Down to earth

In its relations with the world, America takes a sudden turn toward pragmatism

(Oleg Popov/Reuters) President Obama and his secretary of defense, Robert Gates, have been explicit that Americans not expect too much in Afghanistan, either in terms of a quick victory or a final result that looks like a developed country.

WHILE A PRESIDENTIAL candidate has rarely elicited as much overseas attention as Barack Obama - students in China sported Obama T-shirts during the campaign, French and German magazines ran glowing profiles of him, Brazilian politicians vied for the title of the "Brazilian Obama" - the Obama campaign was not, in fact, one centered on foreign policy.

It has been all the more striking, then, how much of the flurry of activity with which the new administration has started - the executive orders and announcements and appointments - seems pitched to an international audience. On his first day in office Obama signed orders to ban torture and to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, a symbol of injustice and cruelty in much of the world; his first formal interview as president was with the moderate Saudi news network Al Arabiya. He has already dispatched a high-level envoy to the Middle East, and appointed another for Afghanistan and Pakistan. His administration has reached out to Russia over the possibility of massive cuts in the two nations' nuclear arsenals, while at the same time expressing a willingness to talk with the Iranian government. In less than three weeks, the image that the country presents to the rest of world has been unmistakably altered.

"He's off to a very fast and very good start," says Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor and former ambassador and undersecretary of state in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. "And he's begun to change the way that the rest of the world thinks about us."

It's still very early, and much of what has happened so far has been symbolic rather than substantive, but the beginnings of a portrait are emerging. And despite the soaring rhetoric with which Obama spoke to the wider world in his inaugural address, the first glimpses of the administration's foreign policy have suggested a strong strain of pragmatism - an eagerness to impose itself in the hot spots of the Middle East and South Asia, but at the same time an emphasis on the limits of American power. Fixing the nation's foreign policy, the administration seems to suggest, is not just a matter of doing more, but demanding less: Agreeing to talk to governments we find in some ways unsavory, for example, or lowering the bar for success in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a sense, this approach is of a piece with Obama's campaign rhetoric, which promised to favor consultation over confrontation, whether with congressional Republicans or the leaders of Iran. But it's also tailored to an era of sharply diminished resources. Regardless of the administration's grand strategy, American foreign policy for the next few years is going to have to be comparatively lean. With a prostrate economy demanding most of the administration's energy and resources even as the country faces a formidable list of unignorable overseas challenges, lofty plans may have to give way to realistic compromises.

"There's a very big to-do list, and there aren't as many resources to direct at it," says Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor of international relations. "That inevitably forces you to make choices about what things are really important, what things can you put off for later, and what you're going to decide not to do at all."

Among Obama's challenges, then, will be reconciling America's deeply ingrained sense of itself as a superpower - the one country on the planet that can do it all - with this newly straitened reality.

The American appetite for overseas entanglements has waxed and waned over the course of our history, but since the end of World War II the country has grown accustomed to seeing itself, as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright put it, as "the indispensable nation": An actor whose military and economic might makes it preeminent on the world stage.

George W. Bush's presidency, especially in its first term, represented an apotheosis of a certain version of this idea. Figures like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney argued that America's overwhelming power freed it from the need to seek out allies or cut deals, even as the country pursued a staggeringly ambitious foreign policy agenda: two wars, the battle against international Islamic terrorism, and a sweeping push to spread democracy throughout the world.

But Obama's own rise as a national political figure was due in part to challenging this idea. Along with his eloquence and his unique biography, what set him apart from his rivals for the Democratic nomination was the fact that, starting with his time in the Illinois Senate, he had consistently opposed the invasion of Iraq, not only because it was, as he put it, "a dumb war," but because it diverted vital troops and resources from Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban and Al Qaeda to regroup. The United States, he implied, couldn't do everything, especially not on its own.

The deepening recession has only made that more apparent. Many foreign policy experts expect the administration to concentrate on domestic economic concerns in the coming months, sharpening the pressure on the new administration to pick its foreign policy battles.

Afghanistan, all signs indicate, is one of those battles. The particulars of the Obama administration's Afghanistan plan won't emerge for another two months - Obama has set the deadline of an April 3 NATO summit - but there have been clear signs of just how seriously the new administration regards it. Obama has tasked both military and civilian officials with focusing an effort that is widely seen as disorganized and drifting, even as he has authorized deployment of two new combat brigades to the country. The administration will soon pressure Congress to approve a plan that triples economic aid to Afghanistan even as it keeps a closer eye on military assistance.

Most visible, however, was the appointment of Richard Holbrooke as special US representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan - a former ambassador and longtime Democratic foreign policy mandarin, Holbrooke was the chief architect of the 1995 Dayton Accords ending the war in Bosnia, and he is as high-profile an emissary as Obama could have picked.

"Holbrooke is a heavy hitter. This signifies a major ramping up of attention," says Daniel Markey, an India and Pakistan specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It's a big deal."

Already, Holbrooke and Vice President Biden have been pushing Obama to take a tougher stance with Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, for not cracking down on the rampant corruption in his government.

At the same time, though, both Obama and his secretary of defense, Robert Gates, have been explicit that Americans not expect too much in Afghanistan, either in terms of a quick victory or a final result that looks like a developed country. Speaking before Congress in the second week of the new administration, Gates cautioned that, "If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience, and money."

Obama has echoed this, emphasizing in a recent television interview that "We are not going to be able to rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy."

Indeed, so far at least, democracy promotion has not been something the new president has made much of, in Afghanistan or Iraq. When Obama spoke publicly of Iraq's largely peaceful provincial elections last weekend, it was only as further evidence that more American troop withdrawals would soon be possible.

"If the Bush administration had still been there, you would have heard statements about the triumph of democracy in Iraq and so on," says Marina Ottaway, director of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "You haven't seen that reaction on the part of the new administration."

And if Obama's Al Arabiya interview is any indication, along with the tamped-down expectations comes a more humble stance with the Muslim world. During the interview, which was front-page news in the Arab world for days, Obama returned repeatedly to the importance of respect and dialogue. "[M]y job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world, that the language we use has to be a language of respect," he said. Later in the interview he described himself as someone who "is listening, who is respectful."

It's a message he reinforced by appointing George Mitchell, the former federal judge and US senator who led the talks that resulted in Northern Ireland's 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, his special envoy to the Middle East and sending him on a "listening tour" of the region.

This emphasis on the give-and-take of discussion has also emerged in early hints of policy on Russia and Iran, two of the larger challenges Obama will face. Obama seems determined to engage the government of Iran in talks, just as he promised on the campaign trail. And unlike the Bush administration, which placed little faith in arms control negotiations, the Obama administration, arms control experts predict, is likely to pursue deep mutual cuts in American and Russian missile stockpiles.

Comments from Obama and his aides also suggest that he's open to offering the Russian government concessions on the issues that most rankle it - perhaps slowing down the deployment of an American anti-ballistic missile shield in Eastern Europe and the process of expanding NATO membership among Russia's neighbors - if the Russians agree to apply more pressure on Iran over its nuclear ambitions.

And environmentalists have high hopes that the new administration will reverse its predecessor's insistence that the country can pursue a climate change policy that doesn't rely on a binding international treaty.

Whether any of this actually happens, of course, depends not only on the still murky intentions of the new administration, but those of its international interlocutors. It also depends on the unexpected emergencies, at home and abroad, that are sure to arise. If the government of Pakistan collapses, or the still-fragile peace in Iraq disintegrates, or if North Korea implodes or Israel preemptively attacks Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program, the Obama administration will not have the luxury of picking its battles. Already, in the past few days, the president has adopted a more combative tone with congressional Republicans in the fight over his stimulus package - it's all but certain that his commitment to international dialogue will be tested in the coming months, as well.

Ultimately, the administration will be judged on how it fits its worldview to the world. Its predecessor, after all, famously came into office contemptuous of nation building, only to find itself trying to remake the Middle East by force.

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.