HILLARY CLINTON was on tour in the Middle East this week. Among other things, the secretary of state popped in on Yemen and criticised Israel’s demolition of Shepherd’s Hotel in Palestinian East Jerusalem. Joe Biden, the vice-president, was meanwhile in Kabul, where he assured Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s testy president, that it was not America’s intention “to govern or nation-build”. In short, the Obama administration was conducting its foreign business as usual, despite the arrival of a Republican majority in the House of Representatives. That is fitting. Convention holds that politics stops at the water’s edge. And isn’t it the president rather than Congress who runs foreign policy?
Well, yes—up to a point. The Republican House is not planning to throw the gears of foreign policy into reverse, as it is in domestic policy. Nonetheless, there will be a change. It is, after all, Congress that doles out the taxpayers’ money, for foreign policy as for everything else, and to Republican leaders who say they are seeking $100 billion in budget savings, foreign policy can look expensive. True, the sharp end of American superpowerdom is safe enough under the Republicans. Buck McKeon, the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was “deeply concerned” to learn that Robert Gates, Barack Obama’s (Republican) defence secretary, thought he could make $78 billion in additional savings at the Pentagon over the next five years, on top of those already planned. But the Republicans’ zeal for defence simply makes spending on soft power all the more vulnerable.
America does not spend a big share of its budget on soft power. The trouble is that voters think it does. According to a recent poll, the average American is under the misapprehension that about 25% of the budget goes on foreign aid. The true number is around 1%. But since it is perceptions that matter in politics, the international-affairs budget of the State Department, the programme under which foreign aid falls, is bound to suffer. The impact on foreign policy will depend on the size of the cuts and where they fall, questions the Republican House and Democratic Senate are still far from deciding. In principle, Congress could pick a number and leave the executive branch to choose what to cut, but that would be to take the notion of the president’s prerogatives in foreign policy too seriously. The newly empowered Republicans have strong views about which causes are deserving (Israel is one) and which are not (watch out, Pakistan).
Even where the parties do share broad aims in foreign policy, the gloss of bipartisanship tends to dissolve on closer scrutiny. One example: although the Republicans are relatively happy to support military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, they may choose not to support the State Department’s associated spending on civilian institutions there. Another: oozing frugality, Darrell Issa, the new chairman of the House oversight committee, intends to investigate corruption in Afghanistan, even though this is certain to deepen the misgivings of the American public and infuriate Mr Karzai. A third: both parties are determined to act against Iran’s nuclear programme, but a Republican House may push harder for tougher sanctions, even if they alienate China and the other allies whose hard-won co-operation Mr Obama considers essential to his Iran policy’s success.
There is even tension of a sort over Israel, a bipartisan cause if ever there was one. Eric Cantor, now the House majority leader, has mooted transferring Israel’s aid from the State Department to the Pentagon, because it would be safe there from foreign-aid cuts. That worries Democrats who want a broader foreign-aid programme to survive. The new pro-Israeli chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Florida’s Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, may be no more pro-Israeli than Howard Berman, the pro-Israeli Democrat she succeeds (though she has received campaign contributions from Irving Moskowitz, the Florida developer behind the Jerusalem hotel demolition that so rankled Mrs Clinton this week). But she could prove to be more hostile than Mr Berman was to the money America gives to the Palestinian Authority and UN Relief and Works Agency (which helps Palestinian refugees) in order to improve the quality of Palestinian life and keep Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, in America’s camp.
The shadow of 2012
For all these reasons, the battle of the budget will twist aspects of Mr Obama’s foreign policy in directions in which he would prefer it not to go. That will be a nuisance. Here, though, is a consoling thought for the president. The Republicans have a few difficulties of their own on the foreign-policy front—and these are soon going to be a lot more than a nuisance to them.
Voters know where Mr Obama stands on foreign policy. But in the coming months, the Republican presidential candidates for 2012 will have to show where they stand. The snag is that Republicans are unusually divided on foreign policy right now. They are, for example, divided on arms control. Mitt Romney, a front-runner for the nomination, opposed ratifying the New START nuclear treaty with Russia, but party discipline collapsed in the lame-duck session of Congress last month, giving Mr Obama the votes he needed in the Senate. And they are divided on the Afghan war. Though many Republicans, such as John McCain, are more hawkish than Democrats, a poll this week, commissioned by the Afghanistan Study Group, found that two out of three conservative voters favoured reducing troop numbers or beginning to leave altogether. At one end of the party are some undaunted neocons, keen still to slay monsters across the seas. At another are tea-partiers wary of overreach. With all eyes on the economy, Republicans could fight the mid-terms last year without worrying about their disunity on foreign affairs. Presidential elections, though, are more demanding.
Źródło: The Economist Jan 13th 2011 | from PRINT EDITION