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.

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.’

This position will no doubt induce a good deal of buyer’s remorse among his ideological base. But Obama is no ideologue. He is smart – ask Hillary Clinton who was so comprehensively outplayed by him in the primaries – ruthless – ‘I know ye not Reverend Wright’ – and of flexible principle – making decisions on the basis of evidence not theory. These are characteristics that might be unattractive on a personal level but are to be welcomed in a war president.

Despite the recent attempts to make Iraq a clear issue of difference, McCain and Obama are implicitly telling us that the Bush strategy is sound. Where they differ, with him and each other, is on tactics. Tactics are technical affairs, tweaked to advance a strategy. The Vietnam war was a tactic within a wider, longer strategy. That tactic, as with Iraq, was the cause of significant dissensus. The strategy it was supposed advance – the containment of communism – was not. It commanded consensus.

Both candidates have pledged that they will alter tactics to advance the strategic goal – of keeping WMD out of terrorist hands – but wont disavow the goal itself. They are thus both running for the third Bush term – but this time a component one.

Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh are authors of After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy.

Dr. Lynch will be at several US speaking engagements this month.

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.

Second, while it is true that Obama has stressed restoring US alliances, America’s standing in the world, and dealing directly with Washington’s enemies, precisely how he intends to achieve all this remains enduringly opaque. In fact, if he truly follows through on some of his promises, he risks worsening, not improving, foreign relations. An America that takes an insular, protectionist turn is hardly likely to win plaudits in foreign capitals facing a global economic downturn. An administration that makes more, not less, demands on its erstwhile allies for committing NATO forces to theatre and for stumping up more resources to fund and fuel them may not yield heartfelt votes of thanks in Brussels and Bonn. An administration whose UN Ambassador does not publicly and privately deride the organization’s utility will no doubt be more welcome in New York. But the failings of the Security Council – from Darfur to Iran to Zimbabwe to Burma – will require more than elegant phrases and soaring rhetoric to remedy.

Third, the urgency of some problems will be greater than ever over 2009-13, not least the Iranian quest for nuclear weapons and the steadily worsening Middle East cauldron. Progressives currently celebrate Obama’s ‘no preconditions’ position on diplomacy with Tehran, Damascus, Pyongyang, Caracas and Havana. But the talking – whether by the E3 (the UK, France and Germany) with Tehran or the six-party talks with North Korea – has been proceeding apace for years, to no material results. Obama has singularly failed to state what the US intends to offer that will alter the existing strategic calculation of the Mullahs. If the regime genuinely wished to bargain away its nuclear aspirations in return for full diplomatic relations, increased trade and closer ties with the US, would it not have done so already? The regime’s interest is not in domestic prosperity, regional stability or peace – it is instability in its neighbourhood than serves its perpetuation in power.

In the midst of a highly personalised presidential campaign, in which both candidates inevitably promise more than either can deliver, a modest degree of scepticism about the future is judicious. We are undoubtedly at the beginning of the end of the Bush presidency. But we are arguably also at the end of the beginning of a struggle that Presidents McCain or Obama will perforce be obliged to continue. The result of that is likely to be an echo of the Truman precedent. Just as Ike derided Truman’s legacy of containment as immoral and promised ‘rollback’ of communism, only to embrace and extend containment in office, so Obama is likely to maintain and finesse, not repudiate, Bush’s core grand strategy. The irony is that Bush’s third term is as likely to be that of President Obama as much as a President McCain.

Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh are authors of After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy.

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).

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?

Does he want us to accept that his administration will sacrifice people in far away places about whom the US knows little? Bush Sr made much of kicking Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait only to abandon those who wanted him similarly removed from Iraq as well. In the spring of 1991, with Saddam in full retreat, Bush Sr did what international law, the UN and assorted Arab regimes demanded: he left the dictator in place. In so doing he left the Kurds and Shiites twisting. Expecting US liberation in a matter of weeks they were made to wait a further thirteen years. The mess the father started the son was obliged to clean up – with all the legacy of mistrust that has plagued the US reconstruction of Iraq.

Does Obama, as a fan of 89-93 diplomacy, want a foreign policy in which America only fights when its own direct interests are at stake? As Yugoslavia descended into hell under Bush Sr’s watch, his secretary of state said America had ‘no dog’ in that fight. It was left, as with Iraq, to a Bush Sr’s successor, Bill Clinton, to intervene on the behalf of Bosnian Muslims and halt Serbian aggression. Are we to deduce from this that an Obama administration will turn away from Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe and ‘return’ to a foreign policy of America first?

Will Obama, like Bush Sr, coddle Beijing? In 1989, the butchers of Tiananmen Square were hardly treated as such by Bush Sr. That same year, as communism was felled by the spontaneous movement of people that it had enslaved for so long, it was Bush Sr and Brent Scowcroft who warned about the instability such behaviour might induce.

Which of these foreign policy successes does Obama want to relive? If we’re right, a President Obama will not reawaken the amoral short-termism of Bush Sr. Instead, he will accept the central precepts of his son and wage a war on terror – only more effectively. For fear of being branded a black Jimmy Carter he wants us to think of him as a black Henry Kissinger. Neither legacy offers Obama the roadmap he will need if elected. Much as it may pain him to acknowledge it, what Bush Jr has done Obama will be obliged to adapt and extend.

Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh are authors of After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy.

Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh

The parallels between the ongoing US actions in Iraq since 2003 and US actions in Korea after 1950 were especially apparent at the Senate hearings on Tuesday. In both wars a charismatic general held the attention of the nation and the fate of his president. Indeed, of his future president too. The most important military official serving George W. Bush is Dan Petraeus. Ditto Harry S. Truman and Douglas MacArthur. Each general brought stunning success that was profoundly controversial back home. The wars they waged caused the popularity of their respective commander-in-chief to plummet. Importantly, their wars were not short, sharp, shocks. They entailed a massive military and economic subvention by the United States – at the request of the host government. America has ‘occupied’ South Korea since 1950; its troops are still there. Iraq, we were warned again yesterday, could be at least as long.

For those with sufficient patience, the legacy of Korea for Iraq is a positive one, as is the legacy of the cold war for the war on terror. If America can stand by its allies over the long haul, in a dangerous neighbourhood, in a global war against a diffuse but ideologically committed opponent it will succeed in this venture.

Korea was the first major battle of a much larger war in which the United States ultimately triumphed. It was controversial, ambiguous, scarred by incompetence – political and military – and meant Truman left the White House a defeated and dejected figure. The parallels with Bush hardly need oblique reference. But the strategy began in Korea worked. It turned South Korea into a model market democracy (especially when set against the fate of its northern neighbour) and, with hindsight, represented a central pillar of US cold war strategy.

Iraq is likely to be remembered in similar fashion, even if Bush won’t go down in history as a Truman. It is the opening battle of a much longer war. The consequences of a precipitate withdrawal, as Petraeus warned yesterday and throughout his commission, would be tantamount to ending the cold war early because particular battles within it went badly. America would present itself as a paper tiger. Hurt it badly enough, said Mao, and it will retreat. This was the logic of international communism. It remains strikingly similar to the strategic thinking of jihadists in the current war: if we hurt the Americans, or if we just wait for them to lose patience and resolve, they will run away.

Finally, consider a second analogy. In 1939, Great Britain went to war over Poland. The liberation of that nation from socialism (German national and then Soviet) was not secured for another fifty years. British ‘failure’ to rescue Poland quickly did not invalidate the strategic, let alone moral, imperatives of World War Two. US failure to secure Iraq quickly should be seen in the same light. Playing the long game might not appeal to politicians and a media that demand instance results. Grand strategies, however, require them.

Timothy Lynch is Lecturer in US Foreign Policy, Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London.

Robert Singh is Professor of Politics, Birbeck College, University of London.

They are authors of After Bush: a Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy