America's Last Stab at Global Leadership

After a series of speeches and diplomatic initiatives, Barack Obama's foreign policy is finally coming into focus. In short, the President's vision is a broad effort to redefine the terms of America's global leadership.

Forged in the searing fires of the second World War, and solidified during the Cold War, American leadership has seen better days of late. The limits of its conventional military might have been exposed by low tech insurgents. Its free-wheeling capitalism and economic dynamism have been tarnished by the financial crisis. While the U.S. still retains a preponderance of both economic and military power, many analysts are penning obituaries for the "American century."

The Obama administration's policy is an attempt to resuscitate America's moribund leadership role. It is anchored in a simple idea: for the challenges the president has chosen to tackle abroad, it is simply impossible for the U.S. to succeed alone. Instead, it must rally the world to address a range of threats from climate change to nuclear proliferation.

"Think of the issues that will define your lives," the President recently asked students at the New Economic School in Russia. "Security from nuclear weapons and extremism; access to markets and opportunity; health and the environment; an international system that protects sovereignty and human rights, while promoting stability and prosperity. These challenges demand global partnership."

As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton noted during her recent speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, the "heart of America's mission in the world today" is to "exercise American leadership to solve problems in concert with others."

It's easy to see why the administration views American leadership in this collaborative context. Take global warming, for example. Even the most stringent controls on America's carbon emissions won't slow global warming if China, India and other developing economies don't make similarly deep cuts. The U.S. can slash its nuclear arsenal and put tight controls on its nuclear exports, but if other nuclear powers won't, or if they refuse to join in efforts to sanction rogues like Iran or North Korea, it won't accomplish much.

Yet if the administration is attuned to the interconnectedness of the world's challenges, it's not yet clear whether their approach will yield results.

To win the world's cooperation, President Obama has asked for the diplomatic equivalent of a mulligan for past U.S. behavior. Depending on where you sit, he has either graciously or gratuitously acknowledged America's sins in an effort to recast our relationship with the world. Goodbye militarized hyperpower. Hello kinder, gentler America.

"American exceptionalism" - the notion that by virtue of its own morality and might, the U.S. must stand above the international system - has also been redefined (rhetorically, at least) as nothing more than parochial nationalism. At a meeting of the G20 earlier this year, Obama said that he believed in American exceptionalism, "just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." By submitting to renewed arms control negotiations with the Russians, the president aims to recast the U.S. as a country that respects treaties and international law, just as it expects reciprocal adherence from other international players.

The hope is that the world will rally to President Obama's humbled America more than they rallied to President Bush's "cowboy" America. "We have taken off the table reflexive anti-Americanism as a reason not to deal with us," White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel recently told the Washington Post's David Ignatius.

The problem, of course, is that "reflexive anti-Americanism" was hardly the reason for a lack of global cooperation. The nations of the world have competing interests that owe nothing to the disposition or tone of American diplomacy. The administration's hope that a clean slate, with fulsome presidential apologies, will provoke a change of heart seems at odds with this reality.

All countries share a generic interest in not seeing a terrrorist detonate a nuclear weapon on their soil, they may all be concerned about the impacts of climate change, and they all seek routes to prosperity. But none of that implies that America's preferred solutions are universally acceptable.

In North Korea, the pro-forma desire for a "nuclear free peninsula" routinely take a back seat to China and South Korea's more urgent interest in not seeing North Korea collapse. In Iran, while China and Russia have acceded to rhetorical swipes at the Islamic Republic, they have balked at imposing the kinds of biting sanctions that could bring about a change in the regime's behavior. At the most recent G8 meeting of industrialized nations in Italy, China and India firmly rebuffed efforts to put a binding cap on carbon emissions.

Time and time again, the vision of America rallying the world to confront common dangers blurs into the less-than-thrilling reality of a world with more important things to do. This should not surprise anyone. During the Cold War, when U.S. leadership was arguably at its apex, even allied nations (most famously France) bucked America's will. While the Obama administration has sought to paint the 21st century's threats in menacing terms, climate change and nuclear proliferation haven't quite sharpened as many minds as the Red Army.

This, then, is the terminus of America's global leadership. If the U.S. proceeds along the course set by the Obama administration and defines leadership as the ability to bring other nations along its preferred path, then they should be prepared to define success down. "Solving" the world's problems, as Secretary Clinton suggested, is altogether a bridge too far. Instead, finding a globally acceptable, lowest-common-denominator outcome will be the order of the day (and even that won't be easy).

And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. By their very nature, the problems the administration has sought to address will be tackled collectively or they won't be tackled at all. On balance, it's better to have the wind of global opinion at your back, which Obama appears to enjoy for the moment.

But the administration should at least begin to put its (or rather, our) money where its multilateral mouth is. It's one thing to accept the fact that many global challenges will require the active assistance of other major powers to overcome. It's quite another to begin reconstituting America's global military posture and responsibilities to reflect that reality. If the Obama administration believes U.S. leadership in the 21st century means getting the cooperation of other nations, it should also make clear that America won't be left holding the bag (or the bill) if other nations don't step up to the plate.