The president of the United States who is inaugurated on January 20, 2009, will inherit the most complex, difficult, and dangerous array of foreign policy challenges ever facing a newcomer to the Oval Office. The United States, under its next president, will need all the help in can get from other nations. Therefore the incoming chief executive will have to move quickly to improve—and indeed repair—America’s image in the world.
These steps—in addition to being important in their own right—will burnish the United States’s credibility as a leader in undertaking two multilateral initiatives that are of surpassing importance to the global community: rescuing the nuclear nonproliferation regime and avoiding a catastrophic tipping point in the process of climate change
Hard as preventing a spiral of nuclear proliferation may be, it is easy compared to stabilizing climate change. Aside from the technical difficulties, there are heavy financial and political costs associated with the measures necessary to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Arms control and nonproliferation, by contrast, actually save money. Furthermore, we have been living with the danger of blowing ourselves up for more than 60 years—and we have experience, and success, in not doing so.
As the science of the problem becomes clearer to all of us, the politics, economics, and timetable of the solution become starker: in order to slow down the rate at which the earth is warming, the United States, the European Union, Russia, and nine other countries—the so-called “dirty dozen” that account for 80 percent of the problem—will have to accept drastic and mandatory cuts in emissions. Half of the countries on that list are considered “developing.” Under the Kyoto Protocol, they get a pass on binding reductions. The Big Three are India, China—whose giant populations and thriving economies make them major greenhouse-gas emitters—and Brazil, the leading source of greenhouse gases produced by tropical deforestation. (The other members of the dirty dozen are Canada, South Korea, Mexico, Iran, Australia, and South Africa.)
Kyoto will expire in 2012. That means the next US president will have fewer than four years to play a decisive role in the design of an effective successor to the treaty. The United States must do this through diplomacy and by example. Given the amount of time and effort that would go into ratifying Kyoto, the new administration will likely not want to go down that road. However, if it instead passes legislation imposing stringent emissions limits on itself, while offering other countries—especially developing countries—substantial incentives to be part of a global effort, then the goal of replacing Kyoto with an accord mandating universal reductions may be feasible.
Collaboration with Europe can help. The new EU trio presidency—France, the Czech Republic, and Sweden, which will chair the European Union in 2008-2009—are set to work on “SIS2,” a revised edition of the Solana security paper of 2003. Entitled “A Secure Europe in a Better World,” the paper characterized the transatlantic relationship as “irreplaceable” and called for strengthened US-EU ties. According to the priorities laid down by the Swedish government for its semester of presidency, the European Union is likely to elaborate a broader definition of security that would include a greater embrace of climate-related policies. If the efforts of the new American administration are deemed to be headed in the right direction, the United States will have political cover to take on the other problem polluters. Together, the European Union and the United States will have better leverage to urge the “dirty dozen” to comply with higher environmental standards. US engagement along these lines would also provide the most concrete sign the new administration could give Europeans of its changed course and thus significantly contribute to a new strengthening of transatlantic relations.
It is asking a lot of the world—and the next president of the United States—to grapple simultaneously with proliferation and climate change, but it is not asking too much, given the consequences of failure. Greater public awareness of the way in which these and other dangers are connected might help galvanize support of the necessary remedies, sacrifices, and trade-offs.
The next US president must act quickly on the hope that the clear and present dangers posed by proliferation and climate change will similarly concentrate minds and political will on what needs to be done. After its long journey down the path of unilateralism, the United States must demonstrate its own resolve to the international community. As it does so, America will also look to its traditional allies to work to marshal the global support necessary for thoroughgoing change. For those on both sides of the Atlantic, this effort must be driven by the recognition that meeting those twin challenges of nonproliferation and climate change is not merely very important but truly urgent.
This article was first published here by our partner Internationale Politik-Global Edition.
Strobe Talbott is president of the Brookings Institution. Talbott, whose career spans journalism, government service, and academe, is an expert on U.S. foreign policy. As deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, Talbott was deeply involved in the conduct of U.S. policy abroad.
Related materials from the Atlantic Community:
- Nikolas Gvosdev: Improving Transatlantic Relations Requires a Frank Dialogue
- Simon K. Koschut: "Country First" to Be Obama's Motto
- Eckart von Klaeden: Europe Needs a Strong American Partner!
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November 27, 2008
Member deleted
Did the Bush administration face equally insurmountable problems of the complexities that President Brack Hussein Obama is believed to be inheriting from the Bush administration?
9/11 happened during the Bush administration, though as is usual with such cases - they are not mere accidents, but are rather accidents waiting to happen. When accidents wait to happen, they usually mean that someone knows what is wrong, while the Gentleman or Lady at the helm of affairs is not.
Usually it is considered the norm that the inheritor inherits a less complex problem and situation than his or her predecessor. Ideally speaking, of course. The next President has to grapple with all the problems that are thrown up at the civilized world, minus their representations of 'rejects' that abound in third world states and usually go a long way in creating such situations of 'accidents-waiting-to-happen'.
It is not merely the issue of climate change and the Kyoto Protocol, or that of Non-Proliferation that form the challenges. These are routine affairs and one does not know if this is Mr. Talbott's style of deprecating Barack Hussein Obama before he even has began. Or his style of blaming the Bush administration for handing over to his successor a complex world that was "less complex" before (??) or was more complex before.
One does not see the diminishing of the existing challenges that lie in much of the covert activities and operations that are underway, with racism sought to be manipulated via US Secretaries of State in third world states' media -like India (arguably a rising power and to my understanding - arguably a major accident-waiting-to-happen for the world). Third world political elites are often marked by their sher dependence upon the 'first' world powers to either galvanize their masses against or for any existing regime - usually with little idea about the challenge they thus present to the Liberal world order, even as they seem to be encouraging a rabid anti-modern qua anti-west agenda. neither are they very well aware of the consequences of their such distant 'importing of' and the need for such 'distant importing' of bugbears to address their populace with - again largely semi-educated as the leadership itself - and as far removed from the reality of global politics as they are from the idea of civilization itself! True. Hindu or Christian or Muslim Tafriqs always and often fail to convey any idea of being civilized and modern - though contrary to these kind of 'political elites' of third world states.
The challenges are from many quarters, not the least from this rabid pathology of socialization of hatred that so marks India and its ostensible 'rise'. Pancakes are nice when they rise well, as are raisin cakes. States and their populace, aided by certain imports of 'first world' rejects are the opposite of such events and such delectable delicacies, in their sheer capacity for churning out of 'accidents-waiting-to-happen' in their regional as well as, thus, the global arena. Not the least in their pathology of rabid socialization of their populace in a culture of hatred, etc. on to a path of self-destruction.
Such states do form the major challenge for the entire civilized world, apart from routine issues Mr. Talbott mentions like climate change and nuclear non-proliferation, with the issue of nuclear non-proliferation having a greater salience, in this backdrop.
The challenge that the entire trans-atlantic community faces, perhaps with less cognizance of it without exciting fire-works and dramatic news like 9/11! The challenge lies in pre-empting such scenarios and the replacement of the Muslim by Hindu or Christain tafriqs does not diminish the problem, with the muslim tafriq barely having made any retreat, except to blind US embassy staff, working with peculiar religious goggles on. Such goggles do not merely diminish sight and clarity, but also makes the United States look like the Vedas or the Qurans or the Old Testament of terrorism - as its authoritative source.
That shall continue to be a major challenge for the next President, while his administration learns better to separate the wheat from the chaff. The first task would be to take those goggles off, to make it more difficult for far-flung flailing states like India etc. (more alarming given India's certain assumptions of being in a better position than, say, Afghanistan or Yemen!) to make it easier to administer to its populace such dosages of anti-civilizational medicine.
The other challenge that emerges as the biggest for the United States of America - is the infiltration of its own civil society with this particular strain of virus that usually attempts to leave behind a signature of 'ideology', when not espousing religious kitsch.
The issue is: is Mr. Barack Hussein Obama inheriting a more complex or a less complex world? What have been the contribution of US citizens to that, since a US President is a US citizen too, including those that assume to be advising the state. A person like Mr. Talbott is in a much better position to be aware of that, having been part of the US administration for some time. He also of course is in a much better position to explain that or tell us that - this issue of inheritance and its being less or more complex, with the reasons thereof.
But that would be writing the new administration's state-policy speech, perhaps and they do not come for free, even for US citizens from US citizens. Perhaps one would understand Mr. Talbott's restrictions to that effect, here - in his article over what the next President inherits or does not and the why(s) of it.