Leader of the Free
World: Obama's 2nd-Term Foreign-Policy Priorities
NOV 7 2012
What it will mean for
the president to "finish what we've started" on the global stage
Barack Obama
campaigned for reelection by asking Americans to give him another term so he
could "finish what we started" in 2008. "We've come too far to
turn back now," he said. "We've got too much work to do to implement
health care. We've got too much work to do to create good jobs. We've got too
many teachers that we've got to hire. We've got too many schools we've got to
rebuild. We've got too many students who still need affordable higher
education. There's more homegrown energy to generate. There're more troops that
we've got to bring home .... That's why I'm running for president of the United
States of America." Last night, he won that second term. Today, the work
begins.
Not surprisingly,
Obama's domestic agenda for the next four years doesn't look much different
from his first-term agenda. The economy may now be slowly improving rather than
worsening, and the unemployment rate has been dropping instead of rising, but
economic issues will remain his most urgent concern. He recently told MSNBC that
if reelected, his first priority will be to push for passage of a debt
reduction plan to cut spending and raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans. He
said he will have a "mandate" to take that balanced approach, and he
sounded confident that Republicans in Congress will agree.
Immigration Reform
Expected
Obama has also
outlined economy-boosting initiatives aimed at increasing manufacturing and
energy production, investing in infrastructure, and encouraging businesses to
hire more workers. But there is also unfinished business from his first term
that will need attention. His administration still has work to do to implement
his banking reform plan, and much remains to be done on his 2010 landmark
health-care reform legislation -- so-called "Obamacare" -- which is
scheduled to take effect in 2014.
Many observers expect
Obama to take up immigration reform. Days before the election, Obama told a
reporter, "Should I win a second term, a big reason [will be] because the
Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the
fastest-growing demographic group in the country -- the Latino community."
Judd Legum, the editor
in chief of ThinkProgress, a liberal online political news site, says Obama is
also likely to return to the issue of climate change, which went nowhere in his
first term, largely because of concerns that regulation would worsen the
already bad economy. "I do think the extreme weather we've been having in
the United States -- particularly Hurricane Sandy, which just hit the East Coast
-- is going to draw renewed attention to [climate change], and I think there's
hope that Obama will take up some of these initiatives that were talked
about," Legum says. "Maybe a cap-and-trade program to limit carbon
emissions, or maybe something else."
Obama 'Unleashed'?
The president's
second-term foreign policy agenda also looks set to largely build on what he's
already begun. There's the war in Afghanistan to wind down by 2014, the
anticipation that tough sanctions on Iran will bear fruit, and the recent U.S.
pivot, both militarily and economically, to the Asia-Pacific region.
Republicans warned before the election that a second-term Obama, freed from the
pressure of being reelected because of term limits, would be
"unleashed" and emboldened to pursue his own agenda.
Christopher Preble,
the vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the CATO
Institute, says that's a wrong assumption. Second-term presidents care about
their legacy, he says, and want to leave office as popular figures. And beyond
that, there are always political repercussions for the president's political
party. "If a president were to do something in foreign policy that was
dramatically at odds with what the public wanted, they risk doing serious harm
to [their] party, and I think they care about that," Preble says. "We
actually saw that, to a certain extent, in the second Bush term, when President
Bush tried to make some changes to foreign policy, but on the critical issue of
Iraq - which, by 2005-2006, the public had turned decisively against -- his
decision to expand the war, contrary to public sentiment, I think clearly hurt
the Republican Party in 2006 and 2008."
On the big issues,
Preble says he expects Obama to continue the same policies he has for the last
four years. He points out that sanctions on Iran are working - they have
crippled the country's banking sector, hobbled its oil industry, and sent its
currency plummeting. "All of those things will take some time, but they
appear to be having some effect, at least on the state of the Iranian
economy," he says. "So I think he is likely to continue along that
path for a while longer."
Mideast Not a Priority
Preble doesn't agree
with the speculation in some quarters that a second-term Obama will feel freer
to take a tough line with Israel and press the Jewish state for concessions on
the Israeli-Palestinian issue. In fact, he doesn't see that issue as a priority
for Obama. "Whenever the United States applies pressure to the Israeli
government to, halts the expansion of settlements in the Palestinian
Territories, it has failed," Preble says. "And so if he's likely to
go down that road, I can't imagine that he's likely to succeed. I frankly would
be surprised if he invests a lot of political capital there, considering all
the other issues on the table."
On the issue of Syria,
where a bloody war between the government and antiregime fighters drags on,
Obama has taken a largely hands-off approach, except to help organize the
disparate rebel factions and lead international calls for President Bashar
al-Assad to step down. Preble says "barring some very dramatic
change," considering U.S. public opinion against another U.S. military
operation, Obama will stay the course.
Obama's much-heralded
"reset" with Moscow at the start of his first term led to cooperation
on issues including Iran and Afghanistan, but President Vladimir Putin is now
in power and demonstrating what many see as open disdain for the United States.
Preble said his sense is that Obama "hasn't really made a connection with
President Putin," but he doesn't foresee major changes in U.S.-Russian
relations, and in fact doesn't rule out Russian cooperation on Syria and even
China.
And finally, on China:
Obama talked tough during the campaign about Beijing's trade policies - calling
them unfair and even illegal - and vowed to take action. He has already
overseen Defense Department changes that will increase the U.S. military presence
in the Asia-Pacific region and serve as a counterweight to China's military
ambitions in that part of the world. Preble says in the wider Asia-Pacific
region, he expects Obama to strengthen U.S. ties with traditional allies like
Japan, South Korea, and Australia, but also to reach out to countries that have
shown interest in closer U.S. ties, like Vietnam, Indonesia, and the
Philippines
This post appears
courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty.
