President Obama's Foreign Policy: The Change We Really Want?
November 26, 2008 By Joanne Landy jlandy at igc.org
Source: <http://www.newpol.org>New Politics
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With the election of Barack Obama, millions in the United States and around the world are hoping for relief from the dangerous arrogance and destructiveness of George Bush's foreign policy. President Obama is expected to take important positive initiatives -- like closing Guantanamo and lifting the rule denying international organizations receiving U.S. aid the right to let women know about abortion. When the inevitable right-wing reaction to these initiatives comes, it will be crucial for us in the peace movement to defend them. On some broader questions, there is a chance that with strong continuing popular pressure -- from both within and outside the United States -- the pre-election hopes of many Obama supporters can be realized on issues such as an end to the war in Iraq or stepping back from Bush's attempt to install "missile defense" in Poland and the Czech Republic.
The Obama administration will face a host of critical issues in foreign policy, such as how to relate to Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, Cuba, Russia, China, Latin America, AFRICOM (the new Pentagon structure for Africa), North Korea, NATO expansion, weapons in space, nuclear and conventional weapons -- and perhaps most important, the international economy and global warming. Popular movements can succeed in moving Obama to some degree on these questions, and that makes immediate mobilization imperative. But achieving a thoroughgoing and consistent progressive foreign policy will require a substantive, not just rhetorical, transformational politics in the United States that goes far beyond what we have reason to expect from Barack Obama's presidency.
Obama's foreign policy advisors and appointments, campaign speeches and website remind us that he has already shown his support for many of the central tenets of U.S. imperial policy. More fundamentally, given the corporate interests with which Obama and the Democratic Party are intertwined, there are limits to how far his administration can or will go in transforming U.S. relations with the rest of the world.
But people have been energized by the sweeping repudiation of Bush's policies and the election of a candidate who has spoken broadly, albeit often vaguely, of the need for change. If movements in this country and abroad can build on popular hopes and show that what is needed is genuinely progressive change, they can push U.S. foreign policy to those limits, and place on the public agenda more profound challenges to the way the United States relates to its own people and the rest of the world. In so doing we can begin the process of forging the radical-democratic transformational politics this country requires.
continued at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/19753