by kid oakland
Fri Jan 25, 2008
This diary is another in a series of diaries I am doing examing the policy positions and teams of the candidate I support in the Democratic primary,
Senator Barack Obama.
Previous diaries examined Obama's policies on
Technology and
Health Care and
the 50 State Strategy.
This diary takes a look at Barack Obama's foreign policy team through the lens of two of his core proposals not related to Iraq or the military: Cuba and foreign aid and how Obama embodies the concept of "soft power."
When I looked at Obama's Technology positions and Health Care proposals, key innovative figures took center stage. In the case of technology, Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, and on Health Care, Harvard Economist David Cutler, who stands at the center of a team of innovative and outside-the-box thinkers on domestic policy. When it comes to foreign policy that theme is expanded. As
James Traub wrote, in his must-read, but mixed review of Obama's foreign policy bona fides in his November 2007 piece in the New York Times magazine:
The great project of the foreign-policy world in the last few years has been to think through a "post-post-9/11 strategy," in the words of
the Princeton Project on National Security, a study that brought together many of the foreign-policy thinkers of both parties. Such a strategy, the experts concluded, must, like "a Swiss Army knife," offer different tools for different situations, rather than only the sharp edge of a blade; must pay close attention to "how others may perceive us differently than we perceive ourselves, no matter how good our intentions"; must recognize that other nations may legitimately care more about their neighbors or their access to resources than about terrorism; and must be "grounded in hope, not fear." A post-post-9/11 strategy must harness the forces of globalization while honestly addressing the growing "perception of unfairness" around the world; must actively promote, not just democracy, but "a world of liberty under law"; and must renew multilateral instruments like the United Nations.
In mainstream foreign-policy circles,
Barack Obama is seen as the true bearer of this vision. "
There are maybe 200 people on the Democratic side who think about foreign policy for a living," as one such figure, himself unaffiliated with a campaign, estimates. "
The vast majority have thrown in their lot with Obama." Hillary Clinton’s inner circle consists of the senior-most figures from her husband’s second term in office — the former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the former national security adviser Sandy Berger and the former United Nations ambassador Richard Holbrooke. But drill down into one of Washington’s foreign-policy hives, whether the Carnegie Endowment or the Brookings Institution or Georgetown University, and you’re bound to hit Obama supporters. Most of them served in the Clinton administration, too, and thus might be expected to support Hillary Clinton.
But many of these younger and generally more liberal figures have decamped to Obama. And they are ardent. As Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council official under President Clinton who now heads up a team advising Obama on nonproliferation issues, puts it, "There’s a feeling that this is a guy who’s going to help us transform the way America deals with the world." Ex-Clintonites in Obama’s inner circle also include the president’s former lawyer, Greg Craig, and
Richard Danzig, his Navy secretary.(Emphasis mine.)
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NYT There's an ongoing theme here across the policy spectrum. Younger, more innovative, more cutting-edge policy analysts have flocked to the campaign of Senator Obama. That does not mean that his foreign policy team lacks gravitas. Heavyweights like
Anthony Lake,
Richard Clarke,
Lawrence Korb,
Gen. Tony McPeak and
Zbigniew Brzezinski can be counted counted among Senator Obama's
advisors. But the operative name that writers have begun to pay attention to, is Senator Obama's work with foreign policy and human rights expert
Samantha Power. (More articles:
Berkeley Interview and this
Commencement Address at Santa Clara University Law School) Samantha Power is, for those of us who've come of age in the era of Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush,
one of us. She speaks with a moral clarity on human rights and foreing policy. Here's a sample from the commencement speech linked above:
In politics this refusal to face inconvenient truths carries life-and-death stakes. And yet only after 3,000 American lives were lost on 9/11 did it become evident that FBI agents had warned of the danger that terrorists would hijack American planes and fly them into tall buildings. Only after more than 800 Americans died in New Orleans and tens of thousands of lives were ruined did we go back and read the stellar reporting in the Times-Picayune and see that people had been yelling and screaming about the vulnerability of the levees for years. And only after gas prices hit $3 did George Bush begin talking about freeing the United States of its oil dependence and speeding up the production of hybrid cars. We have known about our energy crisis since the OPEC crunch of the 1970s. Why are we only now, suddenly, talking about rushing to mass-produce hybrid cars?
Samuel Johnson was most certainly right when he said, "Nothing focuses the mind quite like a hanging." But we can't afford to wait until we stand at the gallows to change the way we govern our country and live our lives. As individuals, as citizens, we have the power to focus our government's mind, to get resources allocated, to save lives. We have the power to concentrate the powers of the American imagination. This power comes through politics. It is the rare politician who thinks more about the collective good than he does his or her individual fortune. I believe that Senator Obama is one who does. But politics is too important to be left to the politicians. It is up to the rest of us to demand that our representatives are attentive to the human consequences of their decision-making. And that means making ourselves heard. It means, according to Lesson Number Three, not turning our noses up at politics. It means using politics to trigger the imagination and to face inconvenient truths before a crisis strikes.
That could be the summary of the mindset that those of us under fifty understand cold. It's our preference. We must focus on a new pro-active approach to the "human consequences of decision-making"...we must use "politics to trigger the imagination and face inconvenient truths before a crisis strikes." Power, pulitzer-prize winning author of
A Problem from Hell: American and the Age of Genocide is not one to leave the discussion in vague generalities most suited to a commencement address. She knows what she's talking about first hand, here she is discussing the genocide in Darfur:
<…>
Cuba:Barack Obama has taken a bold, fearless, innovative stance on Cuban policy. The United States should break down walls with Cuba and as a first step, we should ease travel to Cuba for Americans with relatives there and ease the transfer of funds between Americans and their Cuban relatives. (
Herald Tribune.) This may seem like a minor policy difference, but it exemplifies Obama's ability to take a bold, new stance that actually makes whole lot of sense:
<…>
Senator Clinton cannot take this bold stance. The very same "tried and true" approaches that her supporters claim she will bring to government and foreign policy happen to represent "tried and true" failures of conventional wisdom. Sure, there is a political risk in refusing to take a "hard line" Cuba stance that politicians on both sides of the aisle have taken for decades mainly out of consideration of thier political fate in Florida. But...that stance hasn't worked. Obama is willing to say that. A new generation of Cuban-Americans are ready for something new. Barack Obama can give a fresh start to U.S. Cuba policy. Clinton can't and won't.
Foreign AidThere was a telling moment in the last Democratic debate. Senator Clinton absolutely refused to support Senator Obama's commitment to raise U.S. foreign aid by $25 Billion per year by 2012 and pointedly questioned how he would pay for it. (Obama's proposal to double our foreign aid to $50 Billion per year dwarfs, as it should, all private efforts. Bill Clinton's foundation, to just name one contrast, has raised a grand total of $500 million, much of it
tied to the Clinton's own politics.)
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