At the heart of President Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy has been a promise to end the “unilateral” strategies of his predecessor and to heal bruised relations with America’s allies.
But as Obama makes his presidential debut on the diplomatic stage at the G-20 summit in London this week, he faces an array of world leaders from Europe and Asia who have already rejected some of his most important proposals for rescuing the global economy.
That means Obama’s vision of himself as the great conciliator will face severe challenges right from the start, despite the diplomatic niceties that will surround the sessions. As Obama is discovering at home, so in foreign affairs, enormous personal popularity does not automatically turn specific policies and proposals into reality.
German and French leaders have shunted aside the president’s call for increased government spending to stimulate their economies. The Czech Republic’s prime minister even characterized the American proposal as charting “the road to hell.” Instead of more stimulus spending, European and Asian leaders want more government regulation of the financial system. But when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled proposals for regulatory reform last week — proposals that were almost draconian by previous U.S. standards — foreign leaders reacted with skepticism.
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Obama’s plan did not go nearly far enough, they suggested.
In many ways, Obama is the president that world leaders have been saying they wanted for the past six or eight years. His policies are closer to those of Europeans, notably on climate change and health care. He has reversed some of President George W. Bush’s most controversial policies, ordering the shutdown of the Guantanamo Bay prison and ending aggressive interrogation of terrorism suspects.
The administration is also at work on a strategy for withdrawing from Iraq and has indicated a willingness to engage with Iran.
Overall, Obama has made it clear that he supports a much more multilateral approach to world problems, a break with Bush’s notion of “a coalition of the willing” — which in practice often meant a coalition of those who followed the U.S. lead with a minimum of criticism.
“The message that he brings is that Europe and the G-20 have in America a partner willing to work for success in moving the economy forward, in getting the economy back on its feet and recovered, as well as instituting stricter regulation to ensure that we don’t face these problems again,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
“The latter part of the trip, he’ll talk about the shared responsibilities for security that we all have” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Gibbs said.
Across Europe, Obama’s poll numbers are as high or higher than his high approval ratings at home.
But neither high poll numbers nor a more conciliatory approach has prevented foreign leaders from brushing aside Obama’s proposals for recovery.
Nor have the allies responded wholeheartedly to Obama’s call for a greater commitment to the war in Afghanistan.
“European governments, for the sake of pleasing Obama, are not going to make concessions on these fundamental interest and political requirements,” said Reginald Dale, director of the Transatlantic Media Network and senior fellow at the non-partisan Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“So that’s where he’s confronted with what Europeans regard as their own best interests, which are not the same as American ones….These are fundamental things that you can’t change just by talking nicely,” Dale said.
The G-20 summit, which will focus almost entirely on the global economic crisis, brings together leaders of the major developed economies of Europe and Asia as well as the European Union and such emerging economic powers as China, India, Indonesia and Brazil. It takes place Thursday, but Obama is also expected to hold more wide-ranging meetings with some individual leaders, including China’s Hu Jintao and Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev.
Before returning to Washington, he will visit Turkey, one of the United States’ most important allies in the Muslim world. There too, Obama will encounter leaders who are not wholly in sync with American policies.
Political differences between the U.S. and its global partners are as old as the relationships themselves. Differences in history, culture and traditions make cooperation difficult under the best of circumstances.
And these are not the best of circumstances. The economic contraction is even more severe in many developed and developing countries than it is in the United States. So is unemployment, though a more generous social safety net has cushioned the impact.
Especially in Europe, there also is deep anger over what is seen as the role of reckless American financial institutions — and a complacent Bush administration — in creating the catastrophe.
The differences between the United States and its allies involve not just interests but national attitudes and historical experiences.
On the question of more stimulus spending, for example, Americans have grown accustomed to huge government deficits. Europeans are less comfortable with oceans of red ink, in part because their experience has given them a greater fear of inflation.
Germany in particular is haunted by the unrestrained inflation of the 1920s, which helped lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Conversely, on the issue of regulatory reform, European countries have a history of far more government involvement with business than the United States. While European governments formed a consortium to launch the Airbus as a competitor to American jet liners, for instance, Americans are having a hard time with the idea of government intervention to avert a collapse of the whole domestic auto industry.
Meantime, in Asia, China has been questioning the dominance of the U.S. dollar and suggesting the creation of a new currency to replace it as the world standard.
These differences of opinion are unlikely to erupt into an open fight, if only because of the harm it could do to everyone involved.
“They’re going to paper over any differences in a G-20 statement,” said Steve Schrage, who holds the Scholl Chair in International Business at CSIS. “If there are big disagreements, they’ll have kind of innocuous language that kind of muddles the differences.” That’s why the answer to the bigger question — whether or not the leaders embrace an overall action plan for economic recovery — may not be obvious immediately.
At the NATO summit, which follows the economic meetings by a couple of days, participants will encounter another point of difference: Obama wants increased military commitments in Afghanistan. But NATO leaders have been signaling that they aren’t interested in dramatically increasing their troop presence there,
The U.S. has been adjusting its strategy in advance. While the mission is predominantly military now, Obama is beginning to emphasize the importance of the allies’ contributing to civilian assistance in the region.
Launching into major diplomatic meetings just two months into the Obama administration, with the president’s economic team still being assembled, has its risks.
But the summit dates were set before Obama took office, and some think the timing actually helps him turn the page from the old American foreign policy to the new.
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What’s at stake on Obama’s trip
Q. What is the main purpose of President Barack Obama’s trip to Europe?
A. The president will gather with leaders of the world’s 20 major economies at the G-20 summit, and with the NATO allies and the European Union at their meetings, before taking a side trip to Turkey to begin his promised outreach to the Muslim world.
Q. What’s on the agenda?
A. The agenda items include discussion of what to do about the crashing global economy and how to stem extremist activity in Afghanistan.
But in a broader sense, Obama is setting out on his first overseas trip as a head of state to signal a new day in American foreign policy, and to begin building his one-on-one relationships with world leaders with whom he will work to confront grave economic and security concerns in the future.
Q. What is the G-20 and what is its purpose?
A. The G-20 (technically, the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors) first came together in 1999 in response to the financial crises of the late 1990s, in an effort to head off or contain future troubles. The group tries to promote economic stability through discussions between industrial countries and emerging markets, and to support growth and development around the globe.
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The G-20 is made up of representatives of 19 countries — Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the U.S. — and the European Union.
The group’s potential to influence the global economy and financial system is great. Member countries represent about 90 percent of the global gross national product, 80 percent of world trade and two-thirds of the world’s population. But leaders’ ideas and interests are diverse, and agreements will not come easily.
Q. What does Obama want from the leaders of these countries?
A. First and foremost, the meetings present a chance for the president to establish his leadership position. Obama hopes to begin building consensus about how to tackle the economic crisis, as well as greater commitment to fighting Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In a series of one-on-one meetings with various heads of state, the president will likely begin wide-ranging discussions on everything from NATO expansion and nuclear armament to Iraq withdrawal plans, diplomatic engagement with Iran and development of a more cooperative relationship with Russia.
Q. What is the stimulus plan he proposes?
A. Earlier, the U.S. wanted the other nations to agree to pour money — amounting to 2 percent of their gross domestic products — into their economies to get things moving again. Obama is unlikely to push that, because France and Germany came out against it, but a coordinated package of stimulus spending plans is still a key part of the administration’s general approach to spurring economic recovery.
Q. Why are they reluctant to help him even before he asks?
A. European leaders openly express wariness about building up large public debt to pay for stimulus spending — and more quietly, some question why they should spend money to fix a problem for which they blame the U.S. Before dumping money into the system, goes the logic, the leading economies should tighten up regulation of the financial markets.
Also, Europeans see less need for stimulus spending because social safety nets in place in some countries, including job protections and unemployment benefits, already direct government spending into the economy.
Q. Whom will the president meet on bilateral meetings in Paris and London?
A. Among other leaders, Obama is expected to meet with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Queen Elizabeth, as well as with leaders of Germany, South Korea, France, the Czech Republic and Russia. In particular, Obama’s likely meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao highlights the importance of the two players in the effort to resolve the economic crisis.
Q. What are the president’s plans in Strasbourg?
A. Strasbourg, France and the neighboring German city of Kehl are the sites of the NATO gathering. The president will hold bilateral meetings with foreign leaders and attend the alliance’s 60th anniversary summit.
Q. Why is the president visiting Turkey?
A. Obama has promised to rebuild relations with the Muslim world, saying in the presidential campaign that he would make a major address from an Islamic capital during the first few months of his administration. His staff has been careful to say that this trip will not include the promised Muslim capital speech, an idea that might offend Turkish secularists who don’t view Ankara in those terms. But Obama will probably speak publicly while he is there, where most of the population is Muslim, and his tours of Ankara and Istanbul will give him a chance to cultivate this important — and strategically positioned — ally.
— Christi Parsons, Washington Bureau
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Obama’s itinerary for Europe, Turkey
LONDON (Wed.-Thurs.) G-20 summit to address the global financial crisis; meetings with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Queen Elizabeth
STRASBOURG, FRANCE; BADEN-BADEN AND KEHL, GERMANY (Fri.-Sat.)
NATO summit marking organization’s 60th anniversary; meetings with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel
PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC (April 5)
Summit with EU leaders to discuss the financial crisis and security issues; meeting with Czech President Vaclav Klaus and Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek
ISTANBUL (April 6) Itinerary to be determined.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (April 7)
SOURCE: The White House
TRIBUNE
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Challenge from China: China issues second rebuke of U.S. leadership at chicagotribune.com/rebuke