Foreign policy challenges for the new administration.

Sempa, Francis P.

Foreign Policy Challenges for the New Administration

By John R. Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN

Reviewed by Francis P. Sempa, Contributing Editor

Text: http://www.fpri.org/enotes/200811.bolton.foreignpolicynewadministration.html

In his recent keynote address at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, John Bolton, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and high-level State Department official, outlined the many foreign policy challenges facing the new Obama administration when it takes office on January 20, 2009.

Although the economic crisis has dominated the news, Bolton warned that foreign policy challenges will not wait around for the economic problems to be solved. "Foreign policy and national security," he stated, "will remain at the top of the agenda as they have to for any president." The collapse of the Soviet Union, Bolton said, ended the "existential threat to our existence" that we faced for more than 40 years, but "the number of adversaries we face in the world and the complexity of international affairs if anything has increased."

Russia still poses a challenge to U.S. security as it seeks to reestablish hegemony over the territory of the former Soviet Union. The region between the eastern border of NATO and the western border of Russia, according to Bolton, is a geopolitical vacuum which "gives rise to the potential for instability and to the possibility for further Russian adventurism."

Bolton noted that it is still unclear whether China's inevitable rise will be benign and peaceful, as many hope, or turbulent and disruptive, as many fear. What is clear, however, is that China is steadily enhancing its conventional and nuclear military capabilities, including its naval power, "potentially challenging American predominance in the western Pacific for the first time since 1945."

Other challenges highlighted by Bolton include the India-Pakistan rivalry; Iraq, Iran, and the problems of terrorism and potential nuclear proliferation in the Middle East; and North Korea. The United States will have to meet these challenges, Bolton believes, in a world where its principal allies in Europe will be in "relative decline."

For the incoming Obama administration, it will be "a time of great testing," and "the decisions the new administration makes will affect us ... in some cases for decades to come."