Five Silver Linings In spite of the obvious challenges, Obama will enter the White House with some paths to success staked out.
Posted Monday, Nov. 10, 2008, at 5:48 PM ET
It's a truism that Barack Obama faces the most intractable set of challenges that any president has faced in at least 50 years. But on a few issues in foreign and military policy, he's caught a break. Whether by luck, the effect of his election, or President George W. Bush's stepped-up drive to win last-minute kudos, Obama will enter the White House with some paths to success already marked, if not quite paved.
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StumbleUponIraq. Just a few days after Obama's victory, the Iraqi political factions seemed much more disposed to sign a new Status of Forces Agreement with the United States. The SOFA, which is set to expire at the end of the year, outlines the conditions under which U.S. troops are permitted to remain in the country. One condition that Iraq has been demanding is the complete withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by 2011. Several Iraqi parties have been reluctant to ratify the accord even then, doubting that George W. Bush—or, had he won, John McCain—would really withdraw. But they believe that Obama will. So they're suddenly more eager to finalize an accord. Some factions are also more keen to settle their internal differences to avoid a political collapse or a renewed civil war once the Americans leave. Obama knows that early in his presidency he'll have to figure out a way to mount a major withdrawal from Iraq while minimizing the chance that the Baghdad government falls apart. This new tenor in Iraqi politics somewhat eases the task.
Iran. After refusing to talk with Iran for seven years, on the grounds that "we don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it" (as Vice President Dick Cheney once put it), the Bush administration is preparing to set up a U.S. interests office—not quite an embassy but the beginning of renewed diplomatic relations, a forum for communiqués, anyway—in Tehran. If Obama is prepared to offer more elaborate negotiations, as he should be, a forum will exist for doing so. At the same time, a smart-sanctions campaign run out of the U.S. Treasury Department for the last two years—in which international banks have been persuaded to stop doing business with Iran—seems to be having some effect. Meanwhile, plunging oil prices have slashed Tehran's cash flow. And President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has been riding high on this flow, is losing popularity at home. In short, the time may be ripe for a game of carrot-and-stick diplomacy with Iran, in which the carrot may be welcome and the stick might really hurt.
Russia. President Dmitry Medvedev's recent rumblings—his threat to place short-range missiles in Kaliningrad if the United States proceeds with its plan to install missile-defense batteries in the Czech Republic and Poland—may, if played right, redound to Obama's benefit. Obama clearly doesn't share Bush's misplaced enthusiasm for the missile-defense program; he has said several times that he would deploy a system if it were proved workable—a condition that's not likely to pan out. So Obama now has a good reason to drop the deployment plan—but with a caveat. He should reiterate Bush's point (whether or not it's entirely true) that the batteries in Eastern Europe were designed to shoot down Iran's missiles, not Russia's, and if he's going to let down our guard on that front, Russia has to help him keep Iran from building nuclear weapons in the first place—in other words, Russia has to stop assisting the Iranian nuclear program and join the sanctions initiated by the United States, the European Union, and the U.N. Security Council. If this trade can be made, other avenues of cooperation can also be reopened.
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