Fred Kaplan believes the hype:

“President-elect Barack Obama”—the phrase alone does more to repair the tarnished image of America in the world than any action George W. Bush might ponder taking in his final weeks of power [bold mine-DL]. The very fact of a black president with multinational roots unhinges the terrorists’ recruitment poster of a racist, parochial, Muslim-hating United States. It revives Europeans’ trans-Atlantic dreams just as their own union seems to be foundering.

That first point may be true, but it may not count for very much.  If we assume that there is nothing Mr. Bush can do at this point to repair our image abroad, Obama’s election doesn’t have to do very much repairing to surpass anything Mr. Bush could propose. Its effect is greater than zero, but probably nowhere near as great as this paragraph suggests.  Let me add something here, and this is an important point: it is not going to be Obama’s fault that his election and the early months and years of his administration do not magically restore trust and goodwill that has been frittered away for many years, and he has never really claimed that this would happen.  His “helpful” admirers have repeatedly claimed something like this.  It seems to me that he understands better than a lot of the people spinning these grand theories of his geopolitical significance that any meaningful improvement in our relations with other nations will come from time-consuming, difficult work.  It is clear that he will be given more leeway in the beginning, and there is more tolerance in most foreign countries for Obama to make mistakes early. 

However, as one of the commenters has noted, Moscow is wasting no time making clear its objections to missile defense in central-eastern Europe and suggesting countermeasures (possibly tactical missiles to Kaliningrad) if Washington goes ahead with the plan.  More than most foreign governments, Moscow seems to have few illusions about what Obama’s election means for them.  From his gradually more antagonistic response to the war in Georgia to his selection of Joe “Expand NATO Forever” Biden as his running mate, Obama made abundantly clear what they could reasonably expect from a future Obama administration, which unfortunately isn’t very much. 

The potential pitfall for Obama abroad is that there is widespread expectation in Europe of a departure not only from the Bush style of foreign policy, but also a departure from much of the substance, particularly as it relates to various international treaties and institutions.  Trans-Atlantic dreams may be the right way to describe European expectations, because they seem to have so little basis in political reality.  Some of what many Europeans dream of is probably not going to happen (e.g., the test ban treaty, the ICC), and for the most part expecting much in this area comes from Europeans’ projecting what they think a “good” American President ought to do.  Obama may attempt to do some of the things Europeans hope for, but even though both he and McCain have endorsed the Kyoto Protocols that does not necessarily make ratification politically possible.  The Law of the Sea ratification will be a particularly tough fight.

Relations with European governments will be similarly tricky.  When Merkel and Sarkozy were elected, Republicans cheered the rise of “pro-American” governments, by which they meant governments that tended to agree with them more often than not, so what counted as “pro-American” under one administration may not count that way under another.  Sarkozy and Kouchner have been eager to reduce tensions with Moscow, but they have also tended to take a harder line on Near Eastern questions and, more recently, Kouchner has been tramping around Africa preaching the same humanitarian interventionism that led to the war in Yugoslavia.  To the extent that Obama is less belligerent towards Iran than Sarkozy,  and if Obama is serious about calling on Europeans to contribute more soldiers to Afghanistan, we might see considerable friction with major European governments that would be similar to some of the tensions in the early Bush years.  There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of this–states have different interests and they will sometimes clash.  Even so, there needs to be some grounding in reality when discussing what Obama’s election means to U.S. relations with the rest of the world.  

As an unexpected aid to Obama’s potential problem with Moscow, European governments, buffeted and weakened by the financial crisis perhaps more than most other Western states, will be even less inclined to pursue anti-Russian moves.  That will provide Obama some cover from critics at home if he were wisely to opt for a less confrontational approach and at least put NATO expansion on the back burner.  The missile defense agreement with Poland will be harder to put off, and it would be very difficult to renege on it at this point without inviting a million yelps about “appeasement,” and not just from the usual suspects.  Moscow clearly views this plan as a hostile move, and relations with Russia could decline rapidly if Obama goes ahead with the plan.

As for “unhinging” jihadi recruitment efforts, the first and best recruiting sergeants they have are ongoing American military operations in two Muslim countries.  If Obama brings one to an end only to redouble efforts in another, there is not necessarily going to be that much damage to jihadis‘ ability to recruit.  It has never been clear to me why the election of a politician who supported the bombardment of Lebanon and supports unilateral strikes into Pakistan (which are deeply resented by Pakistanis) was going to improve the image of America in the eyes of that many Muslims.  Leave aside the question of how much flexibility Obama will have back home given the persistent efforts to misrepresent his record on Israel and the like.  Hostility to and distrust of the U.S. government are not going to change significantly so long as the same policies are in place, and that likely means that jihadis will still have a large pool of potential recruits.  Just think about it for a moment.  Suppose you think that America is warring against Islam, occupying Muslim lands unjustly and supporting Israel to the hilt at the expense of your fellow Muslims, and you were offended enough by all of this to want to join a jihadi terrorist group–are you really going to be dissuaded from doing that when the U.S. President has an unusual name and some Muslim ancestors? 

What I am trying to say is that we should not set up the next President for failure by making such grandiose, unfounded claims about what his election will mean for our relations with the rest of the world.  The next administration is going to enjoy a long honeymoon, and that’s fine as far as it goes, but we should all be as sober and clear-eyed as possible about what a President Obama is realistically going to be able to do and what he isn’t.