Widely tipped as a possible secretary of state in a future Democratic administration, former US ambassador Richard Holbrooke has given an indication of his thinking in a recently published article Former US ambassador and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke has held a succession of senior posts in the American diplomatic service, serving both in the Carter administration, when he was Assistant Secretary of State for Asia, and in the Clinton administration, when he held the same post for Europe and went on to broker the Dayton Accords that helped bring peace to Bosnia in 1995. He has been widely tipped as a possible Secretary of State in a future Democratic administration, having acted as an advisor to the Kerry presidential election campaign in 2004 and to Hillary Clinton in her attempt to win the Democratic Party nomination in this year's US presidential elections. Between 1999 and 2001 he was US ambassador to the UN, having lost out to Madeleine Albright for the appointment as Secretary of State. With a track record of this sort, and having been associated with a succession of top-ranking Democratic Party politicians over the past three decades, Holbrooke's views on what a possible future Obama administration should do to restore America's damaged international standing have a special kind of authority, and he has set them out in an article entitled "The Next President: Mastering a Daunting Agenda" that appeared in the September-October 2008 edition of Foreign Affairs, house journal of the US diplomatic elite. While a McCain presidency remains a possibility, giving the Republicans their third consecutive election victory in the race for the White House, should the Democrats indeed win on 4 November, as seems likely, Holbrooke may well find himself responsible for carrying out the policy prescriptions he describes in his Foreign Affairs article. Holbrooke pulls few punches in his analysis of the situation now facing the United States after George W. Bush's two terms in office as president, and he describes the problems facing the country as being greater than those at any time "since at least the end of World War II." Following what Holbrooke describes as "a period of drift, decline and disastrous mistakes," the task of the next US president, Democrat or Republican, "will be nothing less than to re-create a sense of national purpose and strength" in both domestic and foreign policy. Domestically, Holbrooke says, the next US president will need to "revitalize a flagging economy, tame a budget awash in red ink, reduce energy dependence and turn the corner on the truly existential issue of climate change." In order for these things to happen, that president will need to "identify meaningful yet achievable goals, lay them out clearly before the nation and the world, and then achieve them through leadership skills that will be tested by pressures unimaginable to anyone who has not held the job." One main goal will be to reduce the country's dependence on imported oil and to put in place meaningful measures to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change. For Holbrooke, "Americans are witnessing -- or, more to the point, contributing to -- the greatest transfer of wealth from one set of nations to another in history." This transfer, made up of payments from industrialised countries to oil-producing ones, now stands at around US$1.3 billion a day, or US$475 billion a year, for the United States alone at early 2008 prices, and America's reliance on imported oil is not only ruinously and increasingly expensive, Holbrooke claims, but it also has foreign-policy and security implications. In future, "groupings of oil-rich nations with goals opposed to those of the United States and its European allies will become more common and act more boldly," he writes. "More money will be available to fund dangerous nonstate actors who seek to destroy Israel or destabilize parts of Africa or Latin America -- or attack the United States." According to Holbrooke, one such nation is Saudi Arabia, which has benefited from the current high oil prices. The Saudi government, Holbrooke says, in an example of "complicated double-dealing," has "allowed billions of (ostensibly nongovernmental) dollars to go toward building extremist madrasahs and funding terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda." The US needs to find a way to reduce its dependence on imported oil, Holbrooke says, and not only for financial and security reasons. Former US president Jimmy Carter's 1977 attempt to "rally the nation" behind an effort to reduce US oil consumption and to embrace environmental protection was met with ridicule at the time, Holbrooke writes, leading to the deferral of any debate on the issue in the United States for 30 years. The Bush administration's record on such issues has been one of "shocking" neglect, wasting years in refusing to address the issue and then signing up to an "essentially meaningless" statement on the need to reduce carbon emissions at the 2008 G-8 summit in Japan. Moreover, McCain's proposals for addressing the problem, Holbrooke says, are "hardly a serious long-term solution to anything." Obama, by contrast, he believes, has a comprehensive plan to achieve emissions reductions through the employment of a "market-based mechanism that has broad support among economists." While restoring national purpose to the United States at home and doing something to reduce America's dependence on imported oil will be important domestic challenges for the next US president, Holbrooke devotes most of his article to foreign affairs, as is only fitting for the journal in which he is writing, and to what he sees as the need to restore America's standing in the world. Much of what he writes on this subject, aside from a long section about the need for closer US cooperation with China on a host of issues from trade to climate change, has to do with the Middle East and Southwest Asia and particularly with what Holbrooke describes as "the arc of crisis that directly threatens the United States" national security -- Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan." "In some ways," Holbrooke writes, the present US presidential election "is a referendum on Iraq," with Obama and McCain presenting the American electorate with crucially contrasting prescriptions for extricating the US from the mess it has created. Whereas McCain has "repeatedly made clear that he is ready to leave troops in Iraq indefinitely rather than take the risks he believes would accompany major reductions" -- McCain still believes that "the United States is in Iraq to win," Holbrooke says -- Obama has put forward the more responsible policy of starting to withdraw US troops "at a steady but... 'careful' pace," while at the same time calling for "an all-out effort to involve all of Iraq's neighbors in a regional dipl omatic and political effort to stabilize the country." However, it is not only in Iraq that the next US president will need to act. In Holbrooke's view, the administration elected on 4 November will also have to re-engage with wider problems in the Middle East, including those associated with alleged attempts by Iran to set up a nuclear-weapons programme and the on-going Israel-Palestinian conflict, both of which have been neglected or treated with "incoherence" by the Bush administration. As far as Iran is concerned, Holbrooke approves Obama's statements that he is "ready to have direct contacts with Iran at whatever level he thinks would be productive," while he condemns McCain's refusal to engage with the Iranian authorities, likening this to a refusal on the part of the Republican Party candidate to practicing diplomacy per se. McCain's intransigence over Iran, according to Holbrooke "tougher than that of the Bush administration," "is contradicted by decades of US diplomacy with adversaries, through which US leaders, backed by strength and power, reached agreements without weakening US national security," such as what happened in 1971 when the then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger decided to open a dialogue with Mao Zedong's China. While McCain's policy prescriptions with regard to Iraq and Iran "amount to little more than a call for continuing the war because of the risks of trying to end it," in the case of Iraq, and a stance of "deep, visceral aversion to talking to one's enemies," in the case of Iran, Obama's greater flexibility concerning both countries is not only more likely to achieve US goals in their regard, Holbrooke thinks, but it could also "enhance the value of a return by the United States to its role as a serious, active peacemaker between the Israelis and the Palestinians." Holbrooke notes that both Obama and McCain see "the support and defense of Israel" as a key US foreign-policy goal. However, he also says that the Bush administration has "wasted most of its eight years" in not attending to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "The next president must engage personally with this issue, as every president from Nixon to Bill Clinton has in the past." Outside the Middle East, Holbrooke identifies the "other war" in Afghanistan as a further failure of current US foreign policy, along with failures in US policy in Southwest Asia as a whole. Holbrooke's thinking on the problems of this region echoes Obama's foreign-policy ideas with regard to Iraq: in other words, a rethinking of current US military policy together with "regional agreements that give Afghanistan's neighbors a stake in the settlement." However, while Holbrooke in his article approves Obama's policy of a phased withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, he apparently does not think a future Democratic administration will be able to achieve anything similar in Afghanistan. "The situation in Afghanistan is far from hopeless," Holbrooke writes. "But as the war enters its eighth year, Americans should be told the truth: it will last a long time -- longer than the United States' longest war to date, the 14- year conflict (1961-75) in Vietnam. Success will require new policies with regard to four major problem areas: the tribal areas in Pakistan, the drug lords who dominate the Afghan system, the national police, and the incompetence and corruption of the Afghan government." Throughout his article, Holbrooke lays great stress on what he calls the "inspired and, yes, noble US leadership" for which he believes the world's problems are waiting. "The United States," he says, "is not a helpless giant tossed on the seas of history," in a formulation that represents the scope -- and limits -- of Holbrooke's professional rhetoric (a more usual formulation would surely be a "ship" rather than a "giant," and is history, in any case, much like "a sea"?). The United States is "still the most powerful nation on earth, and within certain limits, it can still shape its own destiny and play the leading role in a multipolar world." That the world is waiting, even yearning, for something different from the kind of policies pursued by the United States around the world over the past eight years is incontrovertible, as is indicated by the overwhelming support expressed for Obama, Holbrooke's preferred candidate, over McCain in every opinion poll that has been conducted anywhere in the world outside the United States. Furthermore, Holbrooke's deployment of words such as "multipolar" and his rhetoric of "inspiration," "meaningfulness" and "noble leadership" are presumably designed to signal a contrast with what is widely seen as the selfishness and brute power projected by the Bush administration and to chime with the rhetoric of change and purpose employed by the Democratic party candidate Barack Obama himself. Holbrooke says that the United States under its next president must issue "a clear official ban on torture and close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," following the scandals over the events at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the policy of "extraordinary rendition" whereby prisoners have been tortured with US collusion in foreign countries, and the attempts by the Bush administration to suspend due process of law, notably for foreign terrorism suspects. He spends a good deal of his article laying out the need for US cooperation with other countries in its leadership of a multipolar world, notably with China, and he stresses the need for a revitalising the United Nations, dramatically pushed aside in 2003 when US-led forces invaded Iraq without first securing the mandate of the Security Council. Holbrooke writes that the "UN has been undermined and underfunded for the last eight years... Obama would improve and reform the organization in ways that would serve the United States' interests," and he would make "a renewed effort at serious UN reform." "Bush," Holbrooke writes, "did the dream of democracy a huge disservice by linking it to the assertion of US military power", as was done when the US-led invasion of Iraq was linked to a policy of "bringing democracy" to the Middle East and Arab world. The US should now develop "a new creative approach to public diplomacy" with the "Muslim world," he says. While Holbrooke's article passes over some difficult truths -- blaming the Afghan government for "incompetence and corruption," for example, while saying nothing of the possibly unparalleled levels of both reached by the post-2003 Coalition administration in Iraq, or hectoring Pakistan for "destabilising" Afghanistan without mentioning that it has been the US, after the former Soviet Union, that has intervened the most in that unhappy country -- it is certainly on the whole a refreshing change from what has been coming out of Washington over the past eight years. While it is to be hoped that Richard Holbrooke, or someone like him, does indeed replace Condoleezza Rice as US Secretary of State following an Obama win in next week's US presidential elections, on the basis of this article it is still the case that with regard to the changes Holbrooke describes in US policy towards the Middle East, Iraq, Israel and Palestine the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Reviewed by David Tresilian By David Tresilian
