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As Obama Makes His Final Trip Abroad, a Look Back at All the Must-See Photos from the President's World Travels

President Barack Obama has visited more than 50 countries in his eight years in office

President Barack Obama has visited more than 50 countries in his eight years in office, and this week he’s taking his final overseas trip as president — a tour of Europe.

Obama has so far spent much of his trip reassuring allies in Europe who are anxious about the unexpected election of Donald Trump and “Brexit,” the British vote to leave the European Union, both of which Obama campaigned against.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the president visited Greece, where he climbed the Acropolis in Athens, toured the Parthenon and met with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Obama was the first U.S. president to visit the capital city in 17 years, and he thanked Athens for the “most precious of gifts:” democracy.

“The basic longing to live with dignity, the fundamental desire to have control of our lives and our future, and to want to be a part of determining the course of our communities and our nations — these yearnings are universal. They burn in every human heart,” the president said in Athens, the birthplace of democracy.

On Thursday, Obama arrived to Berlin, where he met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. As he bid farewell to Merkel, whom he recently called his “closest international partner these past eight years,” he assured her — and Europeans in general — that progress will ultimately prevail, despite the current political turmoil.

“I think our politics everywhere are going to be going through a bumpy phase,” Obama said. “As long as we stay true to our democratic principles, as long as elections have integrity, as long as we respect freedom of speech, freedom of religion, as long as there are checks and balances in our governments … then I have confidence that over the long term, progress will continue.”

Obama spent the night in Berlin before continuing on to Peru, where he will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Lima this weekend.

In honor of his final overseas trip as president, here’s a look back at some of the most captivating photos from Obama’s travels abroad:

President Obama and Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud share a laugh during a welcoming reception at the king’s ranch in al-Janadriya in the outskirts of Riyadh. Obama visited Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2009 at the start of a mission to the Middle East to reach out to the world’s Muslims and promote peace.

President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton tour the Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo, Egypt. The president later delivered a speech at Cairo University in which he promised a “new beginning” in the United States’ relationships with Muslims around the world.

President Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, along with former Nazi concentration camp inmates Elie Wiesel (right) and Bertrand Herz (left), visit the camp at Buchenwald near in the eastern German city of Weimar. About 56,000 people were killed at the camp in the Nazi era.

Queen Elizabeth II poses with President Obama, his wife, First Lady Michelle Obama , and Prince Philip , Duke of Edinburgh in the Music Room of Buckingham Palace ahead of a State Banquet in London, England. The Obamas traveled to the U.K. for a two-day State Visit at the invitation of the Queen.

November 2011:

President Obama and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono don Indonesian traditional clothes to attend the gala dinner during the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit and East Asia Summit in Nusa Dua in Indonesia’s resort island of Bali.

November 2012:

President Obama returns a greeting to Bun Rany, wife of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen (center), prior to a gala dinner in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Obama was in Cambodia on the final leg of his three-country tour of Southeast Asia.

President Obama toasts with Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra during an official dinner at the Thai Government House in Bangkok.

March 2014:

Pope Francis speaks with President Obama during a private audience at the Vatican in Rome. The meeting came amid Obama’s six-day European tour.

President Obama speaks during a surprise visit with U.S. troops at Bagram Air Field, north of Kabul, in Afghanistan, prior to the Memorial Day holiday.

September 2014:

President Obama visits Stonehenge after attending a NATO summit in Newport, Wales.

President Obama toasts with a beer as he sits between men dressed in traditional Bavarian clothes during a visit to the village of Kruen, southern Germany, ahead of the G-7 summit.

President Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G7 Summit in Krün, Germany.

President Obama greets children at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

April 2016:

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama meet Prince George at Kensington Palace in London as Prince William and Princess Kate look on. At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner later that month, Obama joked that Prince George showing up to their meeting in his bathrobe was “a slap in the face.”

President Obama and CNN’s Anthony Bourdain enjoy a $12-meal at a restaurant in downtown Hanoi, Vietnam. The dinner was featured on an episode of the Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown show.

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This Is How Far Barack Obama Has Traveled Around the World

P resident Obama’s meeting in Saudi Arabia Tuesday with its new king marks his 84th visit to a foreign country as president, including repeat visits. By TIME’s estimation, he has now accumulated over 447,000 frequent flyer miles in international travel since January 2009, including flights returning to the United States.

Follow each of those trips below with the arrow buttons and watch those totals accumulate. You can skip to the end by using the left arrow from the first slide.

Methodology

Total miles are calculated as the round-trip distance between Washington, D.C. and a given location. Since the figures don’t account for routes and intermediate stops for refueling, the actual figure is likely to be higher. For trips that include multiple stops, the calculation only factors in the flight from Washington for the first and last leg.

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Former President Barack Obama Meets with Belgian Royal Family

King Philippe and Princess Elisabeth welcomed Obama to Laeken Castle.

According to the Brussels Times , Obama traveled to Belgium for a talk—titled " An Evening With President Barack Obama "—in Puurs-Saint-Amand, Antwerp. The talk is part of the technology festival, Supernova, organized by Flanders Technology and Innovation (FTI). The event, which took place last night, was "a moderated conversation about the challenges we're facing and his vision for the future."

As of this writing, President Obama did not post about his visit—his only social media post from yesterday features a snap of him and former First Lady Michelle Obama in Ireland, with the caption reading, "From the O’bama family to yours, we hope you have a happy St. Patrick’s Day!" (The song references a humorous folk song , written in 2008, that goes, 'O'Leary, O'Reilly, O'Hare and O'Hara There's no one as Irish as Barack O'Bama!')

Meanwhile, the Belgian royal family shared the snap of Elisabeth, Philippe, and Obama on their social media channels.

Princess Elisabeth , the heir to the Belgian throne, is currently a student at Oxford University, but was back home for break. The royal is in the last year of her bachelor's degree in History and Politics at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford. For the reception with Obama at the Laeken Castle, Princess Elisabeth opted for a chic, royal blue suit (the blazer is designed by Jigsaw).

Last year, the Duchess of Brabant (as Elisabeth is also known)—who turned 22 in October —took on a more prominent, public role within the Belgian royal family. She attended Prince Christian's 18th birthday gala in October; she joined her father at the royal wedding of Prince Hussein and Rajwa Al Saif in June; and attended the pre-coronation reception celebrating King Charles and Queen Camilla at Buckingham Palace in May.

Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma , a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram .

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Events, news & press, obama’s foreign policy.

The swing away from Bush: How far to go?

A merican foreign policy  swings like a pendulum. Under President George W. Bush, U.S. foreign policy promoted a democracy agenda, used force readily to buttress and at times even displace diplomacy, championed free markets, and risked if not relished unilateralism. Under President Barrack Obama, U.S. foreign policy has swung decisively in the opposite direction. Now, U.S. security interests matter more than democracy, force is a last resort, substantial regulations are needed to end the booms and busts of global capitalism, and multilateralism is the sine qua non of U.S. diplomacy.

After more than a year, it is not too early to evaluate the pendulum swings in American foreign policy and ask whether or not Obama is likely to stop the pendulum this time around.

Successful American presidents have stopped the pendulum to achieve novel and lasting contributions to American security and ideals. Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman ended pendulum swings between ambitious internationalism under Woodrow Wilson and isolationist nationalism under Harding and Coolidge. Roosevelt blended internationalist and nationalist concepts to commit the United States to multilateral participation in the United Nations while reserving sovereign veto rights for the United States and other great powers on the un Security Council. When the un system failed, Truman adapted Roosevelt’s formula to regional security and created the Western institutions of nato , the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, the European Community, and Bretton Woods that defended and rebuilt postwar Europe and Japan.

Ronald Reagan stopped Cold War pendulum swings between containment and detente. He rejected both the balance of power antics of Richard Nixon and human rights initiatives of Jimmy Carter. Like Roosevelt and Truman he combined realism and idealism to confront and reassure the Soviet Union at the same time. Reagan’s military and economic buildups upped the ante in a competition the Soviets could not win while his diplomacy of expanding freedom and reducing reliance on offensive nuclear weapons offered a cooperative alternative the Soviet Union and its satellites could not resist. The effect of Reagan’s strategy was to narrow Soviet economic and military options and encourage Soviet domestic reforms. In that sense Reagan helped bring reformers like Mikhail Gorbachev to power in Moscow. He and Gorbachev then ended not only the Cold War but also the Soviet Union. As John Lewis Gaddis points out in Strategies of Containment , “no administration prior to Reagan had deliberately sought to exploit those tensions [in the Soviet Union] with a view to destabilizing the Kremlin leadership and accelerating the decline of the regime it ran.”

Since Reagan, American presidents have been less successful at stopping the pendulum. George H.W. Bush in the first Persian Gulf War, and Bill Clinton in Somalia, swung American policy decisively toward the un and assertive multilateralism. Then, after the un flopped in Bosnia and Kosovo, George W. Bush pushed the pendulum in the opposite direction. In response to 9/11 , he eschewed un multilateralism altogether and disdained nato  help in invading Afghanistan and Iraq. He made a virtue of unilateralism and lost worldwide credibility. All three presidents suffered reversals, tacking back and forth between engagement and withdrawal without a clear sense of where the pendulum stops.

Will Obama experience the same fate? The chances are good that he will. He has swung the pendulum decisively against George W. Bush. After more than a year, he continues to blame Bush shamelessly for every problem he faces. This reactive tendency is not just partisan; it is part of a broader intellectual and management style. As a self-proclaimed pragmatist, Obama takes on problems as he inherits them. He reacts to what history serves up and sees the world as a complex system in which everything is interconnected. Problems have to be addressed comprehensively, or, like squeezing a balloon, progress in one area will only distort progress in others. He thinks and acts systematically, puzzling about how things fit together; he does not think and act strategically, identifying key problems that cause or unlock other problems. His style is oriented toward “fixing” the world, rather than “shaping” it.

In his first year Obama addressed every conceivable foreign policy crisis on the globe. He reset relations with Russia; visited China; agonized over Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, and Iran; reached out to the Muslim world; attempted to regain Europe’s trust; tried to jumpstart the Middle East peace process; and promoted economic recovery, climate change, and energy independence. He rarely indicated which problem was more important than another and bounced from topic to topic and region to region. 1  In this sense, Obama is clearly pragmatic. He is, as he told a Republican congressional audience in January, no ideologue. But his pragmatism is ideological. He has a coherent worldview that highlights “shared” interests defined by interconnected material problems such as climate, energy, and nonproliferation and deemphasizes “sovereign” interests that separate countries along political and moral lines. He tacks away from topics that he believes divide nations — democracy, defense, markets, and unilateral leadership — and toward topics that he believes integrate them — stability, disarmament, regulations, and diplomacy. He has been called a president for the post-American world, but he may actually be a president for the post-sovereign world. He is a policy pragmatist in response to a worldview of shared community interests that transcend sovereign national interests.

Given his worldview, Obama is unlikely to stop the pendulum. Successful presidents stopped the pendulum because they understood that there are no trade-offs between shared and sovereign interests. Common outcomes — stability, diplomacy, regulations, and multilateralism — depend upon competitive alternatives — democracy, defense, markets, and leadership. There is no lasting stability without progress toward democracy. Diplomacy is not effective without strengthened defense and the threat of the use of force. Regulations need markets to avoid the sclerosis of statism, and unilateralism or aggressive leadership is often the only defense against the malaise of multilateralism.

Let’s look more closely at the four areas in which American foreign policy swings, and at where Obama seems to be heading.

Security not democracy

G eorge w. bush staked his presidency after 9/11 on ending tyranny and promoting democracy, especially in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. In his second inaugural address, he declared, “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Now, Obama is clearly pulling back from this freedom agenda. The objective is no longer to transform domestic society and establish democratic states in unstable countries but to prevent al Qaeda or other extremist elements from regrouping in these countries to plot and carry out violence against the United States. Obama put it bluntly in March 2009 when he announced his first new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan: America has “a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” He narrowed this goal even further when he announced his second new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan in December 2009 : “We must deny al Qaeda a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government.” The goal is no longer defeating al Qaeda but denying  it a safe haven and denying the Taliban the ability to overthrow the Afghan government.

Obama has downsized America’s goals elsewhere as well. In every instance, security interests trump human rights and democracy promotion. In major foreign policy speeches in 2009 , he mentioned democracy either belatedly or abstractly. In Prague he declared that “freedom is a right for all people, no matter what side of a wall they live on, and no matter what they look like.” But in Cairo, he mentioned democracy fourth in a list of seven issues and in Moscow fourth in a list of five issues. In both Cairo and Moscow he started his talks with apologies for American democracy. In Cairo: “I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq.” In Moscow: “By no means is America perfect.” In Ghana, he mentioned democracy first but made it clear that there was no urgency or special role for America to spread democracy. “Each nation,” he said, “gives life to democracy in its own way, and in line with its own traditions . . . [and] America will not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation.” Indeed, earlier in France, he disowned the idea that America had any unique role whatsoever: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

At the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Oslo, Obama made his most elegant defense of human rights: “So even as we respect the unique culture and traditions of different countries, America will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal.” The pragmatic president acknowledged for the first time that there may be philosophical and moral divisions in world affairs. “Make no mistake,” he declared, “evil does exist in the world.” Obama even backtracked on some of his views about American exceptionalism: “Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” These were unadorned Reagan-and-Bush-like words spoken to an audience that was not inclined to appreciate them. But which message is the true Obama? He did not pledge specific help for dissidents in Burma, Zimbabwe, Iran, and elsewhere. And in none of these speeches did he mention, let alone confront, the oppressive policies of a new wave of authoritarian powers stalking the world — Russia in Europe, China in Asia, Iran in the Middle East, and Venezuela in Latin America. Instead he turned to many of these new autocrats as principal partners to pursue shared global interests of disarmament, economic recovery, climate change, and nonproliferation. Consider the following:

• In Moscow he seeks Russia’s cooperation to reduce nuclear weapons, pressure Iran and North Korea to give up their nuclear plans, and gain Russian supply routes for security operations in Afghanistan. Apologizing for American democracy, he says not a word about the far more egregious flaws of Russian democracy: imprisonment of political opponents, replacement of elected provincial governors by protégés of Vladimir Putin, closing of major opposition media, and repeated assassination of human rights activists and journalists critical of Moscow’s autocrats. Nor does he mention Russian military intervention in Georgia or Russian meddling in the domestic politics of Ukraine — through the cut-off of gas supplies, among other means. He mentions Georgia and Ukraine only at the very end of the speech and then in the context of respecting sovereignty, not human rights or democratic processes.
• In China he seeks cooperation on economic recovery, nonproliferation, and climate change. He explicitly downplays human rights issues. He refuses to see the Dalai Lama before his November trip to China (seeing him later in February); accepts a scripted encounter with Chinese youth in Shanghai, which is then censored by the Chinese media; and hails an open internet even as, according to the Washington Post , his State Department denies funds appropriated by Congress to circumvent the Chinese firewall. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set the policy on her first trip to China: “We already know what they are going to say [about human rights] because I’ve had those kinds of conversations for more than a decade with Chinese leaders. We have to continue to press them. But our pressing on those issues can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis.” Shared interests take precedence over sovereign ones.
• North Korea takes a turn for the worse — fires off long-range test missiles at the very moment Obama calls for nuclear disarmament in Prague, tests another nuclear device six weeks later, launches seven medium-range missiles as Obama presses for nuclear disarmament in Moscow, and for good measure fires off five short-range missiles shortly after Obama’s un address in September. U.S. journalists are captured, tried, and sentenced to the gulag in North Korea. Obama dispatches former President Clinton to Pyongyang to free hostage American journalists. As Henry Kissinger asked in the New York Times , “Is the lesson of this episode that any ruthless group or government can demand a symbolic meeting with a prominent American by seizing hostages or threatening inhuman treatment for prisoners in their hands?” Iran may have been listening, because only days after Clinton’s Pyongyang visit, Tehran arrested three American students who wandered across the border from Iraq and now threatens to try them or exchange them for Iranians held in American prisons.
• Obama embraces Hugo Chavez at a g-20  meeting, while Chavez drives political opponents into exile, seizes foreign companies without compensation, pushes through referenda that make him electable for life, and exports his brand of despotism to Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Honduras. Obama sides with Chavez in the dispute over the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who was exiled from the country by the Honduran military after he violated the nation’s constitution. Embarrassed, the United States then backed elections which Zelaya boycotted, even though all other major powers in the region opposed the U.S. position. Arguably, in the space of a few weeks, Obama’s new foreign policy opposed both democratic processes in Honduras and multilateral cooperation in Latin America.
• Obama reacts defensively to the voting fraud and turmoil in Iran, more afraid to meddle in Iranian politics than to stand by Iranian protestors calling for greater freedom. Amnesty International reports that Iranian security forces rape, torture, and increasingly execute dissidents to crush anti-government protests, creating a “climate of impunity” that has plunged human rights in the country to their lowest point in 20 years.

The pattern is too persistent to be an accident. Ever the pragmatist, Obama deliberatively mutes the rhetoric of democracy and human rights in favor of fixing global problems.

>George W. Bush clearly went overboard with his pledge to seek democratic institutions “in every nation and culture.” What’s wrong with the pendulum swinging back? Only that security and democracy are not opposite ends of a pendulum; they depend upon one another. Dialing down the decibels on democracy has costs. It undercuts democracy advocates around the world, creates a vacuum that autocrats fill, discourages democratic allies, and ultimately alienates the American people.

Autocrats in Moscow and the Middle East use the opportunity to crack down on dissidents. In March 2009 , the chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group petitioned the Obama administration to pay more attention to freedom: “Democracy in former Soviet areas needs a friend.” And in October, Ayman Nour, a prominent opposition leader in Cairo, warned: “His [Obama’s] reduced talk of democracy is giving these non-democratic regimes the security that they won’t face pressure. And that’s having a negative impact on democracy in the Arab world.” The Mubarak government imprisons Muslim opposition leaders, and protestors in the streets of Iran cry out: “Obama, Obama, either you’re with them or with us?”

Autocrats step into the vacuum. In July 2009 , the g8  met to condemn Iran’s elections. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, seized the microphone: “No one is willing to condemn the election process [in Iran], because it’s an exercise in democracy.” Grotesquely, Russia tells the world what democracy is. As Obama insists, American democracy has faults. But compared to what? Malpractices at Abu Ghraib pale in comparison to starvation, mutilation, and murder that take place daily in the gulags of Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China. By undressing in front of foreign despots, Obama weakens his moral authority and promotes a perverse equivalence between democracy and despotism. Obama got his only applause in Oslo when he mentioned closing Guantanamo.

By downgrading democracy, America also discourages and distances itself from democratic allies. Instead of nurturing allies to pressure autocrats, Obama extends an open hand to autocrats to pressure American allies. Washington embraces Tehran as it throws democratic protestors in the streets under the bus; presses an Arab-Israeli agreement with a militantly divided Arab world as it alienates Tel Aviv over building new settlements; and draws closer to Russia on arms control as it snubs Polish and Czech allies on missile defenses. A more subtle cost is weakening allies’ commitments to democracy. Germany’s support for the war in Afghanistan is lukewarm, to be sure. But, as Eric Chauvistre writes in the Atlantic Times , “without the high moral ground [of democracy building], the [German] Bundeswehr mission in Afghanistan would never have started.”

Finally, there are political costs at home. How long will the American people, especially Obama’s own party, accept the stepped-up fighting in Afghanistan if the goal is mere stability?

Perhaps Obama plans to talk less about promoting democracy but do more. Maybe, but his talk is revealing. He does not see the battle between democracy and despotism as the great struggle of our times. He sees the world in comprehensive, mechanistic terms, not in competitive, political terms. At the un General Assembly in September, he discussed “four pillars” of future engagement: nonproliferation and disarmament; the promotion of peace and security; the preservation of our planet; and a global economy that advances opportunity for all people. Democracy is missing. The reason apparently is that, in Obama’s mind, the spread of democracy is not a shared global interest or task. It is rather a task and struggle for each country. “The essential truth of democracy,” Obama said, “is that each nation determines its own destiny.” America will assist, but history will decide. And, as he repeated in Ghana, Oslo, and at the un , “history is on our side.” Apparently, the spread of democracy is only a matter of time.

Is this the Obama doctrine? The goals of foreign policy are mutual and material, not competitive and moral. Shared interests trump sovereign ones. Countries of any political persuasion can and must cooperate with one another to deal with problems of common interest. Those common interests include getting rid of arms, restoring economic growth, and saving the planet. While all nations tend to these tasks, individual nations cultivate their own political ideology. History takes over from there. In the Obama doctrine there is no global struggle for freedom that parallels and limits the prospects for cooperation. Cooperation emerges from shared interests not from shared values.

But what if ideological differences impede global cooperation? What if regime types — democracies vs. despots — matter more than shared interests? Then the cause of democracy is as much a global task as arms control or climate change. Bill Clinton believed that “democratic enlargement” was the best national security policy for America because democracies do not fight wars against one another or even threaten one another with military force. The more democracies America can midwife, the more secure and stable the world will be. The best proof of that proposition is modern-day Europe and Japan. Imagine what the world would be like today if there were as few democracies as there were in 1900 . Promoting democracy enhances American security.

That’s not to say that democracies and despots do not and cannot cooperate. Countries always share interests, especially in a nuclear world. But shared interests with despots cannot be the centerpiece of American diplomacy. Such cooperation is inevitably short-lived and always morally compromising. What’s more, it is never enough. The Cold War did not end when détente and shared interests shaped some grand compromise. It ended when freedom prevailed and the Soviet Union disappeared. Obama goes too far downplaying the universal struggle for freedom. Not only may dissidents languishing in jail wonder how long it will take for history to prevail, but history shows no significant gains for security until democracy gains. Security and democracy are hooked at the hip.

Paradoxically, Obama’s Afghanistan policy proves the point. He touts his strategy as more practical and less costly than democracy promotion. But he can’t really establish a more practical order in Afghanistan without confronting the moral issues of democracy. The flawed elections in August 2009 proved that the ideological legitimacy of the Afghan government matters. While that government does not have to be a Jeffersonian democracy, it has to be sufficiently representative and open that the America government can trust it and the U.S. public support it. As Zalmay Khalilzad, former U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, pointed out in February in the International Herald Tribune , four conditions on the ground have to be met: security, a more effective government in Kabul, a regional solution that includes Pakistan, and the perception that the United States is in the region for the long run. The Obama administration, he concluded, “appears to have a plan for the first of these points . . . but . . . not . . . for the other three.”

Thus, seeking security in Afghanistan and Pakistan does not do away with the need for democratic reforms; it reinforces that need. Any stability that America can trust in southwest Asia necessarily involves more not less democratic governance. Will Obama stop the pendulum? If he sticks with narrow security goals, the voices calling for withdrawal from Afghanistan will escalate. Some leaders, including Vice President Joe Biden, already advocate a strategy to punish rather than prevent terrorist attacks. They call for an offshore strategy of counterterrorism to retaliate after an attack rather than an in-country strategy of counterinsurgency to prevent such attacks. The logic is as follows: Since going in at any level implies some need for democracy promotion and nation-building, just don’t go in at all.

The tocsins of retreat are growing louder. Obama will be driven one way or the other — to more emphasis on democracy promotion or out of Afghanistan altogether. Even if he withdraws from Afghanistan, the issues won’t go away. They will simply shift to Pakistan.

Force and diplomacy

T he pendulum in  American foreign policy also swings between force and diplomacy. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, it is said, emphasized the use of force at the outset of their administrations but eventually came around to acknowledge the need for diplomacy. Conversely, Democratic presidents, such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, emphasized diplomacy at the outset of their administrations and later came around to acknowledge the need to use force (in Clinton’s case, in Bosnia and Kosovo; in Carter’s case, in a military rescue operation in Iran). Getting the right balance between force and diplomacy eludes many if not most American presidents.

Will it elude Obama? George W. Bush clearly emphasized “military surges,” responding to 9/11  with a “war against terror” that led to two ongoing U.S. military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama, on the other hand, emphasizes “diplomatic surges,” seeking to exit militarily from Iraq, shift the focus from war to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and perhaps counterterrorism in future interventions, and find regional diplomatic solutions for Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, and other trouble spots. In his first year, he dispatched an army of diplomatic envoys throughout the world — to the Middle East (George Mitchell), Iran (Dennis Ross), North Korea (Steve Bosworth), Sudan/Darfur (Scott Gration), and Afghanistan-Pakistan (Richard Holbrooke).

Obama talks more about the limits of power than the uses of power — the need to reduce arms, especially nuclear arms, and the importance of nonviolent action to oppose oppression. In his world of shared interests, threats come from arms and other material sources, not from ideological adversaries that arm to pursue conflicting objectives. In fact, as he said in Prague, “when nations and peoples allow themselves to be defined by their differences, the gulf between them widens.” Obama subscribes to what political scientists call a constructivist view of threats. Threats do not stem from real differences which provoke armaments for self-defense but rather from constructions of our minds which we are free to shape in significant measure — deciding whether to see others as enemies or friends and having it be so. He shies away from differences and confrontation, and the armaments they provoke, because, in his worldview, these things create or exacerbate but do not resolve conflicts.

The most useful force is nonviolent protest. In Moscow, he said that the Cold War ended when the people of Russia and Eastern Europe “stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.” And in Prague, he said that the Prague Spring of 1968 “shamed those who relied on the power of tanks and arms to put down the will of the people” and taught us the value of “peaceful protest” — that “moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon.”

That’s an odd way to explain the end of the Cold War and the Prague Spring. The Cold War ended in 1991 , not because people protested peacefully but because the Soviet Union lost a material and moral competition with the United States that left it bankrupt and discredited. And the Prague Spring did not shame those who relied on tanks and arms; Soviet tanks and arms crushed the Prague Spring. Where is the role of weapons and deterrence in Obama’s understanding of history? In Prague referring to the onset of the Cold War, he said, “after communism took over Czechoslovakia . . . we came together to forge the strongest alliance that the world has ever known. And we stood shoulder to shoulder — year after year, decade after decade — until an Iron Curtain was lifted, and freedom spread like flowing water.” But where is the mention of Berlin, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and nuclear weapons competition right up to the very end of the Cold War? A military coup in Moscow in August 1991  almost perpetuated the oppressive regime.

In Obama’s account, a few peaceful protestors stood up and the walls came tumbling down. In his version of history, outcomes are meant to be. There are no struggles, no close calls, no Cuban Missile Crisis, no showdowns. If all nations disarm and every nation minds its own “democratic” garden, history will bring peace to all.

Shared interests not only reign; sovereign interests end. In Moscow Obama declared that great power interests are no longer zero-sum:

The pursuit of power may not be a zero sum game (and probably hasn’t been since the beginning of the industrial revolution), but it is still a relative -sum game. The United States and Russia may both gain but one may gain more than the other. Russia understands this arithmetic in the region of the 14 former republics of the Soviet Union, which it refers to as the “near-abroad.” In this region, Russia claims a “sphere of privileged interests” — yes, a 19 th-century sphere of influence — and seeks to claw back influence from the United States. It attacks Georgia, fuels separatists in Moldova, launches cyber attacks against Estonia, and intervenes in Ukrainian elections. Sovereign not shared interests matter most to Moscow, and Russia pushes even shared interests such as arms agreements with the United States to achieve sovereign gain, namely parity with the United States in Europe and diversion from Russian aggression in the Caucasus. Without push-back and vigilance, the United States could quickly lose the edge that makes it the dominant power and guardian of freedom in Eastern Europe.

From 1986 to the present, nuclear weapons have been cut from 24,400 in the United States and 45,500 in the Soviet Union to 9,400 in the United States and 12,000 in Russia and are on track under existing agreements to drop to less than 2,500 for each superpower. Obama argues, nevertheless, that the nuclear powers must disarm more deeply still in order to inspire nonnuclear nations not to proliferate more widely. Yet while the superpowers reduced nuclear stockpiles in recent decades, the number of countries acquiring nuclear weapons rose. Perhaps the incentives work the other way. As nuclear powers disarm, the benefits for nonnuclear states to acquire nuclear arms increase. Now, at increasingly low levels of nuclear arms, some experts worry — as Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press did in the November-December 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs  — that cutting further is too risky, especially before we think through the macabre yet necessary scenarios and capabilities that might be needed to deter future powers that insist on spheres of influence.

It is probably too early to label Obama a dove like Jimmy Carter. His first full defense budget raises expenditures by 4 percent for fiscal year 2010-11 and then holds them flat over the next ten years adjusted for inflation. While it cuts a number of significant weapons systems, including missile defenses, it increases outlays for counter-insurgency operations. 2 And Obama has committed significant additional forces to Afghanistan twice — 17,000 after the first review and another 30,000  after the second. What’s in question is his understanding of the role defense policies play as leverage to arm his ambitious diplomatic undertakings.

All negotiations are partly matters of understanding (outreach) and partly matters of leverage (relative power). Frederick the Great said it best: “negotiations without arms are like music without instruments.” Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s envoy to South Asia, boasts that “diplomacy is like jazz — an improvisation on a theme.” If so, Obama may be gambling that diplomacy is all about improvisation and not much about concussion — all about understanding, empathy, reaching out, and compromising and not much about building up forces, pushing back on the ground in regional disputes, narrowing an opponent’s options away from the bargaining table, and standing up for one side or the other when conflicts break out.

At three levels, Obama seems unaware of the leverage that military power exerts in foreign policy. He does not identify with his defense budget, an important source of background leverage ; he agonizes over deploying forces as ground leverage to narrow an opponent’s options away from the bargaining table; and he depends primarily on un sanctions for negotiating leverage at the diplomatic table. In all three areas, Ronald Reagan was a master at exerting military leverage: using his defense budget to challenge the Soviet Union to an arms race, deploying inf missiles and freedom fighters to raise the costs of Soviet military actions on the ground, and dangling his Strategic Defense Initiative at the negotiating table — all for the purpose, as Martin and Annelise Anderson show in their breathtaking book, Reagan’s Secret War , of negotiating a peaceful end to the Cold War and a shift from offensive to defensive weapons for deterrence.

Here’s how one Soviet official, Alexei Arbatov, assessed the impact of Reagan’s first-term defense policies on perceptions in Moscow: “Reagan’s course in the early 1980 s sent a clear signal to Gorbachev and his associates of the dangerous and counterproductive nature of the Soviet Union’s further expansion, which was overstretching its resources, aggravating tensions, and provoking hostile reactions across the globe.” Gorbachev made the same point himself. Speaking to the Politburo in October 1985 , a mere six months after taking office, he said:

Obama wields none of these advantages. He sees force as a last resort after diplomacy fails, not as a pervasive and parallel resort throughout the diplomatic process. He withdraws U.S. forces unconditionally from Iraq when keeping them there might narrow Iranian options on the ground as negotiations proceed to stop Iran’s nuclear program. At West Point, he announces the dispatch of additional forces to Afghanistan and in the next sentence gives a date to begin their withdrawal, when allies in Pakistan question precisely America’s commitment to stay in the fight. As of this writing he is working on a fourth set of un  sanctions for Iran. In all likelihood, he is heading toward accepting and then hoping to contain the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran. But containment too cannot work without a credible threat to use force.

It’s still early, but Obama needs to stop the pendulum swing from force to diplomacy and recognize that diplomatic outcomes reflect the balance of forces in negotiations as well as the goodwill and mutual understanding of negotiating partners. Force and violence play a continuing role in world affairs, not because the United States wants them to, but because autocratic countries use force daily against their own citizens and will use it more readily against foreign countries, no matter how understanding the United States may try to be. In Oslo, as he accepted his Nobel Prize, Obama spoke for the first time about the justified use of force: “There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.” And he emphasized the limits of diplomacy when he noted that despite his reverence for Martin Luther King and the doctrine of nonviolence, “a nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies . . . [and] negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.” But, again, which Obama is the true Obama?

Obama’s diplomacy is flaccid. He packs few arrows in his quiver. He is content to downplay force, even as Iran, North Korea, and other extremists use force and show no sign of being “shamed” into honoring international norms and principles to stop proliferation or the use of violence. And when he supports the use of force, it seems to be only when force is “absolutely necessary” meaning apparently after America has been attacked (Afghanistan) but not before (Iraq). He assumes that if America does not use force, others will not either. But there’s the problem. If the United States does not push back to stop nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and Asia, others may. Israel is close to that point already, and, if North Korea acquires nuclear weapons, Japan may demand more extensive U.S. nuclear protection or decide to acquire nuclear weapons on its own. The use of force only when it is absolutely necessary does not minimize risks; it leads to much bigger risks later on.

Markets and regulation

T here is no doubt that we are witnessing a major swing in U.S. foreign policy away from markets toward global regulation. The question, again, is will the pendulum swing too far. Will it stop before the rush to regulation strangles a world economy that in the past 30  years has produced unprecedented global growth? On economic policy, George W. Bush pushed tax cuts, deregulation, and free trade agreements. Now Obama pursues higher taxes and more stringent regulations, and he shows little enthusiasm for existing or new free trade agreements.

First, one needs to be clear about the past from which Obama now wants to swing the pendulum. The era of the so-called Washington consensus, which enshrined market policies from the Reagan years (see my account in The Myth of America’s Decline ), has been extraordinarily successful. Here are some of the main accomplishments:

• As Nobel Laureate economist Gary Becker points out in the Financial Times , real world gdp grew between 1980 and 2007 by 145 percent, or 3.4 percent per year, an unprecedented rate of growth for such a sustained period. Even if we include the current recession, the world economy grew by 3.0 percent in 2008 and, after declining by 0.8 percent in 2009 , is expected to grow again by 3.9 percent and 4.3 percent in 2010 and 2011 respectively. Real per capita incomes over this 30 -year period rose by 40 percent, even though world population (the denominator in per capita income) grew by roughly 1.6 percent a year. As these facts prove, the present global recession is nothing like the “Great Recession” which Obama and his cabinet officials repeatedly invoke.
• During the past 30 years, a major world trade round was completed, the Uruguay Round, and numerous bilateral and regional free trade agreements negotiated and ratified, such as nafta .
• A new trade oversight body came into being, the World Trade Organization ( wto ), and opened its doors for the first time to the world’s poorest countries, most notably China and India.
• More than 400 million poor people in China and India, not to mention Mexico, Brazil, and other developing countries, benefited from the world trading system and rose out of poverty to join the world’s middle class. The share of people living on one dollar a day plummeted from 40 percent in 1981 to 18 percent in 2004 . Inclusion of the so-called emerging countries in the g20 , which has supplemented the g8 on the global economic stage, is testimony to the egalitarian consequences of growth during the era of the Washington consensus. In the case of the world economy, “trickle down” actually happened to a surprising extent.
• Trickle down also happened in the United States. Over the past 30 years, the United States, which took the lead in opening markets to the world’s poor, prospered. Taking into account two mild recessions, the United States grew by 3 percent per year over this period and created over 50 million new jobs, accommodating growing numbers of women and immigrants in the work force. Per capita income increased by 65 percent, and household income corrected for the number of people in a household (down from 3.14 to 2.57 persons) went up substantially. According to Stephen Rose in the Washington Post , fewer people live today in middle class households with incomes between $ 30,000 and $ 100,000 , but more live in households making more than $ 100,000 , which has gone up from 12 percent to 24 percent, while the percentage of people living in households making less than $ 30,000  stayed the same. Contrary to conventional wisdom, people in the United States moved up out of the middle class, not down from it.

None of this extraordinary prosperity would have been possible without the liberalization and growth of global financial markets. The freeing up of capital flows is the big untold success (yes, success) story of the past 30 years. Open global financial markets did not exist before 1980 . The early Bretton Woods system controlled exchange rates and private capital flows to encourage trade liberalization. The advanced countries began to liberalize capital and exchange markets only in the 1970 s, accelerating this effort in the 1980 s and 1990 s as the Washington consensus spread. The resulting global financial markets mobilized massive unused savings, especially from China and India, which fueled the unprecedented economic expansion between 1980 and 2010 .

Now, global financial markets stand indicted as the causes of the great economic recession. And the current crisis is vastly overblown to discredit the Washington consensus and market policies. Obama pledges to end the boom and bust cycle of capitalism and compares the present crisis to the Great Depression. In truth, the current slump comes nowhere near the levels of the Great Depression (which led to real gdp losses of 30 percent and unemployment rates of 25 percent) and does not even equal the Reagan recession of 1981-82 in either maximum unemployment ( 10.2 compared to 10.8 ) or inflation rates ( 2 percent compared to 13 percent). So far, by only two measures, the decline of industrial output and number of jobs lost (not unemployment rate), has the current recession exceeded the Reagan downturn. And, ironically, this result is a consequence of the fact that the current recession started at much higher levels of production and employment than in 1981-82 , a testament to the success of economic policies over the past 30  years.

By hyping the current crisis and pandering to populism on such issues as bank bonuses, Obama risks overreacting to the current economic crisis, encouraging the pendulum to swing completely out of control. Of course, mistakes were made during the Washington consensus era by all administrations — the Reagan years left behind massive budget deficits, the Clinton years blessed the unregulated growth of global banking and derivative markets, and the Bush years compounded errors of excessive spending as well as unmonitored financial markets.

Yet the benefits remain for all to see, and now the trick is to correct the errors without reducing the benefits. The real economy in the United States today — the industrial and productivity base — is solid and does not require a major overhaul. Not only are anti-market regulations unnecessary; they were a major cause, along with private banking, of the current crisis. Government housing agencies — especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — added $ 5 trillion to the national debt, and they too awarded “fat cat” bonuses and received bailout funds that exceeded $ 100  billion and are still climbing.

So governments fail, just as markets do. Obama needs to stop the pendulum of anti-market sentiment before we overregulate and recreate the twin specters of slower growth and higher inflation, the scourges of the 1970 s which the Washington consensus ended. Make no mistake: Reducing excessive risk in financial markets is necessary to sustain long-term growth. But reducing risk means reducing growth over the short run, and increasing regulations means raising prices over the long run.

The main challenges for Obama are threefold. First, can his overall economic program work? On its premises, it seems doubtful. The program raises costs to the private sector while expanding investment in the public sector. Small businesses, which provide most private sector jobs, face higher taxes (rescinding tax cuts for annual incomes above $ 250,000 ), increasing energy costs (new cap and trade legislation), more employer mandates (health care), escalating labor costs (card check), and expanding consumer regulations. Meanwhile, federal, state, and local governments spend more to sustain and expand social services, build infrastructure, manage bankrupt industrial companies ( gm  and Chrysler), and create green jobs. At the margins, government bureaucrats, not business leaders and entrepreneurs, make more investment and production decisions.

The American economy is massive and resilient. Maybe the public sector can grow at the margins without reducing growth. But, bear in mind, Obama’s budgets call for government spending to expand from around 20 percent of gross domestic product, where it has hovered for the past 30 years, to 26 percent by 2020 . That’s a 30  percent jump at the margins. And the claim that government spending creates more and better jobs (e.g., green jobs) and offers necessary competition where the private sector fails to do so has to be treated with some skepticism, especially given the financial performance of the government’s housing agencies and its two flagship entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare.

Second, can Obama stem a disastrous protectionist trend which is rapidly accelerating and will become another major factor adding to the costs of private sector entrepreneurs? Global Trade Alert reported in December 2009 that just since the financial crisis in fall 2008 , g20 countries slapped on 184 significant protectionist measures. “Buy American” provisions in Obama’s stimulus package purge Canadian, Mexican, Chinese and other products from U.S. public and private sector projects. 3  Labor unions, which with government now control American automobile companies, call for industrial policies to shut out foreign imports. And politicians advocate penalizing multinational companies that invest abroad.

Thus far, Obama has been silent on free trade. He quietly walked back campaign pledges to renegotiate nafta and designate China as a currency manipulator. But he did nothing to stop provisions in the stimulus package that banned Mexican trucks from U.S. highways, perpetuating a 14 -year dispute in which Mexico won a wto ruling against the United States. Most importantly, he has coddled protectionist supporters on the Hill and stalled free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, South Korea, and other countries. And he has potentially doomed the Doha Round negotiations by saying in summer 2009 that resumed negotiations cannot take up where they broke down but must be “reset” to include greater tariff reductions by developing nations and additional commitments to negotiate in specific manufacturing and service sectors. Obama has no congressional authority to negotiate “fast-track” trade agreements and no intention to ask for it — nor, given his party’s preferences, would he be likely to get it if he did ask. Meanwhile, according to early estimates, world trade dropped by 10 percent in 2009 .

Third, can Obama lead a sensible effort to regulate risks in new global financial markets without strangling competitive markets which mobilized capital for unprecedented expansion after 1980 ? In short, can he create a regulatory regime for global finance like the one the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade created for global trade in the 1950 s and 1960 s? The gatt  regime greatly expanded, not restricted, international economic exchanges.

While financial regulation is complex, two choke points seem crucial. The first is leverage ratios. Leverage ratios specify the amount of capital financial institutions are required to hold to support lending. Domestic banks have been regulated in this area since the 1930 s, and international banks came under similar regulation after 1980 through the Basel Accords. But nonbank institutions including investment houses, insurance companies, pension funds, hedge funds, and structured investment vehicles ( siv s) set up by banks off their balance sheets have never been regulated, and they now account for a larger and larger share of global trading and lending. Leverage ratios at some nonbank institutions such as the American International Group went ballistic in the recent financial crisis. Clearly, nonbank institutions have to be brought into this regulatory regime.

A second choke point in the financial system is transparency. Governments audit banks and in turn provide help in times of crisis, including orderly dissolution if banks fail. Banks can’t fail on their own because their collapse might trigger wider systemic failure. Should governments now also audit and, if they get in trouble, supervise the orderly dissolution of nonbank institutions? In the 2008  crisis, nonbank institutions like Goldman Sachs became bank holding companies to benefit from government support. But these institutions engage in far riskier lending activities than banks. Can governments cover such risks? And if they do, won’t that just encourage more risky behavior by these institutions?

To keep the regulatory system light, one alternative is to use leverage ratios to distinguish between normal bank trading and riskier trading by hedge funds and private equity funds. Thus, if hedge funds or private equity funds create instruments that are riskier and less transparent, as they did in recent years, these instruments should carry higher leverage requirements. That should place a rough cap on high risk operations. If these institutions still get into trouble, they should be allowed to fail, again under some orderly government process.

Sadly, little has been done to enhance transparency since the recent crisis. The original Treasury bailout was supposed to create markets to clean up the high risk “toxic” assets that had been created and sold privately by nonbank institutions. Instead the bailout was used to replenish bank capital. Toxic assets still sit on nonbank books, and financial authorities are gambling that a revival of growth will suffice to redeem these underwater securities. Once again the Obama administration, which announced a plan to remove toxic assets in spring 2009 , has addressed an issue and then failed to follow through.

Any level of regulation requires alert regulators. In the last crisis, regulators were caught sleeping at the switch. So just adding more regulators is not likely to make things better. Regulating at choke points and maintaining focus offer a smarter answer. The massive collateralization of mortgage and other debt in recent years was excessive, to be sure, but up to a point it was also very helpful to put Chinese and Indian savings to work in the global economy, particularly in the housing sector.

Unilateralism and multilateralism

T he fourth area  in which American foreign policy cycles is between unilateralism and multilateralism. George W. Bush became the poster child for unilateralism and assertive American leadership. Obama is now the global rock star for a new era of multilateralism. The tension between unilateralism and multilateralism is not a trade-off; it is a matter of leadership. How aggressively does the United States act, sometimes without the full support of domestic, allied, or international partners, and how often does it defer to a consensus from domestic and international opinion before it acts? The objective in either case is to bring other partners along. Bush tripped the wire toward debilitating unilateralism. Obama may trip it toward paralyzing multilateralism.

So far Obama has gone the extra mile to solicit the support of the American people, allies, and the international community. To his credit, he has improved America’s standing abroad. According to Pew polls in July 2009 , Europe’s confidence that America will do the right thing soared from below 20 percent under Bush in 2008 to well over 85 percent under Obama in 2009 . If such polls mean anything, Obama should now get something in return. So far he has gotten very little.

What if Obama cannot get un agreement on tougher sanctions against Iran? What if the nato allies balk at supporting the Afghanistan-Pakistan campaign? What if the Chinese decide that they have no real interest in stopping North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, especially if it threatens North Korea’s domestic stability (a position that some believe the Chinese have always held)? What if Russia meddles successfully to weaken and eventually replace nato -friendly governments in Georgia and Ukraine and perhaps even to extend its influence in the Baltic nato  states?

Where will Obama stop the pendulum between assertive American leadership, which involves some degree of unilateralism, and accommodating American multilateralism, which risks action too late or no action at all? On many issues, as we see in his deliberations on a second strategy for Afghanistan, he struggles to find a middle ground which satisfies everyone a little bit and dissatisfies no one too much. He often defers to other partners, as he does to the un  on Iran or to Congress on the stimulus and health care legislation. He likes to “wait to see how the dust settles.” But deferring to international institutions is usually a prescription for delay if not default.

Soon, the heat will be turned up on Obama and his numerous diplomatic initiatives. Will he be willing to pull the trigger and act without consensus if necessary? Or will he instead define his objectives down, disarm his diplomacy, default to nationalistic economic forces, and defer to multilateral solutions? We have little to guide our speculation. His Afghanistan policy offers some evidence of resolve, but the test is yet to come, both from the left wing of his own party and from entrenched extremists in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. His redlines for acting alone or with less than majority support are well concealed. This is perhaps the biggest mystery about a man who has always led by community more than by conviction.

Swinging which way?

L ike clockwork, american  foreign policy cycles between democracy and security, force and diplomacy, markets and regulation, and unilateralism and multilateralism. For most of his term, George W. Bush trumpeted democracy, military force, markets, and assertive U.S. leadership. Obama now reverses course in all four areas.

Obama argues that this was the hand he was dealt. But he’s not the first president to initiate or justify a pendulum swing. According to national polls dating back to the 1950 s, voters opposing the party that occupies the White House become more dissatisfied with American foreign policy than the president’s own party. Presidential candidates from opposing parties use this discontent to swing the pendulum away from their predecessor’s foreign policy. George W. Bush advocated policies that his critics called abc , Anything But Clinton. Now Obama advocates policies which are unremittingly abb , Anything But Bush.

Arguably, Obama has swung the pendulum further than previous presidents. He uses the past to browbeat domestic opponents, even exploiting major public forums, such as the un  General Assembly, to castigate his predecessor’s years “as a time when many around the world had come to view America with skepticism and distrust.” Like previous presidents, however, Obama will be judged not by how far or long he swings the pendulum but by whether and where he stops it. Will he grasp, like successful presidents before him, that the crucial aspects of foreign policy are not opposite ends of a continuum but integral factors that depend on one another? At what point will he refresh America’s commitment to freedom as the foundation of security, an effective diplomacy backed by military leverage, a world market that accepts risks to achieve higher growth, and a style of leadership that is not subordinate to the slowest camel in the caravan?

Leadership is much more than pragmatism to solve problems that somebody else has created. It has to define those problems in the first place. In this process, sovereign principles of free peoples matter much more than shared interests with despots who espouse very different principles. Leadership is proactive not reactive, clarifying differences of principle, setting the agenda, pushing preferences, and preempting alternatives. Bush did that part well. But leadership is also bringing along the majority of people, both at home and in the free world, or it can hardly be called democratic. Bush did not do that part very well. Obama has a proven ability to bring people along but an unproven record of where he wants to lead them. To be successful, he needs to stop the swing of the pendulum and chart a clearer course that champions the ongoing struggle for freedom and markets in a world in which despots still prefer to use force and regulations.

Henry R. Nau is professor of political science and international affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University. A more extensively footnoted version of this article can be requested by writing to [email protected].

1 He has displayed the same pattern on the domestic front, addressing multiple issues simultaneously and lacking focus.

2 For example, Obama capped production of f-22 stealth fighter planes and delayed plans for a next-generation long-range bomber. He made deep cuts in missile defense and did little to expand a navy fleet that is down to roughly one half its size at the end of the Cold War. Such decisions have consequences. Containment of China, for example, depends heavily on American air and sea power. Since 1995 , China has increased the number of its submarines by 38 , while the U.S. has cut the number of its submarines by 25 .

3 One typical example: Duferco Furrell Corporation near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, manufactures steel coils from imported slabs not sold in the U.S. After the stimulus package passed, its largest client canceled orders so it could buy from companies with 100 percent U.S. production. Duferco Furrell, which employs 600 people, furloughed 80  percent of its work force.

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Barack Obama: Foreign Affairs

Iraq and afghanistan.

In addition to inheriting an economy in crisis when he took office, President Obama inherited two wars, one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan. An early opponent of President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, Obama promised during the 2008 election campaign to withdraw American troops as soon as possible. In February 2009, he announced a plan to bring troop levels down from 160,000 to 50,000 by August 2010, including the removal of all combat forces. The remaining troops, he added, would be withdrawn by the end of 2011. For several years, the withdrawal proceeded smoothly, in part because Obama was able to build on the gains achieved by Bush's “surge” of 20,000 additional troops in 2007, which had helped the government of Iraq to restore a measure of stability to the country. By 2012, only 150 American troops were in Iraq, a number that remained level for about three years.

Obama’s other war-related campaign promise was to step up the US military commitment in Afghanistan in order to keep the extremist Taliban regime from regaining power and allowing al Qaeda once again to use the country as a base of terrorist operations against the United States and its allies. Soon after taking office, Obama granted the military’s request, initially made at the end of the Bush presidency, to send an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, raising the American military presence there to about 60,000.

As his first year as president unfolded, however, Obama became convinced that a change in military strategy was needed so that the government of Afghanistan eventually would be able to defeat the Taliban on its own. In June, he appointed a new military commander, General Stanley McChrystal, and asked him to recommend a new course of action. McChrystal requested 40,000 more troops and promised to deploy them to train Afghan forces to fight the Taliban instead of relying on American might. After an extended series of meetings beginning in September, Obama announced in a speech on December 1, 2009 , at West Point that he had approved a short-term surge of 33,000 troops with a proviso that American forces must begin to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011. The president soon fired McChrystal for making disparaging remarks about members of the administration, and he replaced him with General David Petraeus, who had developed and implemented the successful surge in Iraq that inspired McChrystal's new strategy for Afghanistan.

After the 2010 midterm elections, congressional Republicans were much more interested in domestic policy than foreign policy, which allowed President Obama to accomplish a complete disengagement of US forces, at least in terms of active combat, from Afghanistan by 2014. The number of American troops in Afghanistan, which peaked at 97,000 in 2011, declined steadily to about 12,000 in 2015 before leveling off at that figure as the president reluctantly acknowledged that the campaign to defeat the Taliban was not yet won. Buttressing Obama’s credentials on military matters was the May 2, 2011, killing of al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, by a team of Navy SEALS. Intelligence agencies had concluded that bin Laden was probably hiding in a residential compound near Abbottabad, Pakistan. Lacking certainty on the matter, and realizing the risks attending a military strike, Obama nonetheless ordered the attack, which was successful. In celebrating bin Laden's death, Americans applauded the president's decisiveness and judgment.

Even after United States soldiers killed bin Laden in May 2011 and began disengaging from Iraq and Afghanistan, the president expanded the strategic deployment of special forces and drones in a “secret war” against suspected terrorists. (Drones are remotely controlled, unpiloted aircraft that conduct surveillance and drop precision-targeted bombs.) Moreover, the White House joined with NATO to help Libyan rebels end the reign of dictator, Colonel Muamar el-Qaddafi. The administration argued that the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to report to Congress when he deploys American forces, did not apply because a state of “hostilities” did not exist.

Obama and his national security team claimed that they were using a new approach to war that relied on multinational rather than unilateral action, and surgical air and Special Forces strikes rather than on massive troop deployments. The administration’s reliance on bombing rather than ground troops in Libya, however, deprived it of any means to reduce the chaos that ensued after Qaddafi was killed. One unfortunate consequence was a radical mob attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in which four American officials were killed.

Syria and ISIS

During the first year of his second term, President Obama seemed determined to take the United States off a “perpetual war footing.” Sensing the country’s war fatigue and noting resistance from both Democrats and Republicans to additional commitments in the Middle East, the president decided not to launch missile strikes in Syria in support of rebels fighting the autocratic regime of Bashar al-Assad, even though the brutal dictator had crossed Obama’s stated “red line” by using chemical weapons against civilians. Calling off a planned air attack on Syria at virtually the last minute, Obama decided to refer the matter to Congress, which had little interest in endorsing his proposed course. A few days later, Obama accepted Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s offer to persuade Syria to get rid of its chemical weapons.

As the president acknowledged, his administration underestimated the danger of ISIS’s incursions into Syria and Iraq; indeed, Obama initially dismissed these fighters as a “JV team.” But the steady advance of the self-proclaimed Caliphate and the powerful public reaction to ISIS’s release of videos that graphically showed the beheading of two American journalists spurred the President to action. In a September 10, 2014, speech to the nation, Obama announced a plan to “degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.” Two weeks later, soon after ordering air strikes on dozens of ISIS targets in Syria, the president issued an even more militant call to arms against the self-described Islamic State in an address to the General Assembly of the United Nations. The number of American troops in Iraq with a mission to help fight ISIS rose to more than 5,000 by 2016, and his administration conducted more than 10,000 air strikes against the radical organization.

Although the air strikes in Syria had strong bipartisan support, constitutional and partisan issues lurked just beneath the surface. In his speech to the nation, Obama said he “welcomed congressional support for this effort,” yet insisted he had “the authority to address the threat from ISIL.” That authority, he claimed, resided in the resolution Congress passed in 2001 authorizing President George W. Bush to use military force against those “who planned, authorized, committed or aided” in the September 11 attacks. The White House argued that the resolution covered a war on ISIS because the terrorist organization is “the true inheritor of Osama bin Laden’s legacy—notwithstanding the recent public split between al Qaeda’s senior leadership and ISIS.”

The president took pains to ensure that the battle against ISIS would be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because it “would not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Yet the military action involved not just “a systematic campaign of airstrikes” but the deployment of additional troops “to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence, and equipment.” Notwithstanding the strong public sentiment to strike back against ISIS’ atrocities, the failure of Congress to place limits on a new Middle East mission renewed concerns about executive power.

Legal and constitutional issues aside, the situation on the ground in Iraq and, especially, Syria remained troubled at the end of Obama’s tenure as president. Nightmarish instability in Syria had consequences not just for the region but for Europe as well, where hundreds of thousands of Syrians fled in pursuit of refuge from the chaotic conditions in their country. Growing Russian ambitions in the Middle East under Putin also were a source of frustration, as was the Putin-ordered military occupation of neighboring Ukraine in 2014. In response to the Russian occupation, the United States and European nations imposed economic sanctions against Russia but they brought about no withdrawal of Russian forces.

Iran Nuclear Agreement and Trade Policy

Obama’s foreign policy goals extended beyond the wars he inherited or that broke out while he was in office. At the start of his second term in 2013, he and the leaders of five other nations began negotiations with Iran that resulted in a 2015 agreement designed to prevent that country from developing nuclear weapons for at least a decade in return for removing United Nations-imposed economic sanctions. Under the agreement, Iran surrendered 97 percent of its enriched uranium. 

Obama also restored diplomatic relations with communist Cuba in December 2014 for the first time in more than a half century and visited the country in March 2016. In 2014, the president reached a bilateral climate agreement in which China and the United States agreed to substantially reduce carbon emissions. That agreement laid the foundation for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015, at which nearly every country in the world agreed to monitor their emissions and develop plans to reduce them. 

In an effort to tie Pacific nations more closely to the United States than to China, Obama negotiated a multinational trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with twelve trading partners from round the Pacific basin. TPP was caught up in election-year politics in 2016, however, when the leading candidates in both major political parties opposed it, and it was never presented to Congress. So controversial had free trade become by the end of Obama’s second term that even Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state had called TPP “the gold standard” in trade agreements, opposed it.

Other than in his fervent long-term concern about climate change, Obama’s approach to foreign policy was pragmatic and piecemeal. He enunciated no sweeping Obama Doctrine analogous to the Monroe Doctrine or the Bush Doctrine, preferring to deal with situations as they arose around the globe on a case-by-case basis. More than anything else, Obama said, his rule was, “Don’t do stupid stuff,” sometimes substituting a different four-letter word for “stuff” in private conversation.

Michael Nelson

Professor of Political Science Rhodes College

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The stark contrast between Trump’s trip to Iraq and Obama’s 2009 visit

President Trump made his first visit to a conflict zone as commander in chief this week, visiting troops at al-Asad Air Base in western Iraq on Wednesday. The unannounced journey took place just days after he declared that he planned to remove U.S. troops from Syria and saw his own defense secretary resign in response.

In April 2009, Trump’s predecessor in the Oval Office, President Barack Obama, made his own trip to Iraq to visit U.S. military personnel. It was his first visit as commander in chief, though he had also visited Iraq in July 2008 as a U.S. senator while campaigning for president.

The contrast between the two trips is sometimes stark — not just because of the timing, but also because of the very different tone they put on display. This itself is a reflection of the different personalities of the two men as commanders in chief, as well as the dramatic changes that have taken place in the Middle East in the past nine years.

Despite frequent praise for the U.S. military and the appointment of military leaders to Cabinet positions, it took Trump almost half of his first term as president to visit U.S. soldiers in a conflict zone.

Trump’s Iraq visit prompts concern over operational security

In contrast, Obama’s trip to Iraq took place less than three months after he was inaugurated. He would go on to visit another conflict zone, Afghanistan, twice in his second year in office. Obama’s own predecessor, President George W. Bush, had also visited Iraq less than a year after the U.S.-led invasion of the country began in March 2003 .

Like Obama’s visit, Trump’s trip to Iraq was not announced publicly beforehand — a reflection of the security concerns that have not abated much between 2009 and now. Both visited U.S. troops in the country, with Obama meeting them inside a palace built by Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, while Trump visited an air base. Neither president spent more than a few hours inside Iraq.

However, Obama met with Iraq’s leader at the time, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, at Camp Victory while he was in Iraq. Trump did not meet Iraq’s current leader, Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi. Iraqi lawmakers said there was a disagreement over whether to meet at the air base, as the U.S. side wished.

Some Iraqi politicians have criticized Trump’s visit to Iraq and described it as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty. “The U.S. occupation of Iraq is over,” Sabah al Saadi, the leader of the Islah parliamentary bloc, said in a statement.

Certainly, the Iraq that Trump is visiting is in a very different neighborhood than the one that Obama visited in 2009. In 2009, there were no U.S. troops in Syria to withdraw — indeed, that country had not yet started on the path of the civil war that has killed over half a million people since 2011. Obama himself had not yet helped reach the nuclear deal between Iraq’s neighbor Iran and other world powers in 2015, while Saudi Arabia had not begun the complicated changes that were kicked off by King Abdullah’s death in 2015.

When Obama visited in 2009, the United States still had a huge military presence in Iraq itself: There were roughly 157,800 U.S. military personnel in the country during the 2008 fiscal year. During his visit, Obama reiterated his intention to remove all U.S. troops from the country.

“Under enormous strain and under enormous sacrifice, through controversy and difficulty and politics, you’ve kept your eyes focused on just doing your jobs,” Obama told the troops in 2009 . “You have given Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country.”

“They need to take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty,” Obama said of the Iraqi government.

Obama followed through on his pledges in 2011, withdrawing U.S. soldiers from Iraq. However, U.S. troops returned in 2014 in response to a request from the Iraqi government to help in the fight against the Islamic State, an extremist group that had previously been called al-Qaeda in Iraq and was known as the Islamic State of Iraq when Obama visited in 2009.

The year after Obama visited Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was installed as its leader. He would go on to lead the extremist group to expand into Syria, eventually leading the United States to send troops to that country, where they have been working with local forces since 2015.

Last week, Trump announced that these soldiers would be coming home, as the Islamic State was defeated. “Our boys, our young women, our men, they’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now. We won,” Trump said in a video message on Twitter. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis announced his resignation soon afterward.

But as he visited Iraq on Wednesday, Trump had a very different message — again, a real contrast to Obama’s message nine years before — for the roughly 5,200 U.S. troops deployed in Iraq. The message was that this time, there was no immediate plan to withdraw U.S. soldiers from Iraq. “In fact, we could use this as the base if we wanted to do something in Syria,” the U.S. leader added.

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Obama sparks buzz with surprise visit to 10 downing street amid buckingham palace drama.

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Maybe Barack Obama knows what’s ailing Kate Middleton .

The 44th president raised eyebrows Monday when he popped by No. 10 Downing Street for a meeting with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak .

Obama, 62, was tight-lipped about the reason for his surprise visit, but the British government said the sitdown had nothing to do with any royal family issues.

“The Prime Minister welcomed Barack Obama to No 10 this afternoon for an informal meeting, as part of the former President’s visit to London with the Obama Foundation,” a Downing Street spokesperson told The Post.

“They discussed a range of issues, including international affairs and AI.”

Obama, who founded his eponymous foundation along with wife Michelle in 2014, was seen entering Sunak’s home office via the back door at around 3 p.m. London time.

The former president remained for roughly one hour before departing alongside US Ambassador to the United Kingdom Jane Hartley, Sky News reported .

Reporters gathered outside No. 10 attempted to coax Obama over to take questions, to which the graying former leader responded, “I’m tempted” before walking back to a waiting motorcade.

The 44th president traveled to London three times during his eight years in office, with his last visit coming in April 2016.

Over the weekend, Obama delivered remarks to a sold-out crowd at the FTI SuperNova technology festival in Belgium.

Obama also stopped by Laeken Castle in Brussels, where he posed for a photo with Belgium’s King Philippe and Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Belgian Royal Palace (@belgianroyalpalace)

Sunak, 43, has been outspoken about trying to modernize government policies for the era of artificial intelligence.

Last fall, he hosted an AI Safety Summit that Vice President Kamala Harris attended.

Obama’s visit took place as Buckingham Palace finds itself engulfed in drama over the Princess of Wales’ absence from the public eye after undergoing abdominal surgery earlier this year .

Rumors about her condition have reached a fever pitch after she released a doctored family photo last week.

On Monday evening, The Sun newspaper published images of Kate and her husband, Prince William, shopping for groceries over the weekend in Windsor.

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Barack Obama drops into No10 for surprise visit on his way through London

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Former US president Barack Obama popped into Downing Street on Monday for private talks with Rishi Sunak.

Mr Obama, who served in the White House from 2009 to 2017, smiled and waved at members of the press before he entered No 10 shortly after 3pm.

His visit was understood to be a courtesy call as he was in London.

Mr Obama and Mr Sunak met for around an hour, mostly one-on-one, over cups of tea. They discussed a range of subjects including AI.

Mr Obama left No10, accompanied by the US Ambassador to Britain Jane Hartley.

One broadcaster shouted out: “Why should we care about democracy in Russia?”

The former president responded: “I’m tempted..,” before moving, smiling, towards the car waiting for him.

Mr Obama was due to meet up with long-time friend David Lammy, the shadow Foreign Secretary, and his wife Nicola Green for dinner.

Mr Obama angered some Tories when he warned during the 2016 referendum campaign on Brexit that Britain would be at the “back of the queue ” for a free trade deal if it splintered away from the European Union.

But the then president has proved right with still no sign of a free trade deal between the UK and America, despite leading Brexiteers having argued that such a pact would be easy.

Mr Obama’s visit, which would have come amid tight security, caused an immediate stir in Westminster.

But it was far less surprising than when Bill Clinton, the year after he had left the White House, turned up at Labour’s annual rally in Blackpool in 2002 and popped into the local McDonald’s restaurant.

Local people going in to buy a burger or other food were stunned to see the former US president there.

Mr Clinton posed with staff, as he enjoyed a drink.

He delivered a barn-storming speech at Labour’s annual conference that year, around half way through Tony Blair’s New Labour premiership.

Mr Obama addressed the joint Houses of Parliament during a State Visit to the UK in May 2011 and also flipped burgers with David Cameron during a barbecue in the garden of No10.

He told the hundreds of MPs, peers, staff and journalists gathered in the historic Westminster Hall: “I have known few greater honours than the opportunity to address the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster Hall.  I am told that the last three speakers here have been the Pope, Her Majesty the Queen, and Nelson Mandela -- which is either a very high bar or the beginning of a very funny joke.”

He added: “I come here today to reaffirm one of the oldest, one of the strongest alliances the world has ever known.  It’s long been said that the United States and the United Kingdom share a special relationship.

“Of course, all relationships have their ups and downs.  Admittedly, ours got off on the wrong foot with a small scrape about tea and taxes.

“There may also have been some hurt feelings when the White House was set on fire during the War of 1812.  But fortunately, it’s been smooth sailing ever since.”

Mr Obama’s visit, though, comes amid some trans-Atlantic tensions over the Ukraine war and fears that Donald Trump, if he wins another term in the White House, would dramatically scale back support for Kyiv in its fight against Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

Republicans are currently blocking a huge new aid package for Ukraine.

Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron warned US Republicans in mid-February not to show “the weakness displayed against Hitler” as he urged American legislators to pass a bill including the additional support for Ukraine.

His remarks were slammed by some Republicans including Marjorie Taylor Greene who told a broadcaster: “I really don’t care what David Cameron has to say.

“I think that’s rude name-calling and I don’t appreciate that type of language. David Cameron needs to worry about his own country and frankly he can kiss my ass.”

During Mr Obama’s 2011 State visit, his presidential motorcade was fined for not paying the congestion charge.

A £120 penalty was imposed after the US authorities failed to pay the then £10 levy on time.

The US authorities escaped a fine for “The Beast”, the president’s high-security limousine, as the congestion charge cameras were unable to record its number plate as it was travelling slowly, close to other vehicles in Mr Obama’s motorcade.

Only one of the cars in the convoy is understood to have been issued with a fine, which the Americans refused to pay.

The American Embassy at the time defended the refusal by US diplomats to pay the C-charge insisting it was “wholly in accordance” with the 1960 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which a spokesman said “prohibits the imposition of this sort of tax on diplomatic missions”.

The US authorities have not paid C-charge fines totalling millions.

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A Friend of Obama Who Could Soon Share the World Stage With Trump

After Britain’s next election, David Lammy is likely to be foreign secretary. He’s setting out a “progressive realist” policy — and forging ties on the U.S. right, just in case.

By Mark Landler

Reporting from London

Few British politicians have American ties as deep as those of David Lammy, who is set to become Britain’s foreign secretary if the opposition Labour Party wins the coming election, as the polls suggest it will.

A son of Guyanese immigrants who grew up poor in working-class London , he spent summers with relatives in Brooklyn and Queens, working at Con Edison, before earning a master's degree at Harvard Law School and befriending Barack Obama, for whom he canvassed in Chicago during his first presidential campaign.

Yet now, on the cusp of becoming Britain’s chief diplomat, Mr. Lammy finds himself facing an uncertain, even potentially hostile, American political landscape. President Biden and the Democrats, with whom Mr. Lammy has cultivated a deep network of contacts, are fighting to hold off a resurgent Donald J. Trump.

Having been chosen by the Labour leader, Keir Starmer , partly because of his trans-Atlantic credentials, Mr. Lammy, 51, is scrambling to build ties with Republicans and, more challengingly, with those around Mr. Trump. It’s a very different American establishment from the Democratic one he knows so well.

Would Mr. Lammy pay a visit to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach estate, as David Cameron, Britain’s current foreign secretary, did two weeks ago to lobby the former president on military aid to Ukraine?

“Of course,” he said in an interview this past week in Portcullis House, the parliamentary office building across the street from Big Ben. Noting that he was headed soon to New York and Washington, he said, “I’m happy to talk to whomever the American people decide they want to run the country.”

That’s a time-tested answer for any foreign politician during an American election year, especially one from a party that has held a double-digit polling lead over the governing Conservatives for 18 months. But unlike many Europeans, who regard Mr. Trump with a mix of fear and bemusement, Mr. Lammy genuinely seems to believe he can find common ground with those in Mr. Trump’s orbit.

He has held meetings with former Trump officials like Mike Pompeo , who served as secretary of state and C.I.A. director, and Robert C. O’Brien , who was Mr. Trump’s last national security adviser. And he has struck up a relationship with Senator J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican and enthusiastic Trump convert .

Mr. Vance’s best-selling memoir, “ Hillbilly Elegy ,” he said, bore parallels to his own story, growing up with a single mother and an absent, alcoholic father, in Tottenham, where race riots convulsed the streets. Mr. Lammy, whose memoir is titled “Out of the Ashes,” said Mr. Vance’s book “reduced me to tears.”

“I said to J.D., ‘Look, we’ve got different politics, but we’re both quite strong Christians and we both share quite a tough upbringing,’” said Mr. Lammy, who would be Britain’s second Black foreign secretary after James Cleverly, a Conservative.

The challenge for Mr. Lammy is that he shares more with Mr. Obama, who was a few years ahead of him at Harvard. The two men, who met 20 years ago at a gathering for Black alumni, had dinner when Mr. Obama visited London last month. In Mr. Obama’s Washington office hangs a portrait of the former president made by Mr. Lammy’s wife, Nicola Green, an artist who chronicled his 2008 campaign.

One of Mr. Obama’s former advisers, Benjamin J. Rhodes, introduced Mr. Lammy to other Democratic lawmakers and has also become a friend. In the event of a Labour government and a second Biden administration, he predicted, “You would see a much more aligned U.S. and U.K. relationship.”

But Mr. Rhodes said Mr. Lammy’s gregarious manner and pragmatic politics would give him at least a fighting chance with a Trump administration. “I think he believes that through force of personality, he could develop relationships in that circle,” Mr. Rhodes said.

For now, Mr. Lammy is determined not to offend. Asked about Mr. Trump’s recent statement that he would tell the Russians to do “ whatever the hell they want ” to any NATO member that did not pay its fair share of the alliance’s costs, Mr. Lammy seized on the reference to burden sharing.

“Is Donald Trump right?” he said. “100 percent.”

Too many NATO countries, Mr. Lammy said, still failed to meet the alliance’s target of military spending equal to 2 percent of gross domestic product (Britain spends roughly 2.2 percent). The Labour Party has vowed to raise that to 2.5 percent, and Mr. Lammy accused the Conservatives of bleeding Britain’s armed forces down to a size they had not seen since the Napoleonic era.

“I recognize in Donald Trump an ability to use language to concentrate minds,” he said.

Other Labour veterans bear no illusions about the chemistry between a Labour government and Mr. Trump. The former president clashed with Theresa May , a Conservative prime minister, though he had better relations with Boris Johnson and praised the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, for seeking to water down Britain’s climate goals . Mr. Cameron, years before he visited Mar-a-Lago, called Mr. Trump’s threat to ban Muslims from entering the United States “ divisive, stupid and wrong .”

“A Trump government would be very difficult for a Labour government, but it would also be difficult for a Rishi Sunak government,” said Jonathan Powell, who served as chief of staff to a Labour prime minister, Tony Blair.

With the risk of a turbulent stretch in trans-Atlantic relations, Mr. Lammy is emphasizing Britain’s own neighborhood. In a new essay in Foreign Affairs magazine that lays out a foreign policy based on what he calls “progressive realism,” he said Britain needed to focus on rebuilding its security ties with the European Union, which have withered in the aftermath of Brexit.

Mending fences with Europe, Mr. Lammy said, is necessary regardless of whether Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump wins in November because the United States is increasingly preoccupied by its rivalry with China.

“For that reason, the U.K. must play its part here in Europe,” Mr. Lammy said, adding that Labour was better placed than the Conservatives to rebuild trust because of European suspicion of Brexiteers like Mr. Johnson. “Europe is keen to turn the page. The United States is keen for the U.K. to turn the page.”

Even as their strategic priorities diverge, the United States and Britain remain lashed together in conflict zones like the Middle East. British and American warplanes jointly helped repel Iran’s aerial assault on Israel.

Britain’s position on the Israel-Gaza war mirrors that of the United States, and Labour has stayed largely in sync with the Conservatives, despite pressure from its left wing to take a harder line on Israel. Mr. Lammy described the conditions in Gaza as “hell on earth,” but he has not called for Britain to suspend arms sales to Israel, as have legal experts and some members of Parliament.

While Mr. Lammy said he was “very concerned” that Israel might be violating international law, which would trigger a suspension of arms exports, he did not want to get ahead of a judgment by the government’s lawyers.

“I’m also very conscious that I and Keir Starmer might be officeholders” within the coming weeks, Mr. Lammy said, pointing to speculation that if the Conservatives suffer dire losses in local elections in early May, Mr. Sunak might call a general election .

As he contemplated that possibility, Mr. Lammy’s thoughts came back to the United States, where he said the struggles of civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the election of Mr. Obama symbolized a bend in the moral arc toward racial justice that has transformed Britain as well.

“If I have the privilege of becoming foreign minister,” he said, “I’m very conscious that I’ll be the first — it almost makes me emotional as I say it — the first foreign secretary who is the descendant of enslaved people.”

Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades. More about Mark Landler

Blinken Begins Key China Visit as Tensions Rise Over New US Foreign Aid Bill

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has begun a critical trip to China armed with a strengthened diplomatic hand following Senate approval of a foreign aid package that will provide billions of dollars in assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan as well as force TikTok’s China-based parent company to sell the social media platform -– all areas of contention between Washington and Beijing

Mark Schiefelbein

Secretary of State Antony Blinken waves as he boards a plane, Tuesday, April 23, 2024, at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., en route to China. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, Pool)

SHANGHAI (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has begun a critical trip to China armed with a strengthened diplomatic hand following Senate approval of a foreign aid package that will provide billions of dollars in assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan as well as force TikTok’s China-based parent company to sell the social media platform -– all areas of contention between Washington and Beijing.

Blinken arrived in Shanghai on Wednesday just hours after the Senate vote on the long-stalled legislation and shortly before President Joe Biden is expected to sign it into law to demonstrate U.S. resolve in defending its allies and partners. Passage of the bill will add further complications to an already complex relationship that has been strained by disagreements over numerous global and regional disputes.

Still, the fact that Blinken is making the trip — shortly after a conversation between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, a similar visit to China by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and a call between the U.S. and Chinese defense chiefs — is a sign the two sides are at least willing to discuss their differences.

Of primary interest to China, the bill sets aside $8 billion to counter Chinese threats in Taiwan and the broader Indo-Pacific and gives China’s ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok with a possible three-month extension if a sale is in progress. China has railed against U.S. assistance to Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province, and immediately condemned the move as a dangerous provocation. It also strongly opposes efforts to force TikTok’s sale.

The bill also allots $26 billion in wartime assistance to Israel and humanitarian relief to Palestinians in Gaza, and $61 billion for Ukraine to defend itself from Russia’s invasion. The Biden administration has been disappointed in China’s response to the war in Gaza and has complained loudly that Chinese support for Russia’s military-industrial sector has allowed Moscow to subvert Western sanctions and ramp up attacks on Ukraine.

Photos You Should See - April 2024

Even before Blinken landed in Shanghai — where he will have meetings on Thursday before traveling to Beijing — China’s Taiwan Affairs Office slammed the assistance to Taipei, saying it “seriously violates” U.S. commitments to China, “sends a wrong signal to the Taiwan independence separatist forces” and pushes the self-governing island republic into a “dangerous situation.”

China and the United States are the major players in the Indo-Pacific and Washington has become increasingly alarmed by Beijing’s growing aggressiveness in recent years toward Taiwan and Southeast Asian countries with which it has significant territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea .

The U.S. has strongly condemned Chinese military exercises threatening Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province and has vowed to reunify with the mainland by force if necessary. Successive U.S. administrations have steadily boosted military support and sales for Taiwan, much to Chinese anger.

A senior State Department official said last week that Blinken would “underscore, both in private and public, America’s abiding interest in maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. We think that is vitally important for the region and the world.”

In the South China Sea, the U.S. and others have become increasingly concerned by provocative Chinese actions in and around disputed areas.

In particular, the U.S. has voiced objections to what it says are Chinese attempts to thwart legitimate maritime activities by others in the sea, notably the Philippines and Vietnam. That was a major topic of concern this month when Biden held a three-way summit with the prime minister of Japan and the president of the Philippines.

On Ukraine, which U.S. officials say will be a primary topic of conversation during Blinken’s visit, the Biden administration said that Chinese support has allowed Russia to largely reconstitute its defense industrial base, affecting not only the war in Ukraine but posing a threat to broader European security.

“If China purports on the one hand to want good relations with Europe and other countries, it can’t on the other hand be fueling what is the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War,” Blinken said last week.

China says it has the right to trade with Russia and accuses the U.S. of fanning the flames by arming and funding Ukraine. “It is extremely hypocritical and irresponsible for the U.S. to introduce a large-scale aid bill for Ukraine while making groundless accusations against normal economic and trade exchanges between China and Russia,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Tuesday.

On the Middle East, U.S. officials, from Biden on down, have repeatedly appealed to China to use any leverage it may have with Iran to prevent Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza from spiraling into a wider regional conflict.

While China appears to have been generally receptive to such calls — particularly because it depends heavily on oil imports from Iran and other Mideast nations — tensions have steadily increased since the beginning of the Gaza war in October and more recent direct strikes and counterstrikes between Israel and Iran.

Blinken has pushed for China to take a more active stance in pressing Iran not to escalate tensions in the Middle East . He has spoken to his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, several times urging China to tell Iran to restrain the proxy groups it has supported in the region, including Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria.

The senior State Department official said Blinken would reiterate the U.S. interest in China using “whatever channels or influence it has to try to convey the need for restraint to all parties, including Iran.”

The U.S. and China are also at deep odds over human rights in China’s western Xinjiang region, Tibet and Hong Kong, as well as the fate of several American citizens that the State Department says have been “wrongfully detained” by Chinese authorities, and the supply of precursors to make the synthetic opioid fentanyl that is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans.

China has repeatedly rejected the American criticism of its rights record as improper interference in its internal affairs. Yet, Blinken will again raise these issues, according to the State Department official.

Another department official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity to preview Blinken's private talks with Chinese officials, said China had made efforts to rein in the export of materials that traffickers use to make fentanyl but that more needs to be done.

The two sides agreed last year to set up a working group to look into ways to combat the surge of production of fentanyl precursors in China and their export abroad. U.S. officials say they believe they had made some limited progress on cracking down on the illicit industry but many producers had found ways to get around new restrictions.

“We need to see continued and sustained progress,” the official said, adding that “more regular law enforcement” against Chinese precursor producers “would send a strong signal of China’s commitment to address this issue.”

Copyright 2024 The  Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

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Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC .

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Senate passes bill renewing key FISA surveillance power moments after it expires

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted to reauthorize a powerful surveillance tool the U.S. government describes as critical to combating terrorism, after defeating efforts by civil liberties advocates on the left and right to rein it in.

The vote of 60-34 sends the bill to President Joe Biden, who has championed it. The legislation extends Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act , or FISA, for two more years.

The final vote came after the Senate defeated six amendments from progressive and conservative senators who said the spying powers are too broad and demanded protections for Americans’ civil liberties and privacy. The Biden administration and FISA supporters had warned that even a brief lapse could have a detrimental impact on the intelligence-gathering process.

Senators just missed the midnight deadline to reauthorize the FISA Section 702 statute but voted to reauthorize it minutes later. Had any amendments been adopted, the bill would have been sent back to the House, potentially forcing a lengthy lapse of the law.

“In the nick of time, bipartisanship has prevailed here in the Senate,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said.

“It wasn’t easy, people had many different views, but we all know one thing: letting FISA expire would have been dangerous. It’s an important part of our national security to stop acts of terror, drug trafficking, and violent extremism,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “Thank you to all my Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle for their good work in getting this done.”

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Frank Thorp V is a producer and off-air reporter covering Congress for NBC News, managing coverage of the Senate.

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Ryan Nobles is a correspondent covering Capitol Hill.

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How streaming, mergers and other major changes are upending Hollywood

Tonya Mosley

Nearly a year after the Hollywood writers' strike started, the entertainment industry remains in flux. Harpers journalist Daniel Bessner says TV and film writers are feeling the brunt of the changes.

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. On the cover of the May issue of Harper's Magazine is a provocative image - a black-and-white clapper board, the kind we see in movies during the filming of a scene where a director yells cut - with the words, "The End Of Hollywood As We Know it." Cover story writer Daniel Bessner makes the argument that seven months after the strike that essentially shut down Hollywood, the industry is now facing an existential threat like never before. And television and film writers, Bessner says, are the ones losing out. And there is no one reason why - the merging of big studios, the continued disruption of streaming services, and the lack of regulation have all created an environment that has displaced workers with top talent making more than ever before, and the nuts and bolts workers losing out dramatically, writes Bessner. One of the biggest disruptors, the merging of big studios, continues to impact the industry. Just this week, we learned news that three separate entities are in talks to acquire Paramount, one of Hollywood's biggest studios, which experts say will cause even more disruption.

Daniel Bessner joins us to talk about what this all means for workers and for us, the consumer. He's an associate professor at the University of Washington's Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. His work is focused on U.S. foreign relations, the history and theory of liberalism, and most recently, the history and practice of the entertainment industry. He's the author of "Democracy In Exile: Hans Speier And The Rise Of The Defense Intellectual" and the co-editor of several historical books on domestic histories and foreign relations. Daniel Bessner, welcome to FRESH AIR.

DANIEL BESSNER: Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure and honor.

BESSNER: Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure and honor.

MOSLEY: Daniel, you teach foreign and U.S. policy, and you most recently began writing about the entertainment industry. What is it about this moment that has caught your attention, that you think speaks to a greater issue?

BESSNER: So what got me interested in exploring this subject more broadly was effectively the decline of journalism and the decline of academia, which have different causes, although journalism, I think, a lot of what happened rhymes in terms of private equity entering and...

MOSLEY: Yes.

BESSNER: ...Hedge funds entering and destroying newspapers, and traditional media - a lot of that rhymes with what's happening in Hollywood. But what fascinated me about Hollywood is that it's really the last place in the United States, perhaps the world, where you could, at least until very recently, get paid to be a writer. That's not really possible in other spheres. You know, you read about people writing science fiction stories in the 1940s and 1950s and making a living off that - you know, Harlan Ellison, people like that. That's simply impossible. And the only place that you can still be a writer is in Hollywood, partially because it's unionized, but partially because it's in an industry that made money. So I'm ultimately interested and was ultimately interested in exploring that idea of the writer in contemporary capitalism and how the writer's fortunes have changed in the last roughly century, the article kind of begins in the '20s.

MOSLEY: Daniel, as we see all of these changes to the industry, the merging of companies, the struggling of creatives and what they're experiencing, how much of the bad guy is streaming - Netflix, Hulu, and all of the others?

BESSNER: (Laughter) So, it's interesting. Walter Leman - I think it was Walter Leman once had a quote that, you know, a pump is a pump, and it's how you use it that matters. Streaming in and of itself could be anything. It could actually have been a boon to the industry. But I think the problem is that there was a gold rush mentality when it came to the famous streaming wars, as they're called, because the goal of the companies and particularly Netflix - and I just - you have to hand it to Netflix. They really did succeed in disrupting a business, and they are profitable, and they are doing quite well, and they have entered the culture. But the notion was that a particular streaming service would become the dominant force in Hollywood, just like Uber and Lyft have...

MOSLEY: Right.

BESSNER: ...Disrupted/killed...

MOSLEY: The taxi industry.

BESSNER: ...The taxis, and Amazon has effectively destroyed a lot of medium and small businesses.

MOSLEY: Yes, but you know, there are many disruptions to the television and film industry. I thought it was interesting how one historian told you that with each major technological innovation - for instance, from cable to VHS tapes to DVDs, and now streaming, there's always been a disruption of some kind with...

BESSNER: Totally.

MOSLEY: ...Advancements. So what I'm trying to understand is whether what we're seeing is an extension of something that happens every decade or so, or is something more alarming and irreversible happening. And is it happening in combination with everything else you're telling us about?

BESSNER: It's a great point. And, you know, when the VHS was introduced or when DVDs were introduced or initially when internet-streamed content was introduced, the studios always claim they have no idea what's going on, so they can't pay writers enough, et cetera. The difference is that the internet isn't regulated, that the cables that carry Netflix are not regulated in the same way that the cables that carried a traditional cable bundle were regulated. And that's really simply it, is that in this era of deregulation, which began in Reagan and was solidified under Bush and Obama, and, of course, Trump, that it's just not regulated in the same way. So you essentially had a frontier of technology that was able to be taken advantage of by the capitalists who run the entertainment industry and the American political economy as a whole.

MOSLEY: What are some of the ways that streaming has disrupted the traditional models - so from writers and producers pitching an idea to working on it to being paid for it to sing it out in the world?

BESSNER: It's a great point because initially, people welcomed streaming, very much so, particularly Netflix, because what Netflix would do is that they would oftentimes, I think, actually always, guarantee creators that if the show was purchased and green lighted after, you know, several stages of development, they would make an entire season of the show, and you didn't have to worry about things like Nielsen ratings. For example, I talked to a couple of producers, and they were like, yeah, we'd wake up and we'd look at the Nielsen ratings, and at first, when we were dealing with Netflix, it felt so freeing to not have to do that. So there were significant benefits to Netflix initially, not only in the fact that they didn't focus on ratings, but they greenlighted quite adventurous shows and not only Netflix, but other streaming services. Netflix famously had "BoJack Horseman," but other services had things like "I Love Dick" or "Dickinson," a show based on a 19th-century poet, which probably would have been greenlighted in the 1980s or 1990s. So there were some benefits. However, over time, and as often happens in gold rushes, gold rushes aren't good for working conditions because a lot of people are trying to strike that gold vein and get rich quick. So it created, for a variety of reasons, downward pressure, first on writers' wages, and then on writers' working conditions. In particular, people have spoken about mini-rooms, which are basically writers' rooms that are convened before the production of a show as the show is being developed. Usually they don't last very long - about eight to ten weeks. I spoke with someone whose writers' room actually lasted only four weeks.

MOSLEY: And how are the mini-rooms different from how it was done before?

BESSNER: Right. So in a traditional pilot season or when you're writing a show that has been greenlighted, you know, in the 1990s or 2000s for 13 or 22 episodes, a writer's room would be convened for that show throughout production. And it's really important that a room lasts throughout production because that is effectively how the industry reproduced itself. When you're a young writer writing on a show that's being literally made, you would oftentimes go to set. You would learn how to talk to actors. You would learn how to stay within budget. You would learn what it was like to be on an actual set. But in a mini-room that is often dispersed before a show is put into production, you don't get that experience, and you're also - might be added, you're usually employed for a far less amount of time.

Traditionally, in a pilot season, writers would have been employed for, like, eight months, let's say. Where in a mini-room, you're employed for 2 1/2 months, and then it's very difficult to get another job. So you have to go back and work at the Apple Store or drive Lyft, which means you're not working on your craft to the same degree, which means you're not getting the experience that you would have gotten in a traditional writer's room. So it's the industry kind of cannibalizing its future in the search for short-term and medium-term profits, which was partially the result of the entry of high finance, and thus financial incentives, into film and television production.

MOSLEY: I mean, this is significant because I think that those who may not know how the industry works may hear writers in a creative industry and think, well, these people are privileged. I mean, these are not regular working people. But there are reports that there's food insecurity now within a huge contingent of writers in Hollywood who now have no work or limited work, or they're working in the way that you are describing here. What are some of the stories that you've heard?

BESSNER: I think that's a great point. And it reflects a broader proletarianization of creative fields. You might have also heard that many professors are mostly - roughly three-fourths of them, according to some studies, are adjuncts. And you see something happening similar in Hollywood. So when I would talk to young writers in particular - and frankly not that young, you know, people in their 30s who had broken into the industry about 10 years ago - it's just very difficult to make a stable living. Moving from show to show is not especially easy. You're employed for less amount of time. There are fewer people employed at each job.

So you're actually not living the high life of what one would have imagined a Hollywood writer lived in the 1990s and into the 2000s, which is - again, I want to emphasize, this is just American capitalism doing what American capitalism does, except now it's coming for white-collar workers. If it happened for blue-collar workers in the '60s and the '70s, it's now happening in the last 20 years for creatives - again, journalists, academics and Hollywood writers. So this is why I think you might get - there might be some anger from people whose fields had already been destroyed. If you were, for example, cutting timber or working in mines...

MOSLEY: Sure.

BESSNER: ...Or working in a factory, maybe you don't want to hear about whiny Hollywood writers. But to me, we're all kind of in this together as laborers. But it is difficult work that takes a lot of skill to accomplish, and one should be properly remunerated, especially when the high-level executives are making so much money. So one thing that I hope to do for people who just view this as a bunch of Hollywood writers is to actually see that there's solidarity to be built across class lines because if capitalism isn't coming for you today, it's coming for you tomorrow.

MOSLEY: Well, let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest today is writer and associate professor Daniel Bessner. We're talking with him about his latest article for Harper's Magazine titled "The Life And Death Of Hollywood" about the existential threat film and television writers face after the writers and actors strike last year. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF AWREEOH SONG, "CAN'T BRING ME DOWN" )

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and today I'm talking to Daniel Bessner. He's a writer and associate professor of American foreign policy at the University of Washington, where he focuses his work, among other things, on the history and practice of the entertainment industry. His latest article for Harper's, titled "The Life And Death Of Hollywood," is about the existential threat film and television writers face after the writers strike last year and what it means for the entertainment industry at large.

Daniel, I want to get to some of what you've written about how we got here. So to understand it, you take us in your article all the way back to the 1920s and '30s, when there were a handful of studios and screenwriters. They made careers out of this versus the model that we see today, which is a significant number of people are now freelance writers. This is not a full-time gig, as you said. They have other jobs. What was the average salary back then for a writer compared to today?

BESSNER: So maybe just to give some context before I talk about salaries is that there was something called the studio system where writers were actually employed by specific studios, and they had stable work. And the studios were producing an enormous number of movies each year over the '20s, '30s, '40s and into the 1950s. And when you were working for a studio in 1931, you were making more than $14,000 a year for a full-time - if you were a full-time salaried employee on average, which is about $273,000 in today's money. So it was...

MOSLEY: Wow.

BESSNER: ...Really quite - yeah, it was quite good. And more importantly even than good-paid work, it was stable work. You knew where you were going every day into work. And believe me. The writers complained. I don't want to paint this as some golden age. There was a lot of complaining from the writers who were working in Hollywood at that time. They felt that their bosses...

MOSLEY: About what?

BESSNER: ...Didn't respect...

MOSLEY: Yeah.

BESSNER: ...Their - the bosses didn't respect their art. They expected them to do a lot of work. They weren't necessarily in control of their artistic vision. But in exchange for that, they had good salaried work.

MOSLEY: Well, something happened in 1933. Both MGM and Paramount Pictures cut screenwriters' pay by 50%. Why?

BESSNER: So basically, Hollywood actually did fairly well for the first years of the Depression, which, of course, started in 1929. People wanted to escape. The full unemployment hadn't yet hit the entire economy, but by 1933, things were getting a bit hairy. So there's a very famous story of, I believe, Louis B. Mayer going in front of all the contract workers, the salaried employees of MGM, and basically, hat in hand, you know, kind of - not literally crying but, you know, saying, we need to take a cut. Otherwise, you're all going to - the business will close. And so, you know, some actor got up, and then writers got up, and they all said they would agree to take the cut. But then some writers found out that the executives didn't necessarily take the cut. And more importantly, the below-the-line workers, who, I believe, were in proto-IATSE at that point, also didn't take a cut.

So there had been something called the Screen Writers Guild that had been percolating for some time in Hollywood. It was somewhere between a union and a social club. But after this stunt by MGM and Paramount in early 1933, a bunch of writers came together and decided that they needed to actually form a union, which was eventually certified later in the 1930s and, after quite a few years of negotiation, finally got its first contract in 1942. But...

MOSLEY: And that provided a baseline...

BESSNER: ...To make a long story short...

MOSLEY: ...Of pay, right?

BESSNER: Yes.

MOSLEY: That provided a baseline of pay, right?

BESSNER: Yes, a baseline to pay of $125 a week if you were a salaried employee, which is about $2,500 today - so quite good, particularly when you're guaranteed work as a salaried employee. So it's the old story. The capitalists went too far, and then labor decided to fight back.

MOSLEY: Can you explain the Supreme Court ruling in 1948, which I'm bringing up? It's important to note as we think about today, because this ruling found that these major motion picture companies had conspired to fix prices and monopolize the industry. What was happening that brought this all the way to the Supreme Court?

BESSNER: Sure. So there was a studio - the studio system was dominated by five big companies and three smaller companies. But it was effectively the smaller studios who came together to accuse the larger companies of effectively making it a non-competitive industry. And they were right. The big eight - or the big five and the smaller three - effectively had monopoly power in Hollywood. And one of the major reasons that they were able to have that power was that they owned the distribution networks. But most importantly, and this is what the Paramount decrees - that's what they were called - of 1948 was about, they owned the movie theater chains.

And so effectively what the Supreme Court did is that, if I recall, they basically said you had to either get rid of distribution or exhibition. And the major companies got rid of the exhibition part because they ultimately decided that they were truly in the distribution business. So you get the movie theater companies, movie theater chains essentially being spun off as a result of these Paramount decrees in 1948, which was effectively the outcome of decades of capital P, Brandeisian - Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice - thought about anti-monopoly, antitrust legislation.

And now, Hollywood had been a monopoly for a long time. But during the '30s, during the Depression, during World War II, it wasn't considered to be a major concern. So it was only really after the war that Hollywood was demonopolized.

MOSLEY: So for a time, you write, screenwriters for many decades, they were still able to make a living, though. There were even interventions from the federal government to institute a minimum pay - until the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. How did Reagan's governing impact Hollywood?

BESSNER: Sure. I think it's actually important just to pause very quickly on the '50s, because the '50s is an important decade because it's a transitional period where the studio system, like - it just happened, the Paramount decrees. So there still weren't writers on salary, but there's more and more freelance work. So there's a 1960s strike with the WGA and the Screen Actors Guild. And it's as the result of these strikes that a stable gig work-life is created. So even though you're a gig worker like a writer, unlike other industries, you get health benefits. The studios agree to contribute to pensions. There's increased minimums for work, and you got more and more residuals for material that was rebroadcast.

So what happens is at a moment when, Tonya, as you probably know, journalism was quite a stable career - you know, you go and work for the Baltimore Sun and you could stay there for 40 years. That wasn't true in Hollywood by the middle of the 20th century. But nevertheless, if you worked, you were able to have some of the benefits that you would have had in a traditional salaried job.

What changes in the 1980s is the rise - and this is really the work of Jennifer Holt, who wrote a wonderful book called "Empires Of Entertainment," who really goes into the details of this, which is that there was a new ideology - what might be termed in today's parlance a neoliberal ideology - that began to permeate elite spheres as the so-called New Deal Order of the 1930s to the 1970s began to come apart. And so you see with the rise of Reagan a very strong embrace of deregulation, most famously with the air traffic controllers' union...

BESSNER: ...Which Reagan effectively broke, but also in Hollywood. There was a new ideology that began to permeate the American elite. That was very pro deregulation. And there's a lot of tensions and contradictions about how this affected writers, but that's the long - a short story long (laughter).

MOSLEY: Well, I mean, what happened was the combining of cable and film and broadcast network interests in direct violation of antitrust law. Why was this allowed to happen?

BESSNER: Tonya, what you're referring to, of course, is in 1983, the Department of Justice allowed HBO, which already existed, Columbia Pictures and CBS to form a new company called TriStar Pictures, which, like you said, combined these cable, film and broadcast interests in direct violation of antitrust law.

So what happened was that the Reagan administration, particularly the DOJ as, of course, an executive institution, did an end run around Congress. Without Congress actually deregulating the economy, which would come later, the executive department said, we're no longer going to enforce elements of antitrust and anti-monopoly law, which basically allowed the formation of enormous conglomerates in the 1980s. And in 1985, the DOJ said, we're not going to enforce the Paramount decrees any longer. So that is a big shift in the history of Hollywood from being a very regulated industry to where we are now, a almost totally unregulated industry.

MOSLEY: Our guest today is writer and associate professor Daniel Bessner. We're talking with him about his latest article for Harper's about the existential crisis film and television writers are now facing post-strike and what it means for the entertainment industry. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ALEX NORTH'S "STAN AND STELLA")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And if you're just joining us, my guest today is writer and associate professor Daniel Bessner. He writes about the history and practice of the entertainment industry. His latest article for Harper's magazine is about the fate of the entertainment industry, titled "The Life and Death of Hollywood - Film And Television Writers Face An Existential Threat." Bessner is an associate professor of American foreign policy at the University of Washington. He's the author of "Democracy In Exile: Hans Speier And The Rise Of The Defense Intellectual" and the co-editor of several historical books on domestic histories and foreign relations. His writing has been published in various publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

So learning this history certainly puts what we're seeing today into focus. You write about how the rollback of protections continued into the Clinton administration. And around this time - we're talking about the '90s - cross ownership, as you write, flourished. Viacom merged with Blockbuster Video and took over Paramount. Disney merged with Capital Cities/ABC, Time Warner joined Turner Broadcasting. What did all of this merging then set in motion?

BESSNER: Clinton did two things. He got rid of the financial interest and syndication rules, which were initiated by the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, in 19th century, and which, in effect, barred networks from holding ownership stakes in the prime time and syndicated programs that they air, which, in effect, although not specifically prohibited film studios from owning TV networks and vice versa, because it didn't really make business sense, and so you actually have increased competition. And it's this reason that someone like Norman Lear and someone like Lucille Ball were able to become so wealthy because these independent producers were actually able to compete in a real way with major companies, which is something that's simply impossible.

And then in 1996, Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, which removed the statutory restrictions on the cross ownership of broadcast networks and cable providers. So you basically get a regulatory environment where film studios, cable stations, broadcast stations could all be owned by the same gigantic conglomerate. And this is the era of great synergy, where, you know, if you're a conglomerate and you own a magazine and you own HBO, you could put, let's say, "Sex And The City" - I think this is the famous example everyone uses - on the cover of your magazine saying, this is the greatest show of all time, pushing people to watch the show on HBO. So this is the type of stuff that is allowed in this deregulated environment, which simply would not have been allowed earlier on in American history.

MOSLEY: I want to talk for a moment about how asset management firms became basically the largest stakeholders in media and entertainment. So in 2008, in an effort to stimulate the economy, the Federal Reserve began cutting interest rates. How did that open the door for asset management companies and private equity firms to step into the industry and gain such a hold?

BESSNER: In brief, two things happened. Companies were looking for places to invest particularly after the.com crash of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the liquid capital that was plunged into the system and the lowering of interest rates provided them with money and access to what is effectively cheap credit. And so people in finance understand that there's more going on there, but that's the long and the short of it. And so it's at this moment in the late 2000ps, early 2010s that high finance, private equity firms, asset management companies, but also hedge funds, really begin to invest seriously in Hollywood because they're looking for, in effect, places to invest. And the argument that scholars like Robert Brenner and others make is that since roughly the 1970s and the era of deindustrialization, that there's been fewer and fewer places to actually profitably invest in the American economy. Because media, as you probably know, isn't necessarily the greatest business. It depends on hits. Oftentimes, returns are not especially high. But one of the reasons that these companies invested in traditional media that they tried to disrupt and did to a significant degree with Netflix, which is very successful, was that there really aren't other places to invest.

MOSLEY: One insider told you that these old large legacy institutions used to be able to have a longer-term view of the industry. They would absorb losses and take risks. Now, everything is driven by quarterly results. So essentially, they're not making decisions for the future. They're just making decisions for what is directly in front of them.

BESSNER: That's precisely right. And I think for consumers, it's important to view this - or it's almost natural to view this from a place of the art and the content that is actually produced. The greatest shows of the so-called prestige TV era - think about "The Sopranos" or "The Wire" or "Breaking Bad" or what have you - were primarily made by people who came up in the television industry of the '80s and '90s like David Chase, David Simon, Vince Gilligan and others. And the only reason that they were able to make such great art was - I think it's Blake Masters had a great quote is because they understood everything about television - said and hated all of it. He was referring to David Chase.

But they knew how to make television. They had done things like been in rooms. They had gone to set. They had talked to actors. They had, over years and years and years, developed the skills necessary to write an amazing show like "The Sopranos" and also to run it. But when you focus on short-term incentives, when you establish a system of mini rooms, you're, in effect, stealing from the industry's future because you're not letting the next generation of writers learn the skills necessary to create a brilliant piece of work like "The Sopranos," "The Wire" or "Breaking Bad." And this really begins to take off after the 2008 recession, 2007-2008 recession, as finance, as we talked about, for a variety of reasons, began to seriously enter Hollywood.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest today is writer and associate professor Daniel Bessner. We're talking with him about his latest article for Harper's, titled "The Life And Death Of Hollywood," about the existential threat film and television writers face, even after the writers' strike last year. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, I'm talking to Daniel Bessner. He's a writer and associate professor of American foreign policy at the University of Washington, where he focuses his work among other things on the history and practice of the entertainment industry. His latest article for Harper's, titled "The Life And Death Of Hollywood," is about the existential threat film and television writers face after the writers' strike last year and what it means for the entertainment industry.

One of the things you write about that I think was really interesting - we talk about it all the time - is that we see a pattern now of repackaged stories, like all of the superhero stories and remakes. When did executives begin to make these bigger bets on pre-existing intellectual property, which you've been talking about, versus original content?

BESSNER: It's a really important question, and I hope to expand this into a book and get into this more in detail. But to give a potted history, in the mid- to late-1970s, you get the rise of the blockbuster first with "Jaws," but really with "Star Wars." So you get the rise of tentpole movies. In 1989, you get "Batman." "Batman" is released. And "Batman" is not only a gigantic tentpole, but it is also based on previous intellectual property, and perhaps even more important, it's able to be - it's in the conglomerate era or the early conglomerate era of Hollywood. So a conglomerate's - all of its systems could work together to push "Batman." You could have "Batman" Happy meals, "Batman" video games, "Batman" toys...

MOSLEY: Right, right, yup.

BESSNER: ...Numerous sequels, et cetera, et cetera. So I think "Batman" is really this crucial turning point because it lets executives realize that there could be significant value in intellectual property and pre-existing intellectual property, that you don't need to take a gamble on someone like George Lucas who may have a "Star Wars" in him. You could take a gamble on stories and characters that audiences are familiar with, and that this is, like one executive I spoke to said, it's a dry run for a story, and you at least have a sense theoretically about how audiences will respond to it, and you have a sense, you know, audiences like "Batman," so they'll see "Batman." But another thing that - why this gets supercharged, as high finance enters Hollywood in the late 2000s, particularly, of course, the Marvel cinematic universe - "Iron Man" is, I believe, released in 2008. So it's happening at the same time- is that you have the money to basically plan out dozens of movies, and you also have IP, intellectual property, as something that is legible to financial investors. It is in theory - in a business where very little is quantifiable because it's based on taste, and as William Goldman says, no one knows anything. You don't really know it's going to be a hit - IP is something that could be legible to the quantitative guys.

You could say, this has been a comic that's been in existence for 50 years. Everyone really loves "Iron Man," which wasn't necessarily true, but you could say everyone really loves "Iron Man." He's such a popular character, and we're going to create this whole universe of films, and we already know it's going to be a success because these are some of the most indelible characters in American history.

MOSLEY: It's just crazy. You write about how some of the writers have told you that working for a show with existing IP like a Marvel cinematic universe that sometimes they don't even know the full arc of the project when they're brought on as writers. So they're writing something that they don't even see the bigger picture for.

BESSNER: Because there's a larger vision in terms of a - the executive is really the creator of the cinematic universe, even if writers and directors are the - of individual movies. So if you're hired to write, you know, "Thor 2," or whatever it is, "Thor 2" fits into a larger tapestry of films that the executive class is more aware of than you are as a writer, and you're effectively in hoc to whatever they want. Because, one, you're being paid a lot of money. And two, you don't necessarily know the full tapestry, and that tapestry is, of course, ever- changing. So this, again, makes the writer less important with Marvel in particular. And with many Marvel movies, the first thing that's made is not even the script, but literally the art scenes of fights, because that is what ultimately...

MOSLEY: That's the action.

BESSNER: ...Sells the movie...

MOSLEY: That's the action, right.

BESSNER: ...That's the action, and also what you have going on here is you get the relative stagnation of the domestic box office in 2000s. Movies are becoming less and less important to culture. Everyone knows this. That's a story that we are well aware of. And you have a shift to international markets, particularly China, because China is really only developing its film industry in the 2000s. So there's enormous growth opportunities and something that travels well, unlike, let's say courtroom dramas or specific American comedies are gigantic action films, that, you know...

BESSNER: ...Punching is the international language. And so you get a focus on these sorts of films partially also for the international market.

MOSLEY: The Marvel cinematic universe is hugely popular. You write about how it then has become a template. But I'm just wondering if it's still working, because didn't Disney's "The Marvel" (ph) come in more than $60 million short of breaking even? What does that say, if anything? Is that seen as a fluke, or is it seen as something to be concerned about?

BESSNER: I think it's pretty clear that there's something called superhero fatigue in audiences, that audiences aren't necessarily lining up to see another 25 films about superheroes. The question is how does that affect intellectual property? Because in Hollywood, everyone's talking, rightly - "Barbie" did incredibly well. And is that not the ultimate intellectual property? It's literally an inanimate toy.

MOSLEY: But it also is just one. It's one. Like, it's one...

BESSNER: Totally right.

MOSLEY: ...Project that's up against what we're seeing as a trend.

BESSNER: Yeah, there's one project, and there's a lot of uniqueness about it. Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach were given a lot of freedom. Greta, I think, created, like an enormously, incredibly visually stunning tapestry for the movie. Is Jerry Seinfeld's Pop Tarts movie going to do as well? I don't know. If there's a Slinky movie, which I believe coming, is that going to do as well? I don't know. Particularly because the pendulum has swung so far. But in the late 1980s, I think roughly 40% of the money that was produced by the top 100 films domestically was produced by original work, original screenplays. And by the late 2010s, I forget the year, but that number had dropped to something like 6%.

So it's such an incredible swing in the other direction that it's naturally going to return to some form of normal. People do want original screen plays. What the new normal is, though. I think it remains to be seen. But if I had to guess, I think audiences are a little sick of superheroes, and they might be also sick of intellectual property more broadly, and they might be craving something new - remains to be seen.

MOSLEY: OK, Daniel, we've been talking this entire time about the problems. You give your assessment at the end of your piece on what you think should happen and then what is feasible. What are some solutions or interventions?

BESSNER: It's kind of funny. I tweeted about this today. I'm like, oh, why do millennials have to deal with antitrust law? We figured out this stuff a hundred years ago. But the government needs to regulate monopolies at base. If you don't...

MOSLEY: How realistic is that, the possibility that that would happen?

BESSNER: Almost impossible (laughter). And they would also have to regulate high finance. Now, the question is - and this ties into broader themes is - that we do live presently in a gerontocracy, that a lot of the people who are making the decisions in these institutions, particularly the politicians - not all of them, of course, but many of them - were politicized and came of age in a different era, particularly in the Reagan era, where deregulation was meant to unleash the forces of the political economy. When the gerontocracy fades away, due a variety of natural processes, IE dying, when younger people come in and actually assume positions of authority, are they going to do things like re-regulate the economy, enforce antitrust law, re-regulate high finance? That might very well happen. But given the state of American politics right now, it seems very unlikely.

And of course, we had to take out these numbers because there wasn't space to do it. But when you take the amount of money that all the conglomerates spend on lobbying versus what, let's say, the WGA spends on lobbying, you'll be surprised to learn that it absolutely dwarfs it. So there's all these larger problems in American politics from money and politics to the gerontocracy, that, in my opinion, at least, make it very unlikely that the most obvious things that need to be done for Hollywood to become a healthy business - from getting accomplished. So, effectively, that leaves it up to labor. And so one of the major solutions that I think will need to be accomplished, particularly because I believe that government action on monopolies and finance is unlikely to be forthcoming, is that all the Hollywood unions, the Writers Guild, the WGA, the Actors Guild, SAG-AFTRA, the Directors Guild, the WGA and also the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which is popularly known as IATSE, I-A-T-S-E.

They represent the, quote-unquote, "proverbial sound guy," camera men or women for that matter, stage hands, gaffers, the people who really make the industry go around would be for all of these unions to come together and do an industry wide - first, ideally a negotiation. But then if the AMPTP doesn't agree to various demands, to participate in a strike that would have as its goal the actual restructuring of the industry. This is, of course, very difficult to accomplish for a variety of reasons. A strike like this would have an enormously negative effect, to be frank, in the short term on many of these workers from IATSE on down. And so if I were, you know, the god of labor, and I was waving around my wand, I would say all the Hollywood unions, every single one, the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, the WGA, but really, really, importantly, IATSE as well, which might very well go on strike in a few months, they need to do a broad, industry-wide strike.

MOSLEY: Daniel Bessner, thank you so much for this conversation.

BESSNER: Thank you so much for having me. It was a genuine pleasure.

MOSLEY: Daniel Bessner is a writer and associate professor of American foreign policy at the University of Washington. His latest article for Harper's is titled "The Life And Death Of Hollywood." Coming up, book critic Maureen Corrigan shares an appreciation of the letters of Emily Dickinson. This is FRESH AIR.

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