Kumbaya?
Marko Hoare thinks McCain would be best for South-East Europe. He dismisses Hillary as a continuation of Bill Clinton’s unfocused performance on the world stage, and warns that Obama is pandering to Serbian and Greek domestic lobbies which are fairly right-wing (as such lobbies tend to be).
I’d like to examine this argument in more detail, and I’ll try to post something longer over the weekend. Briefly, though, I would argue that Hillary is America’s best hope for a smart yet assertive foreign policy; McCain scares me for a variety of reasons; and yes, Obama is the least convincing of the three. I’ll stick to writing about Obama for this post, and hopefully get around to expanding on my thoughts later.
I find Obama most troubling of all, because though I believe that he is the most capable and intelligent candidate, I get the sense that his gifts for oration and inspiration can get the better of him sometimes.
In his letter to the Serbian Unity Congress, he states:
I support and shall help in every possible way development of the dialog between all sides in Kosovo because I believe that peace and stability can be reached only by solutions acceptable for all sides.
Unlike Dr. Hoare, I don’t see this as a pander. I think he has a genuine concern that America’s recent moves in the region are sowing the seeds of a broader future conflict. He is calling for Kosovars and Serbs to get together and work out their differences in good faith. It’s a nice sentiment, and a nice template for solving conflicts in theory. In the practice of international relations, however, we’re frequently not dealing with good faith interlocutors, and a harder-nosed realpolitik is oftentimes called for.
I worry that Obama’s proven ability to motivate people in the domestic setting is making him believe that he can replicate this on the world stage. I worry Obama believes that the Balkan tragedy of the 1990’s came about because the Great Powers didn’t insist on negotiations hard enough. I worry that he thinks that the Russians, who are saying very similar things to what he’s saying above on Kosovo, are being honest and sensible, rather than duplicitous and deceitful. I worry that Obama, listening as he does to the Samantha Powers of the world, has an idealistic and naive idea of how the United States ought to behave.
“The Skopje airport is indeed named after Alexander the Great, though why this should be in any way objectionable, let alone the object of a senatorial resolution, is really beyond comprehension to anyone who is not a Greek nationalist, and I shall not insult the reader’s intelligence by labouring the point.”
That’s just so well put I can’t say anything else.
Bollocks! I have no idea who the best candidate for Southeast Europe is. Nor do I have a particularly strong case of white-person manlove for Obama. But I do vote almost strictly on foreign policy, which is precisely why voting for Obama seems to me like a no-brainer. Did you read the speech he gave the other day at Fort Bragg? If not, you should. To go all blog-nerdy, I agree with Josh Marshall that he has McCain dead to rights on the tactics vs. strategy problem. I also agree with the oft-discussed in the blogosphere notion that one of the central US foreign policy questions today is the imperialism issue. None of these candidates is radical - Obama certainly won’t challenge the idea of US hegemony. But I do think he’s the most likely to challenge the imperialist tendency. Clinton isn’t evil, but I have yet to see anything that makes me think she’ll challenge any of the assumptions that have led to us to our current position in the woodshed (whether to talk to Iran is perhaps the single most indicative example here). And McCain is, as Matt Yglesias says, TR without the progressivism. Also, using Samantha Power as the point of reference here is a red herring. Or are Obama’s other advisers like Zbig, Tony Lake, Richard Clarke, Merrill McPeak, Phillip Gordon, and Lawrence Korb all dismissable as “naive and idealistic” as well?
ps…um, sorry to make such a humorless and un-snarky debut in your comments section. i promise to make fun of Jonah Goldberg or throw up a link to two dwarves fighting over a chicken bone next time round. also, since you’re pretty much solo as my SEuro source I’d like to know what you think of Charles Simic’s (yeah, our poet laureate) short NY Review of Books piece on Serbia/Kosovo. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21190
Jake,
I read the Charleston speech from Thursday, but haven’t seen the text from Fort Bragg. Got a link?
I admire Zbig a whole bunch, but he’s not going to serve in an Obama administration; Richard Clarke and Lawrence Korb are solid small-bore advisors; and Tony Lake is a fine, storied diplomat. Lake, however, is a poor substitute for Richard Holbrooke, and Holbrooke as Secretary of State is what makes me prefer Hillary in foreign policy.
My main worries with Obama concern him overshooting in the wrong direction as a reaction to the Bush years. I don’t see the main foreign policy challenges facing the incoming administration centering around terrorism, but rather imagine them regressing towards a 19th century-style struggle between Great Powers. The next president, therefore, needs to free us of the Iraq mess, and retrench us viz. Russia and China. And while I’m confident that Obama would learn quickly on his feet—the man’s exceptionally bright, isn’t particularly dogmatic, and is a very clear thinker—he doesn’t have a real global vision guy on his staff of advisors (apart from Zbig who won’t serve).
At the end of the day, it comes down to the “imperialist tendency” you identify and scorn. I’d like to discuss it more with you, publicly, and not in the comments to this thread where it’ll easily get lost in the shuffle. I’ll shoot you an email about it tomorrow or the day after.
As for Charles Simic, he has some of his basic facts wrong about sovereignty and legality as they pertain to Kosovo, and seems to have imbibed deeply in the self-pity potion the Serbs love to indulge in, but is right about the tragic political dynamics within Serbia. I’ll try to write more soon.
It’s interesting, the relationship that the Republican party has with southeast Europe. Expanding on the above topic about the Greek lobby, don’t forget that Bush’s first foreign policy move of his second mandate was to recognize Macedonia under their constitutional name, doing away with FYROM nonsense at least as far the world’s only remaining superpower was concerned. (The use of which name was made even more ridiculous given that the country formerly known as Yugoslavia had retired that name in favor of “Serbia and Montenegro” some two years prior.) It was explained to me around this time that Greek-Americans traditionally support the Democratic party and Macedonian-Americans the Republican party; no matter, the move made Bush and the USA wildly popular in Skopje for at least a few weeks, a city in which Americans had not been so well-loved since pushing through the Ohrid Accords in late ‘01. The Macedonian lobby (United Macedonia Diaspora) is fairly weak especially when contrasted to the power wielded by the Greek lobby; this isn’t to say that Macedonians haven’t done as well as Greeks in the US; it’s just that there are far fewer of them and UMD has only very recently begun to get its act together. Regardless of whether one endorses the American right or left, Hilary or Obama, S. Res. 300 is preposterous from any angle and I think anyone will a balanced view of southeast Europe can see that the Greek position on Macedonian’s name is petulant, petty, and counter-productive to further stability in the Balkans.
One lobby that escaped mention on this post and Dr. Hoare’s essay was the Albanian one. The Albanian American Civic League under Joseph DioGuardi has done a lot for the Kosovar Albanian cause, and, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of Prishtina knows, the Kosovar Albanians are possibly the only Balkan nation with a great love for Clinton. So allow me to leap to the conclusion in this brief blog posting that I agree that either Clinton or McCain might be ok FP-wise for southeast Europe. I think one thing that takes a lot of people away from Obama is his untested nature, his folksy candor which I genuinely believe could do a lot to heal political rifts in American but perhaps less when applied to the cruel cold world of realpolitik. The lack of good faith negotiators in Bosnia is what led to so much of the tragedy and failure there, but that’s probably a subject for another post.
At bottom it’s an American election, but it would be a bitter irony if the decidedly undemocratic forces in Belgrade and Athens managed to use their Washington lobbies to force an otherwise well-meaning candidate’s hand on issues such as Kosovo’s integrity or Macedonia’s name.