Greg Sheridan, Serious Foreign Policy Expert:
I ran into Beazley at this year’s Australian American Leadership Dialogue in Washington, DC. The dialogue, founded by Melbourne businessman, Phil Scanlan, is the most important initiative in private diplomacy in Australian history.
As well as reminding us of the important circles in which he moves, Greg pulls out some of his greatest hits:
The Bush administration, for all its sins, real and imagined, has given life to the doctrine that the US should spend a lot of time cultivating allies. Certainly this has been particularly the case with Australia, Japan and South Korea.
So long as those allies are entirely dependent on and in agreement with the United States. Anyone who isn’t can fuck off. Foreign policy under Bush has resulted in the United States having an increasingly small circle of obedient friends.
Obama is likely to be less instinctively committed to these alliances but, to look at it from the opposite point of view, will be less shackled by Cold War-style thinking, which can have its limitations.
Two obvious alternatives beckon. Either Obama’s foreign policy is a Jimmy Carter-style disaster because he never comprehends the essential workings of global power.
Or alternatively Obama could produce a brilliant foreign policy, which comprehends the essentials from the past, but is unhesitatingly in touch with all the contemporary issues, from climate change to energy costs to global pandemics and all the rest of the new agenda issues.
Sheridan demonstrates his ability to intuit precisely what Barack Obama is thinking and yet make diametrically opposed predictions about the possible outcomes.
McCain of course is profoundly steeped in all the verities of the Cold War.
Either man will represent a break from the Bush years.
QED. Seriously, Sheridan barely mentions McCain in this entire article, but he has proven that he won’t be Bush Mk III. How? Because Greg Sheridan said so.
