In his presidential campaign, Barack Obama sometimes made foreign policy sound like a simple matter of changing the tone, turning the page -- and moving 10,000 troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.
"Rather than fight a war that does not need to be fought, we need to start fighting the battles that need to be won on the central front against Al Qaeda, in Afghanistan and Pakistan," he said in a March speech on foreign policy.
In his first two weeks in the White House, Obama has succeeded in changing the tone of U.S. policy, at least on the surface. He gave a television interview to the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya station in which he promised the Muslim world "a new partnership." He offered Iran "an extended hand." And he dispatched a new envoy to renew peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians.
But now he faces the tougher challenge of turning the page, which will require him to bring the unfinished war in Afghanistan -- and the attendant skirmishes in Pakistan -- to a successful conclusion.
To that end, Obama is preparing to implement recommendations from his military advisors (all holdovers from the George W. Bush administration) for an escalation that could double the number of U.S. troops on the ground and keep them fighting for five years or more.
So does the Obama approach represent a dramatic shift in foreign policy beyond just tone? Not yet, but it's heading in that direction.
Obama's decision to commit more troops is in line with the Bush administration's plan for an Iraq-like surge in Afghanistan. But the new administration's strategy also includes some striking new elements.
One change is a decision to set lower goals and to be candid about that. Another is to shift U.S. and allied efforts from the ineffective and corrupt central government in Kabul to provincial and local governments instead, even if some of them are dominated by warlords. A third is a greater focus on Pakistan in its own right, not merely as an adjunct to the Afghanistan war -- because a descent into chaos by nuclear-armed Pakistan would be even worse for U.S. security than a collapse in Kabul.
Robert M. Gates, the no-nonsense Defense secretary who has seamlessly achieved the improbable transition from working for Bush to working for Obama, made the shift to lower goals clear when he appeared before congressional committees last week.
