Foreign Policy Priorities of the Obama Administration

In conjunction with the US Embassy, the Director of Policy Planning in the United States Department of State, Anne-Marie Slaughter, was at the Hans Arnhold Center to deliver a lecture on President Obama’s foreign policy -- and the challenges ahead -- on June 30. Kicking off the Transatlantic Forum, a day-long annual conference held at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Berlin, Slaughter was joined by an audience of peers for a frank and lively discussion, as well as questions from the audience. 

Director Slaughter spelled out the new directives of the Obama Administration as determined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, summed up by the phrase “global security, development, and engagement.” Secretary Clinton, Slaughter says of the person who tapped her in January to head policy planning at the State Department, likes to keep to the three “D”s: Defense, Diplomacy, Development.

Slaughter began her talk by speaking about nuclear weapons, specifically of the current tensions faced in Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan. “We can see the dangers of proliferation growing,” she said. And with Russia, Slaughter spoke of renewed efforts between President Obama and President Medvedev, beginning with the START program, to reduce nuclear stockpiles in tandem. She stressed the profound importance, perhaps now more than ever, of engaging multilaterally in the pursuit of the global reduction of nuclear arms, with the ultimate goal of their eradication, as President Obama has mentioned frequently. As Sam Nunn, the former Georgia senator and current head of the Global Threat Initiative, a think tank dedicated to this goal, has said, “this is not a game we can go alone.” 

Secondly, the threat of terrorist attacks on American or European soil still, of course, exists. But Slaughter pointed out how the Obama Administration has taken a new tack on, firstly, how to approach speaking about the problem so as not to exacerbate lingering tensions between the United States and Muslim-majority nations. President Obama's Cairo speech helped many to re-imagine the fundamentals of this relationship, but so did the Adminstration's switch to using the phrase “violent extremism” instead of the “War on Terror" or "Islamofascism." Doing so alludes, Slaughter says, less a simple change in words and more to change to a more concrete way of looking at the world. Instead of going at terrorism as one sprawling and interwoven issue, there is a concentrated effort to look at each terrorist network, in each country or unstable state in which they thrive, and in each distinct part of the world, to determine how and why those groups are in operation -- and what exactly they are doing. To address those specific problems requires not just a defense, but the smart use of development and foreign aid. Under the guidance of Hillary Clinton, the State Department has put diplomacy and development on par, as two sides of the same coin that can fundamentally alter the way nations engage with one another, tacking away, they hope, from violent confrontation.

Slaughter also addressed the crucial issue of climate change. Not as a “moral, social, or sustainability” issue, she says, but as one of shared, clear-eyed global security. When a place becomes too hot or too flooded, she says, “people want to move to where other people already live.” This inherently creates tensions and leads to conflict. A change in global temperatures will, as such, result in national security threats across the globe. And as part of climate change is caused by human activity, domestic economies -- specifically that of the United States -- will have to change their energy bases from petroleum to renewable sources. As such, the domestic policies being forwarded by the Obama Administration are being done with a consciousness of how they ultimately affect the strategic defense of the United States.

Slaughter spent a good remainder of the evening taking a multitude of questions from the audience on Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

rjm