Obama's Foreign Policy Needs a Domestic Boost

"We're absolutely going to get a health-care-reform bill passed this year. No question about it," Senator John Kerry told me recently. We were in New York City for the U.N. General Assembly festivities, talking about the frustrations the Obama Administration is facing overseas, especially in Afghanistan, when I changed the subject and asked about health care. Kerry's certainty led to an unexpected thought: Barack Obama may well be having an easier time handling domestic issues than foreign ones. Indeed, he may be headed for the most successful domestic-policy year by a Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson's legislative tidal wave of 1965. Obama has pushed through a $787 billion stimulus package and doubled down on the Bush Administration's financial-crisis remedies, which seem to have prevented an economic crash. He is making quiet but substantial progress on education reform; his energy policy will probably be all carrots and no sticks — that is, no cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions — but it will provide a significant boost to green-energy industries. And despite the screechers of summer, he seems likely to pass a universal-health-care plan.

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Things have not gone so well in foreign policy. In a way, that is an inevitable consequence of the strategy the President has chosen to pursue: diplomacy over bellicosity. Diplomacy moves slowly, if at all. A willingness to talk to our adversaries doesn't guarantee that they will be willing to talk to us. The President betrayed a bit of his frustration about this when he spoke to the U.N.: "Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world," he said, "cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone." (See pictures of a photographer's personal journey in Afghanistan.)

Ironically, several of the President's most important initiatives — in Israel, Iran and Afghanistan — have been mugged by democracy (or the pretense of democracy, in the latter two cases). In Israel, democracy is very real, but the elections resulted in a right-wing coalition that has refused to freeze illegal settlements in Palestinian territories. This intransigence has led to a diplomatic stall across the region. The Palestinians seem as inept as ever, unable to present a united front for negotiations. The Syrians, who always seem almost-ready to make peace, seem less almost-ready than they did a few months ago. The other Arab states in the region, especially Saudi Arabia, have refused to provide diplomatic incentives to nudge the Israelis toward peace, even though a Sunni-Israeli alliance seems the most rational way to confront the Iranian nuclear threat. Meanwhile, the Iranian leadership, stung by the embarrassment of the rigged elections and the regime's subsequent violence against its own people, seems unlikely to concede very much when formal talks begin about Iran's potential weaponization of the uranium it is now enriching. (See pictures of Obama in Saudi Arabia.)

It is possible that the only ways to break these various logjams are unpleasant ones: withholding some U.S. aid to Israel so long as the settlement-building continues (as the first Bush Administration did) and imposing stricter sanctions against Iran. Neither path is likely. American Jews are among the Democratic Party's most loyal supporters, and Barack Hussein Obama probably won't want to encourage the fears, stoked by neoconservatives, that he is not a friend of Israel. The rigor of the Iran sanctions will be determined by the Russians and Chinese, who have not been willing to exert much pressure in the past. The President has stopped pursuing the European antimissile defense system, which should please the Russians — and he has reminded the Chinese that we face a common enemy in central Asian Islamic extremism. But that doesn't guarantee either country will be willing to get tougher on the Iranians. (See pictures of Afghanistan's Kunar province.)

The biggest foreign policy problem Obama faces is Afghanistan. Indeed, it is an issue that has divided his foreign policy team for the first time. I'm told the Secretaries of both State and Defense and National Security Adviser Jim Jones warily favor the military's request for more troops. But Vice President Joe Biden and, perhaps, the President remain skeptics — and rightly so, since any military policy depends on whether the Afghan government can regain some credibility after the flagrantly corrupt August elections. If Hamid Karzai limps into a second term but does not make some major reforms — like removing his brother from power in Kandahar province — we will not have the legitimate local government that the military's counterinsurgency strategy requires.

The Afghan election mess will probably be resolved in the next month. If a runoff election is required, it will be held before winter — just about the time health care is decided in Congress, which brings us back to Kerry's observation. These issues are linked. If Obama wins health care, he will have the political capital to move any way he wishes on Afghanistan — with the military, or against it.

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See pictures of Obama in Russia.