticates who still see Iraq as a disastrous mistake, the war on terror as a fiction, and a return to the Bill Clinton years of supposed ‘peace and prosperity’ as seven years overdue. But these expectations are already so high that, assuming the Illinois neophyte wins in November, a strong element of buyer’s remorse is almost inevitable in 2009, for three reasons.

<<Jonah Goldberg’s LA Times commentary on the future of Bush’s reputation>>

Firstly, if Obama does make it to the Oval Office, it will not be as a McGovernite ‘bring the troops home’ candidate but as a ‘hard power’ Democrat. As it has since 1972, national security remains the reliably painful Achilles heel of Democratic presidential aspirants. Obama’s platform thus far, such as it is, promises not to abandon the war on terror but to rebrand and wage it more effectively. His main rationale for getting US forces out of Iraq is not to turn their swords into ploughshares at home but to redeploy them to Afghanistan. Obama has committed to using US forces in the border states of Pakistan against al Qaeda if Islamabad refused to do so. Notwithstanding the unforeseeable threats that will arise after 2009, an Obama presidency will not see the end of action for the US Marines, Predator drones or special forces.

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The authors of After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy are featured in June 2’s Wall Street Journal give us their take on George Bush and the fate of US Foreign Policy post election season.

Timothy Lynch

Robert Singh

Don’t Expect a Big Change in U.S. Foreign Policy

Want more George W. Bush foreign policy? Elect John McCain – or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Regardless of who wins in November, the current foreign policy will live on in the next White House.

None of the main candidates has disavowed the war on terror. Each has called Mr. Bush tactically deficient. But the debate over the war on terror is over how, where and when. The candidates have all argued that they would do a better job of fighting it.

Administrations bequeath foreign policies to their successors that are then tweaked, but rarely transformed. The seeds of Ronald Reagan’s Cold War strategy were sown in the defense buildup of the later Jimmy Carter years. President Bush’s purported “obsession” with Baghdad began in the hawkish statecraft of Vice President Al Gore. In 1998, Bill Clinton made regime change official U.S. policy, and in 2003 Mr. Bush made it a reality.

The last great liberal hope to win the White House – Bill Clinton – committed more troops to more parts of the globe than any president since World War II. Since the end of the Cold War, America has undertaken at least nine military interventions overseas, under three presidents of both parties in two distinct historical eras (pre- and post-9/11). This history suggests that the next great liberal hope – Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton – would probably continue the trend.

Furthermore, the departure of Mr. Bush will hardly leave the nation’s foreign relationships in tatters. Despite much American introspection, Euro-liberal sniping and Latin American leftist fantasizing, the quantity and quality of America’s formal friendships have endured, if not actually increased, since 2001. Eighty-four governments, out of a world total of some 192, are formally allied with the U.S.

Foreign leaders such as France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel clearly see that their true interest resides in maintaining and renewing their relationships with the U.S. Few governments have prospered by severing such bonds. In Asia as well, nations are looking to strengthen their ties to America. China needs the U.S. market. India is moving toward America, not away.

The number of America’s foes hasn’t grown under the Bush administration. The actual number of our enemies can be counted on one hand: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela. With the exception of the latter, all these enmities predate Mr. Bush and his successor will inherit them.

Certain aspects of anti-Americanism are essentially immune to what any president does. The U.S. can bomb Christians to protect Muslims, as it did in Bosnia in 1994-1995 and Serbia in 1999, and still somehow augment the fury of radical Islamists.

It’s also important to remember that we’re winning the war in Iraq. A President Obama would risk too much with a precipitous withdrawal, especially if it was just to fulfill an early campaign pledge that was adopted more to establish blue water between him and Mrs. Clinton than to reformulate the war on terror. Mr. Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war is empirical – “it didn’t work” – rather than ideological.

Mr. Obama is capable of changing his position to reflect events on the ground. He is not dedicated to a peacenik vision of immediate withdrawal. He will not desert Iraq if doing so puts U.S. national security at risk.

The desire to get rid of George W. Bush will not make his replacement any less vociferous and committed to the current president’s pursuit of American prosperity and security. As such, rising expectations in and outside America for rapid foreign-policy transformation are likely to lead to disappointment. As a Romanian proverb reminds us: “A change of leaders is the joy of fools.”

Messrs. Lynch and Singh, academics at the University of London, are the authors of After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

What will be the Bush legacy in the next US presidency? According to policy experts Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh, the next president will be bound by history to follow a foreign policy very close to that of George W. Bush.

Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh

Two possible reasons account for Barack Obama’s recent embrace of George H. W. Bush. The first is that he wants to portray himself within the mainstream of the US foreign policy tradition and that he sees Bush Sr has standing squarely within it. He is in effect asking us to consider him as a welcome return to a diplomacy which was cautious and limited, more Kissinger than Wolfowitz. The second, building on the first, suggests an Obama foreign policy will defer to international law and rebuild American likeability abroad. As a campaign strategy this is commonsensical. As a foreign policy strategy is potentially disastrous.

We’ve argued in our recent book that a President Obama would likely adapt to the fact of American primacy rather than dilute it. If Obama is sincere in what he is saying about Bush Sr – and he may be – we might be wrong about him. Obama, instead of tweaking the Bush Doctrine for foreign consumption (our argument), could actually be engaged in a far more problematic endeavour: the revision and reapplication of a foreign policy that between 1989 and 1993 was hardly a study in success. What is it that Obama wants us to see in his foreign policy through the prism of George Bush Sr?

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