Since I like to take the long view of things, I don’t spend a lot of time looking at near-term presidential victories. But the weekend’s passage of comprehensive health-care insurance reform is not without implications. Since everyone else is busy loving or hating the president and the party in power, I’ll leave the rhetorical over-reaction to them. I’m more interested in what passage of the bill means for America’s foreign policy.
StratFor is on top of things with a great Geopolitical Diary entry entitled Obama’s Pending Foreign Policy Agenda (the link contains my highlights). Regardless of our collective feelings about healthcare reform, two things are clear.
- The Democrats have proven they can actually govern in matters of domestic policy.
- The Obama Administration can pay more attention to U.S. foreign policy commitments.
The Top Four
StratFor’s prediction for the top four foreign policy challenges (in the near term) is pretty straightforward and reasonable. The relevant excerpts follow (though reading the aforementioned article won’t take long and will give you much more perspective).
China: The recent tensions between the United States and China could possibly flare into a full-blown trade war in the coming months.
Iran: The country that had the most potential to draw the United States into yet another Middle East war during Obama’s first year in office is happy to watch from the sidelines as Israel struggles on the Iranian and Palestinian fronts vis-a-vis the United States.
Israel: The Tuesday meeting scheduled to take place in Washington between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will occur when American-Israeli relations are at one of the lowest points they have been in years, perhaps decades.
Russia: One country that has been delighted to read about the United States’ problems with China and Iran is Russia. It has seized the opportunity to operate in its near abroad and continue upon its mission of resurging into the former Soviet periphery.
Fast Paced, Slow-Motion Change
Pictured: The Future
What continues to fascinate me as I read articles like these is just how slowly the now seems to move. And while the now moves, what we call history is so punctuated. It’s hard for a contemporary American to think that our actions in the Middle East haven’t gone on for an eternity. But no matter how much history seems to move like sludge, there will come a time when we look back on our now and compress everything into a few internal, mental, descriptive sentences.
They will say nothing and yet seem to say everything to our deteriorating memories. Since I’ve started my little pro-am interest in geopolitics, I’ve begun to appreciate that the people behind the scenes are looking into the future in a way that defies our collective cultural definition of ten years as “a long time.”
Russia knows that U.S. commitments in the Middle East will not last much longer, and with the possibility of a more foreign policy-focused American president who can more actively resist Russian advances now on the table, Russia may see a need to speed up the course of events.
Which is exactly the point. All things end. Then we grow older and count the wars we’ve lived through on increasingly numerous fingers. It’s a depressing reality. It’s a testimony not only to our sometimes ugly human nature, but also our inability to grasp when change is happening. It’s tortoise and hare stuff, only the tortoise hasn’t just gained on us, but crawled through our home and raided the kitchen before we even noticed.
