President Obama will deliver his first State of the Union address to Congress tonight. As this report in the Washington Post notes, it is expected that domestic issues will dominate the speech. I’m fairly certain that some foreign policy issues will mentioned, but probably not as many as I would like. From a U.S. role perspective, I’m hoping that President Obama will mention the U.S. role in helping Haiti recover from the recent earthquake, the U.S. role in promoting political reform and reconciliation in Iraq, fighting the war in Afghanistan, negotiating a new arms control treaty with Russia, and countering emerging global threats like climate change. If you would like to participate in a web chat on these issues, Brookings President Strobe Talbott, former deputy secretary of state, and POLITICO senior editor Fred Barbash will be hosting a web chat on Global Threats at 12:30PM EST.

You are invited to participate in an online discussion today about “Obama’s Foreign Policy—One Year On” hosted by BBC Live at Carnegie. The online event will bring together foreign policy experts and scholars Jessica Tuchman Mathews, Robert Kagan, Douglas H. Paal, Paul Salem,  Robin Lustig, Ashraf Ghani to assess, “President Obama’s first year in office and the chief challenges that lie ahead: strengthening the nonproliferation regime, climate change, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Iran, and Afghanistan.” The event will be broadcast from 5:00-6:30 p.m. ET. You may submit questions for the panel ahead of the event here.

Stratfor is a global intelligence company founded in 1996 that is well respected for both the breadth and depth of their strategic analysis. In the following video report, Stratfor founder George Friedman examines the U.S. relationships with Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, noting U.S. goals and the likely complications that may arise in this new year. He expresses pessimism regarding prospects for sanctions in persuading Iran to curb their nuclear program as well as doubts about achieving a military victory in Afghanistan.

The timeline for withdrawal that President Obama mentioned in his West Point speech has emerged as one of the more controversial aspects of the troop surge. In his speech, the President said:

But taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011. Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground.

The timeline for withdrawals has provoked opposition from Republicans as well as Democrats who believe that an announced withdrawal date will prompt the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies to simply wait out U.S. forces. Is the deadline firm or flexible? How will the U.S. assess when conditions on the ground permit an orderly withdrawal of forces? In Afghanistan: How Long Until We Know Brookings analysts Michael O’Hanlon and Bruce Riedel suggest that it won’t be a measure of battlefield success against the Taliban that determines the likelihood of withdrawal, but rather the new capacity and capability of the Afghan security forces, something they say we will be in a position to clearly assess by the middle of 2011.

I was impressed with President Obama’s speech at West Point last night. He clearly explained why he was sending an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, he explained what they would do there, and he explained when they would come home. He also anticipated objections to the troop buildup and responded to them. From a U.S. Role standpoint, I was particularly impressed by the way he placed the effort in Afghanistan in the historical context of U.S. world leadership:

Since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, and the service and sacrifice of our grandparents and great-grandparents, our country has borne a special burden in global affairs.  We have spilled American blood in many countries on multiple continents.  We have spent our revenue to help others rebuild from rubble and develop their own economies.  We have joined with others to develop an architecture of institutions — from the United Nations to NATO to the World Bank — that provide for the common security and prosperity of human beings.

We have not always been thanked for these efforts, and we have at times made mistakes.  But more than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades — a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down, and markets open, and billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress and advancing frontiers of human liberty.

For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination.  Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations.  We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours.  What we have fought for — what we continue to fight for — is a better future for our children and grandchildren.  And we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.  (Applause.)

As a country, we’re not as young — and perhaps not as innocent — as we were when Roosevelt was President.  Yet we are still heirs to a noble struggle for freedom.  And now we must summon all of our might and moral suasion to meet the challenges of a new age.

Framing the effort in this way helps provide a sense of continuity between the victories of our past and the challenges ahead and while many questions remain to be answered, Obama’s speech defined the war in Afghanistan in a manner consistent with the traditional post-WWII view of the U.S. role in the world: We are a superpower doing those things that a superpower needs to do, not only for our own security, but for the security of the world.

If you missed the speech, the White House has archived the transcript and I’ve added the video below. Finally, I’d like to invite you to use the comments link to share your reaction to the speech. Did President Obama’s speech convince you that sending more troops to Afghanistan is the right thing to do?

President Obama will address the country tonight from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and explain his decision to send 30,000 more tropps to Afghanistan over the next six months. I’m looking over my past blog posts on the subject of Afghanistan and I’d like to call attention to this one in which Gilles Dorronsoro, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, presents a policy brief recommending a strategy focusing on securing transportation routes and urban centers and building up the Afghan government. From what I can tell, President Obama’s plan mirrors this approach, he intends the “surge” to take on the Taliban, certainly, but also to do those things which are necessary to make sure there is a strong Afghan security force to take over upon the eventual American withdrawal. I’ll be watching closely tonight for the specifics of how forces will be deployed and what the new strategy will be.

Photo Credit: AFP

Foreign policy has once again returned to the headlines as President Obama continues his decision-making process on Afghanistan and Secretary of State Clinton recently completed a tour of the Middle East. I’d like to call your attention to an interesting report in today’s Washington Post that compares and contrasts the promise and performance of the Obama Administration in the area of foreign policy. I like how it focuses on the issues and gives the reader a good idea of how Obama’s extraordinary personal popularity has translated (or failed to translate) into foreign policy wins/losses for the U.S. as well as the personal decision making style and values that Obama brings to the process. The report notes that Obama’s approach has taken some getting used to for U.S. citizens as well as our allies.

As you know, President Obama has not yet made a decision on whether to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan and there are any number of reports in the media about his decision-making process. The White House is signaling that President Obama is nearing his decision on Afghan war strategy:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Tuesday that a planned meeting on Friday with the Joint Chiefs of Staff will be among the last events in the decision-making process. Gibbs said Obama then will take some time to evaluate the recommendations and decide what is best for the United States as well as for Afghanistan, Pakistan and that region of the world. [...] Gibbs said the president will announce his decision in the coming weeks.

In previous posts I used this space to highlight recommendations by scholars and experts who study this issue. One of the key variables that Obama and his national security team are considering is the depth of public support for the war and the question of whether the U.S. public would support a long-term engagement. The consensus seems to be that the public would not support a long-term commitment to Afghanistan. I was reminded recently that the U.S. is not a stranger to long-term military commitments. Having fought WWII in Europe and Asia the U.S. still retains a large number of forces there, and as this AP report notes, the status of those forces often has profound implications for the domestic politics of host countries:

Japan cannot sign off on a planned reorganization of U.S. troops in the country before President Barack Obama visits Tokyo next month, its foreign minister said on Thursday, after the U.S. defense secretary bluntly called for the deal to be implemented. Friction over the military realignment deal could be the first big test for ties between the United States and Japan’s new Democratic Party-led government, which has pledged to steer a diplomatic course less dependent on its closest security ally. [...] The daily Yomiuri newspaper said U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada on Tuesday that Japan should decide before Obama’s November 12-13 visit to go ahead with a plan to move a U.S. Marine air base to a less crowded part of Japan’s southern Okinawa island.

From this, I would draw two conclusions. First, If the status of U.S. forces in Japan is a hot-button issue for Japanese domestic politics I can’t help but note that sixty-four years after WWII it’s not at all an issue in U.S. domestic politics. No commitment phobia there. And second, perhaps if Japan no longer wants U.S. forces there we can move all our troops from that country to Afghanistan. I don’t really think that would happen, but we could do that…if we wanted to.

Nicholas Thompson responds in this blog post to Andrew Bacevich’s article in The Washington Post about updating the Cold War doctrine of containment for the war on terrorism. He agrees that here is much in George Kennan’s original idea that could be applied to the present conflict with global jihad while suggesting that the effort be expanded to include soft power as well as traditional military based hard power. It’s nice to see the old strategies revived, after all, nothing succeeds like success.

President Obama is engaged in a comprehensive policy review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and meetings this week at the White House have produced a flurry of news reports about about the situation there. In this report in the LA Times, General Stanley McChrystal makes the case for a “troop-intensive counter-insurgency strategy” that would call for a dramatic increase in the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to counter the resurgent Taliban rather than the UAV drone-centered high-tech low-troop approach favored by some in the administration. Lest you think that the news out of Afghanistan is all bad, I’d like to point you to this video report from the BBC, which notes a recent success by allied forces in Helmand province working to rebuild a war shattered village. Can drones do that?