A Liberating Defeat For Obama

On Tuesday, Barack Obama will lose his congressional majority. What will become of his foreign policy? He was once the Superman upon whose shoulders rested the hopes of the world.

He even won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. How long ago that seems! So much remains unfinished because he had to expend so much energy on domestic issues in the wake of the economic crisis. Guantanamo remains open, the START treaty to reduce strategic nuclear arsenals has yet to be ratified, the stabilization of Afghanistan is elusive, Iran continues to work toward getting nuclear weapons and the Middle East peace talks are threatened with breakdown after they have barely begun.

Was that the whole story? Is this the end of hopes that this superpower could play an active and constructive international role, just because the president will lose his congressional majority?

Obama doesn’t appear to be challenging this notion. On Friday, he departs on a trip to Asia and the Republicans are sure to accuse him of fleeing his domestic policy woes. But it’s also simultaneously a demonstration. He refuses to cut back on his global policy ambitions. And he shouldn’t. It’s likely that he will be a more prominent foreign policy presence in the next two years than he was during his first half of his term.

Several of his predecessors did likewise. An American president’s elbowroom is far less restricted than that of a German chancellor’s. He needs no congressional approval to change the Afghanistan strategy, to ramp up troop strength there, to increase sanctions against Iran, nor to conclude further economic agreements with China, India, the European Union or the G-20 nations. Congress has only indirect influence on these matters, namely in the votes on budgets to implement them.

The conventional wisdom that says Democrats will suffer significant losses at the polls could actually have a beneficial effect on Obama’s foreign policies in that he will no longer need to be as considerate of his own party. In the future, people need to understand that he will be courting the Republicans because they are the majority. If Obama decides he wants to extend the length of troop deployments in Afghanistan or Iraq and war-weary Democrats threaten to deny him supplementary budget funding to do so, he’ll look for support from conservative representatives and will get it.

Obama is really only dependent on Congress in one foreign policy matter: ratification of the START treaty with Russia, which the Senate must approve with a two-thirds majority vote. A failure there would be an embarrassment for Obama and a burden on relations with Moscow. Hence Russia’s ambition to successfully conclude plans for a joint missile defense system and other cooperative projects — just in case the START talks break down and result in a deterioration of U.S.- Russian relations and to ensure Moscow remains on America’s side concerning Iranian policies.

The more the conservatives use their congressional majority to block Obama’s domestic initiatives, the more Obama will seek accomplishments in the foreign policy arena, in the Middle East, for example. In 2009, Obama delivered a speech to the Islamic world in Cairo. It will soon be time to deliver one in Israel in order to encourage people there to have the courage to seek historic compromise with the Palestinians. An electoral loss certainly doesn’t strengthen Obama’s foreign policy hand, but neither does it render him powerless.