One hundred days isn't enough to judge a presidency, the cautious pundits say. "It takes time for a president to put his team in place, formulate policy, steer legislation through Congress, and conduct foreign negotiations," history professor Allan J. Lichtman writes in The Washington Post. Look instead, he says, to the next 100 days.
But we live in TwitterWorld, where all judgments are snap and Susan Boyle can go from unknown to over-exposed in less than a week. In a world of constant tweets, 100 days are an eternity. Think of all that you can learn (and forget) about Ashton Kutcher in three months!
Judged according to even the mayfly attention spans of TwitterWorld, the Obama administration moved quickly to implement its change agenda in the domestic sphere: pushing through an economic stimulus bill, painting the country Green, preparing the ground for long-awaited health care reform. Responding to the deep crisis we face on the home front, the new president implemented measurable change in record time. Indeed, in the Institute for Policy Studies' new report on Obama's first 100 days — Thirsting for Change — we give the new president pretty high marks for his domestic policies.
The score for foreign policy isn't so clear-cut. In TwitterWorld, the temptation is to evaluate change on the basis of headlines and rhetorical flourishes. Accordingly, the new president would seem to have sharply broken with the international policies of the last administration. Obama issued executive orders to close the Guantánamo Bay prison in a year and end the U.S. use of torture. He stopped using the phrase "Global War on Terror" (GWOT). He promised to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. He embraced the agenda of nuclear abolition. He has shaken Hugo Chávez's hand. That's five tweets right there, each under 140 characters.
But even these accomplishments are far from unalloyed. On torture, the administration has released damning Bush-era memos but has been cool to the idea of prosecuting those responsible or even holding an independent inquiry into these violations of international law. GWOT is dead, but "overseas contingency operations" are still claiming civilian lives in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's not yet clear, on Iraq, what will happen to U.S. military bases, U.S. contractors and foreign mercenaries, and the control of Iraqi oil. The commitment to nuclear abolition is undercut by Obama's continued support of missile defense, which has blocked progress in disarmament in the past. The U.S. relationship with Venezuela may be on the upswing, but no handshakes are yet in the offing for Iran and North Korea.
Then there are the less appetizing continuities between the Obama and Bush foreign policies. These continuities even inspired a few tweets back in January that Obama is a closet neo-conservative. "In the area of foreign policy, where neo-cons in our own age have been most influential, Obama has echoed many of their concerns, and has adopted his own variant of a hawkish foreign policy," neocon Ron Radosh wrote after the inauguration. "He has emphasized the need to win in Afghanistan, not to allow Iran to go nuclear, and has supported Israel's right to defend itself against Hamas terrorists."
While it's a stretch to make the new president into a neocon, his foreign policy has certainly emphasized certain continuities. Most disappointing has been the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan without any clear strategy and in the face of considerable evidence that a surge in troops won't make that country more stable. Also disappointing has been the decision to increase military spending by 4%. At a time when we so desperately need to shift resources from our military to international diplomacy and human needs at home, it makes no sense whatsoever to add to the Pentagon budget.
Finally, although the Obama administration has wisely pushed other countries to pass economic stimulus packages in order to pull the global economy out of the recession, it has failed to implement "change we can believe in" in international financial architecture. It supported giving the International Monetary Fund practically a blank check, even though the IMF has been one of the institutions responsible for the mess that we're in.
But just as the achievements come with qualifications, so too do the disappointments. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has courageously targeted some unnecessary Cold War weapons systems, like the F-22, and we might see a cut in Pentagon spending in the near future. U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan might drop off sharply after the August elections. Significant rapprochement with North Korea and Iran might be in the offing. There's more going on here than meets the tweet.
In Thirsting for Change, which is an update of our comprehensive book Mandate for Change that outlines a progressive agenda for the Obama administration, we've represented our Change Meter as a glass of water. Obama started off in January with the water level halfway at 5 (whether it's half-full or half-empty depends on whether you're an optimist or not). In our report, we give him a 6 on his foreign policy. After 100 days, the glass is now definitely more than half full. But we're still a long way off from a fundamentally new relationship between America and the world.
Crossposted from Foreign Policy In Focus.
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