Should Susan Rice be America's next secretary of state? That's not my decision, of course, and it's not yours either, unless you happen to be President Obama or a member of the Senate. But I think the recent debate on her possible nomination has missed the real issue.

Thus far, the debate has focused almost entirely on Rice's appearances on five Sunday talk shows back on September 16, where she offered a vigorous defense of the administration's handling of the Benghazi incident. Although some of her statements turned out to be inaccurate, it is now clear that she was dutifully repeating the talking points that she had been given. No scandal there; that's what loyal subordinates do. 

The harshest thing one might say about Rice's performance in these shows is that she might have hedged or qualified her remarks more than she did. Even so, she did say -- repeatedly -- that her comments were based on the "best information" available at the time, and she made it clear that the investigation into these events was still proceeding and that a "definitive" account was not yet ready. But the overall impression she left was one of certainty rather than doubt, and this left her at least somewhat vulnerable to the (false) charge that she had misled her interviewers and the viewing public.

So the Benghazi business offers no basis to oppose Rice's appointment, and even a critic like Sen. Lindsay Graham now seems to agree. My concern is rather different: I fear that unlike Hillary Clinton, Rice is too much of an Obama insider and too dependent on the president's patronage to be an ideal Secretary of State. As a result, her appointment will reinforce the growing lack of intellectual diversity within the administration.

Recall that when Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, she had been First Lady for eight years, a U.S. Senator, and a presidential candidate who came close to winning her party's nomination. She had independent stature of her own, which is why Obama had to accommodate a number of her personnel requests in order to get her to take the job. And some of those appointments involved people with strong personalities and policy views of their own. Moreover, although Clinton proved to be a terrific team player, her independent stature allowed her to speak freely and enhanced her policy clout. Obama could never entirely ignore Clinton's views, because she could go public with her disagreements or even threaten to resign if she were adamantly opposed to a particular initiative. That she never did so (as far as we know) shows that Obama understood this situation from the very beginning.

Rice, by contrast, has no independent power base. She did serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Africa in the Clinton administration (to no great distinction), but signed up early with Obama and was a key foreign policy advisor during the 2008 campaign. She obviously has Obama's confidence, but her current ascendancy depends solely on the president's backing. Maintaining his personal support will be critical to her effectiveness, which makes her much less likely to tell him things he doesn't want to hear or that cut against the thrust of existing policy. Although Rice has the reputation of being a forceful advocate with sharp elbows, her relationship to the president runs the risk of making her more of a courtier than a counselor. And if she stumbles, Obama will be blamed for having pushed her appointment in the face of skeptics.

To be sure, an administration at war with itself wouldn't be very effective, and one could argue that a unified team will do a better job than one where there's lots of backbiting. It's a question of balance, and my sense is that the administration's world-view is getting narrower over time. Realists like Robert Gates have been gone for some time, and Clinton will be gone soon. James Jones left the NSC years ago, and independent thinkers like the late Richard Holbrooke are no longer with us. Instead of vigorous and creative debate and a willingness to rethink past decisions or priorities, we're likely to get groupthink and a tendency to circle the wagons and defend past decisions (just as Rice did on those TV shows). 

The narrowing of world-views is a familiar second-term phenomenon, as the first team leaves the stage and the survivors are those who have managed to adapt themselves to the emerging policy consensus and maintain their standing with the president himself. Instead of the "team of rivals" that people saw at the beginning of his presidency, what we have instead is a cocoon of confidantes. The only thing that might introduce some fresh foreign policy thinking into the Obama White House is a forceful set of Cabinet officials with their own power bases, but that's not what Rice is likely to provide at State. Obama already knows what she thinks, after all.

If Obama does nominate her and I were a Senator, however, I'd vote to confirm. Not with great enthusiasm or with high expectations, but there's nothing in the record to warrant rejection. And who knows? Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Is Hillary Clinton a great secretary of state? A puff-piece in the New York Times Magazine a couple of weeks ago referred to her as a "rock star diplomat," and quotes Google chairman Eric Schmidt calling her "the most significant Secretary of State since Dean Acheson." (Hmm. . . has Mr. Schmidt ever heard of some guys named Dulles, Kissinger, and Baker?). I'm neither a fan nor a foe of Ms. Clinton, but one can't really call her a great secretary at this point, through no fault of her own.

First the positives. There's no question that Clinton has been terrifically energetic, as well as a loyal team player. In this sense, Obama's decision to appoint her has worked out brilliantly, due in no small part to her willingness to serve the man who defeated her for the 2008 nomination, and in a broader sense, to serve her country. She's also proved to be relatively gaffe-free (there have been a few slips, but that's inevitable for anyone who's in the limelight 24/7 and who has to respond and react to rapidly evolving events). Insiders with whom I've spoken say she is an excellent boss who elicits considerable loyalty from those around her. And as the Times piece notes, she's helped restore the somewhat battered morale of the foreign service, and used her celebrity to raise public awareness on a number of signature issues. Nothing to be ashamed of there, and I'd argue her record puts her well ahead of predecessors such as Warren Christopher, William Rogers, Christian Herter, Madeleine Albright, Dean Rusk, Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell. (For a balanced but positive appraisal of Clinton's record, see FP editor Susan Glasser's profile here).

The problem, however, is that she's hardly racked up any major achievements. The Chen Guangcheng affair was a nice bit of on-the-fly crisis management, but the fate of a single Chinese dissident is not exactly the stuff of high politics and in the end won't have much impact on Sino-American relations either way. She played little role in extricating us from Iraq, and it is hard to see her fingerprints on the U.S. approach to Afghanistan. She has done her best to smooth the troubled relationship with Pakistan, but anti-Americanism remains endemic in that country and it hardly looks like a success story at this point. Yes, her belated quasi-apology eventually got the NATO supply trucks rolling again, but it took months to get this matter resolved and the relationship itself remains deeply fractured. She certainly helped get tougher sanctions on Iran, but the danger of war still looms and there's been no breakthrough there either.  

Needless to say, she has done nothing to advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace or even to halt Israel's increasingly naked land grab there (for which she can share blame with the rest of the administration, AIPAC, the U.S. Congress, and the Netanyahu government). Finally, although she's helped articulate the need for the "pivot" to Asia and has done some effective salesmanship on that topic both at home and in the region, this move was both a geopolitical no-brainer and still faces significant obstacles. Among other things, the recent debacle over the aborted strategic cooperation agreement between South Korea and Japan (which led to the resignation of one of Korean President Lee Myung-Bak's top aides) is a setback for both Lee and for Clinton's efforts to build a stronger coalition in Asia.

The lack of major accomplishments isn't really her fault, however, for several reasons. First, as I noted way back when Obama became president, there just weren't a lot of low-hanging fruit available when the new team took office in 2009. On the contrary, they faced a series of difficult-to-intractable problems, several of which (Iraq, Afghanistan) were likely to end up looking like failures no matter what they did. Even if Clinton had been a magical combination of Bismarck, Machiavelli, Gandhi, and Zhou en Lai, she'd have had trouble devising a strategy that could have solved all these problems quickly and without costs.

Second, Clinton isn't a great secretary of state because that is not the role that she's been asked to play in this administration. Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker had extremely close working relationship with the presidents that they served, and each enjoyed far more authority over foreign policy than Clinton has been given by the Obama White House. Obama's initial reliance on a set of "special envoys" diluted Clinton's clout even more, even when some of them (such as the late Richard Holbrooke) were personally close to the secretary.  

Add to this the fact that the Pentagon and intelligence community now controls vastly greater resources than the State Department does, and has for more impact on our relations with trouble spots like Central Asia, Yemen, the Persian Gulf, etc.. Given that raw bureaucratic reality, it's not surprising that Clinton cannot point to any major achievements on her watch. Indeed, a good case can be made that American foreign policy is still operating ass-backwards: Instead of seeing military power as one of the tools we use to advance a broad political agenda, today military imperatives tend to dominate and the diplomats just get sent out to line up some compliant partners and to clean things up afterward (see under: Drone wars).

Which is not to say that Clinton has performed badly. On the contrary, I'd give her high marks for executing the job she was asked to perform, especially given the constraints (both organizational and geopolitical) in which she had to operate. So maybe the "rock star" label is right after all. Rock stars get a lot of attention and sometimes adulation, and sometimes they even deserve it. But not even Elvis had much lasting impact on international politics.

President Obama is reportedly angry with the U.S. intelligence agencies for failing to anticipate the upheavals in Tunisia or Egypt. His irritation is silly, because there's a well-founded social science literature (by Timur Kuran, Susanne Lohmann, and Marc Granovetter, among others) explaining why it is nearly impossible to predict the onset of a revolutionary upheaval. You can identify countries where the government is unpopular or illegitimate, and thus were a rebellion might occur, but that doesn't tell you if or when a popular uprising of the sort we have been watching will occur. 

As I explained before, the reason is because an individual's willingness to rebel is essentially private information, and nobody is going to tell you what they really think in an authoritarian society. Furthermore, an individual's willingness to march openly against the regime depends on what he or she thinks others will do, and that cannot be ascertained in advance either. But when conditions are right and some triggering event occurs (which can be almost anything), then you can get a rapid and unexpected revolutionary cascade, as more and more people decide that it is safe to express their previously-concealed resentment and that doing so is likely to succeed.

Instead of being angry with the U.S. intelligence agencies, therefore, Obama should be reserving his ire for his foreign policy advisors, who have been screwing up U.S. Middle East policy for over two years now and who may be in the process of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory yet again. If the news reports I've seen are correct, the United States is now getting behind a political transition that will be orchestrated by the new Vice President Omar Suleiman, a close Mubarak associate. It's not even clear if the United States now thinks Mubarak has to step down. Instead, Secretary of State Clinton seems to be suggesting that we need to help VP Suleiman "defuse" the street demonstrations, which would remove most of the impetus for change.

An unnamed "senior U.S. official" has also suggested that the Obama administration is dead set against a substantial political role for the Muslim Brotherhood.  Indeed, the official reportedly suggested that what the United States wants is a purely "secular" government in Egypt (i.e., one with no Islamist influence) as if that's even possible in a country that is overwhelmingly Muslim.

It's early days, of course, and as FP's Josh Rogin reports here, there is a potential legal nightmare trying to revise Egyptian law in ways that would permit a genuinely "free and fair" election.  But I worry that the Obama administration is about to repeat the same mistake that the Bush administration made in the Palestinian legislative elections of 2006. After insisting that the elections be held, the United States simply refused to accept the results of the elections when we didn't like the winner (Hamas). Are we now going to keep our thumb discreetly on the scale in Egypt, to make sure that a post-Mubarak government continues to dance to Washington's tune?  When will Washington learn that you cannot simultaneously proclaim your commitment to democracy and freedom and then insist on dictating who is allowed to win?

The other problem is that Suleiman doesn't have much (any?) credibility as a steward of democratic change. I suggested a couple of days ago that one way he could bolster his position would be to help push Mubarak out (and to make it clear that he is doing so), and to openly declare that he (Suleiman) will serve only as a caretaker and not run for office himself in the next election. I'm not at all sure that these measures would work, however, and the anti-government forces might well see him as no different than Mubarak himself. That certainly seems to be their reaction thus far. And if subsequent reforms are mostly cosmetic and individuals or groups associated with the old regime end up retaining power in a subsequent election, they are likely to have no more legitimacy than Mubarak has right now. And the U.S. image in the region, which is bad enough already, will take another big hit.

So the United States has two long-term challenges. The first is to make sure it is not once again perceived as working to quash a genuinely representative government in Egypt. The second is get ready to accept the results of that process, even if the people we might prefer don't win.

For more analysis along these lines, check out Asli Bani and Aziz Rana's article "The Fake Moderation of America's Moderate Mideast Allies," from Foreign Policy in Focus, here. 

If you think today's announcement that the Israelis and Palestinians are going to resume "direct talks" is a significant breakthrough, you haven't been paying attention for the past two decades (at least). I wish I could be more optimistic about this latest development, but I see little evidence that a meaningful deal is in the offing. 

Why do I say this? Three reasons. 

1. There is no sign that the Palestinians are willing to accept less than a viable, territorially contiguous state in the West Bank (and eventually, Gaza), including a capital in East Jerusalem and some sort of political formula (i.e., fig-leaf) on the refugee issue. By the way, this outcome supposedly what the Clinton and Bush adminstrations favored, and what Obama supposedly supports as well.

2. There is no sign that Israel's government is willing to accept anything more than a symbolic Palestinian "state" consisting of a set of disconnected Bantustans, with Israel in full control of the borders, air space, water supplies, electromagnetic spectrum. etc. Prime Minister Netanyahu has made it clear that this is what he means by a "two-state solution," and he has repeatedly declared that Israel intends to keep all of Jerusalem and maybe a long-term military presence in the Jordan River valley. There are now roughly 500,000 Israeli Jews living outside the 1967 borders, and it is hard to imagine any Israeli government evacuating a significant fraction of them. Even if Netanyahu wanted to be more forthcoming, his coalition wouldn't let him make any meaningful concessions. And while the talks drag on, the illegal settlements will continue to expand.

3. There is no sign that the U.S. government is willing to put meaningful pressure on Israel. We're clearly willing to twist Mahmoud Abbas' arm to the breaking point (which is why he's agreed to talks, even as Israel continues to nibble away at the territory of the future Palestinian state), but Obama and his Middle East team have long since abandoned any pretense of bringing even modest pressure to bear on Netanyahu. Absent that, why should anyone expect Bibi to change his position?

So don't fall for the hype that this announcement constitutes some sort of meaningful advance in the "peace process." George Mitchell and his team probably believe they are getting somewhere, but they are either deluding themselves, trying to fool us, or trying to hoodwink other Arab states into believing that Obama meant what he said in Cairo. At this point, I rather doubt that anyone is buying, and the only thing that will convince onlookers that U.S. policy has changed will be tangible results. Another round of inconclusive "talks" will just reinforce the growing perception that the United States cannot deliver.

The one item in all this that does give me pause is the accompanying statement by the Middle East Quartet (the United States, Russia, the EU and the U.N.), which appears at first glance to have some modest teeth in it. Among other things, it calls explicitly for "a settlement, negotiated between the parties, that ends the occupation which began in 1967 and results in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors." It also says these talks can be completed within one year. Sounds promising, but the Quartet has issued similar proclamations before (notably the 2003 "Roadmap"), and these efforts led precisely nowhere. So maybe there's a ray of hope in there somewhere, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans here in the United States will continue to make pious statements about their commitment to a two-state solution, even as it fades further and further into the realm of impossibility. Barring a miracle, we will eventually have to recognize that "two-states for two peoples" has become a pipe-dream. At that point, U.S. leaders will face a very awkward choice: they can support a democratic Israel where Jews and Arabs have equal political rights (i.e., a one-state democracy similar to the United States, where discrimination on the basis of religion or ethnicity is taboo), or they can support an apartheid state whose basic institutions are fundamentally at odds with core American values.  

Equally important, an apartheid Israel will face growing international censure, and as both former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak have warned, such an outcome would place Israel's own long-term future in doubt. If that happens, all those staunch "friends of Israel" who have hamstrung U.S. diplomacy for decades can explain to their grandchildren how they let that happen.

As for the Obama administration itself, I have only one comment. If you think I'm being too gloomy, then do the world a favor and prove me wrong. If you do, I'll be the first to admit it.

A quick look back at some recent posts, in light of subsequent events:

1. Regarding Hillary’s trip to Moscow to clinch the arms control deal. It’s not over till it’s over, but it looks like her team did read the tea leaves properly. If so, then props to the negotiators. If Obama gets to sign it on the one-year anniversary of his Prague speech, that will heighten its symbolic value.

2. Does the health care win enhance Obama's foreign policy clout? Andrew Sullivan has raised some good points on this issue, see here and here. I'll concede that getting health care done will free up more of Obama's time and energy to devote to foreign policy. It may also make the White House a bit more Bolshie about taking on domestic opposition to its foreign policy agenda. But even if that’s the case, I still think prospects for major foreign policy achievements are slim. Why? Because even if Obama has more free time, he’s gotta worry most about the economy over the next year or two. And as I said in my original post, none of the big foreign policy issues are easy to resolve, and the foreign opposition he must win over isn't likely to be swayed by the fact that the adminstration managed to get 220 members of the president's own party to support a bill that was heavily laden with political compromises. I'm not dissing the domestic achievement, mind you, just skeptical that it gives you that much more leverage abroad.

3. Did General Petraeus say that there was a link between U.S. support for Israel, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and our standing elsewhere in the region? Phil Klein at The American Spectator claims that Petraeus is denying he said any of the things previously attributed to him in recent weeks, and is walking back from his own testimony (i.e., prepared statement) to the Senate Armed Services Committee. But if you look carefully at what Petraeus told the Senators, it’s clear that he recognizes that there is a link (which is what his prepared statement said, in rather uncontroversial language. Consider his response to a question by Sen. John McCain:

We keep a very close eye on what goes on there [in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip], because of the impact that it has, obviously, on that part of CENTCOM that is the Arab world, if you will. And in fact, we’ve urged at various times that this is a critical component. ... Again, clearly, the tensions, the issues and so forth have an enormous effect. They set the strategic context within which we operate in the Central Command area of responsibility. My thrust has generally been, literally, just to say -- to encourage that process that can indeed get that recognition that you talked about, and indeed get a sense of progress moving forward in the overall peace process, because of the effect that it has on particularly what I think you would term the moderate governments in our area."

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said something similar today too (HT Spencer Ackerman). Of course, what they are saying is pretty mild, unsurprising stuff; it's just the sort of thing that didn't used to get uttered by senior officials. 

Matt Duss at the Center for American Progress pokes holes in Klein's revisionism, see here.

Back in 2007, we wrote that AIPAC has an "almost unchallenged hold on Congress." Little has happened since then to alter that conclusion, and we will probably get another demonstration of Congressional spinelessness this week. On Tuesday, the House is scheduled to vote on H.R. 867, an AIPAC-sponsored resolution denouncing the recent Goldstone Report on possible war crimes by Hamas and Israel during the Gaza War last year. You can read the resolution here. You should then read Judge Goldstone's response here, which points out the errors in the House resolution. And then read historian Tony Judt's eloquent statement here. If you're convinced that the resolution makes a mockery of America's professed commitment to justice and human rights, then you might express that sentiment here or here. Or just call your Congressman's office and tell him/her to grow a backbone and vote against it.

Meanwhile, over in Israel itself, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is completing the Obama administration's humiliating retreat from the principles set forth in the president's Cairo speech of less than five months ago. In a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Clinton did not criticize continued Israeli home demolitions in East Jerusalem (a practice she had previously denounced), and praised Netanyahu for making "unprecedented concessions" on settlement expansion. Huh? This is Clintonian double-talk worthy of her husband. Netanyahu's "concession" was to insist that Israel would keep building whatever and wherever it wished in East Jerusalem, and would also continue the "natural growth" of settlements in the West Bank, but would not start any completely new settlements for awhile. Bear in mind that virtually every country in the world regards all of the settlements -- both the unauthorized outposts and the vast neighborhoods built by the Israeli government -- as illegal under international law, and the United States used to say this too. And for this "concession" the Palestinians are supposed to enter into another meaningless round of discussions, while the bulldozers and construction crews continue to eat away at the land on which they hope to establish a state of their own. To praise Netanyahu's position as an "unprecedented concession" is like discovering someone is robbing your house, and then expressing gratitude when they offer to do it a bit more slowly.

The two-state solution was on life-support when Obama took office, and at first it appeared he might make a serious effort to nurse it back to health and make it a reality. At least, that's what he said he was going to do.  Instead, he and his Secretary of State are in the process of pulling out the plug. But what will they do when "two states for two peoples" isn't an option and everybody finally admits it, and the Palestinians begin to demand equal rights in "greater Israel?" Will the United States support their claims for equality, democracy, and individual rights, or will it continue to defend and subsidize what will then be an apartheid state? Well, if it's up to our courageous reps in Congress, you know what the answer will be.

Avi Ohayon/GPO via Getty Images

I had a very pleasant R & R -- thank you -- and I'm grateful to Justin Logan for filling in with such clear and well-argued pieces on unipolarity and Iran's nuclear program. I would only add that I'm a big fan of the work that Bill Wohlforth and Steve Brooks have done in recent years, despite my various disagreements with some of what they've written, and I'm glad that Justin put their work up in bright lights.

I managed to avoid the Internet almost entirely while I was away, and even skipped the New York Times most days. So I'm playing catch-up on the week’s events, and have only a few thoughts on recent developments.

On North Korea: The freeing of the two journalists strikes me was a clear case of pragmatic realism in action, and President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton deserve points for their calm, clear-eyed approach to a vexing but ultimately not-very significant problem. They achieved the U.S. goal -- getting the two women out -- and Kim Jong Il got a photo op but nothing more. Even getting a former president to drop in isn't all that significant these days, because North Korea has welcomed former presidents before. True, North Korea got Bill to visit without having to pay his normally whopping speaker's fee, but they also didn't get a speech. Indeed, the fact that they seem to place so much value on a brief drop-in by an ex-president reveals a lot about the regime's pathetic need for attention. As for the former president, he deserves credit for staying on message and not grandstanding while he was there, though the real work was almost certainly done behind-the-scenes and he didn't have to do any actual negotiating.  

In the end, the whole business was not that big a deal (except for the two journalists and their families, of course), and I think it confirms the value of not over-reacting every time Pyongyang does something annoying. Being annoying is its only diplomatic asset these days, but our best course is to treat them as a minor irritant and reserve most of our attention for more important problems. And it's probably good for Hillary if Bill has something constructive to do every now and then.

So props all around, and I would love to hear how conservative critics of the administration's handling of the problem would explain their positions to the journalists or their families.

On Afghanistan: The Times reports today that the Obama administration is still trying to come up with suitable "benchmarks" to measure progress in Afghanistan. Taking time to develop meaningful yardsticks for success or failure is a good idea in theory, but such measures are usually elusive in the context of counterinsurgency warfare. Body counts are a terrible measure, for example, because rising counts may simply reflect greater insurgent activity (and recruitment), and signs of diminished insurgent activity may simply mean that they are lying low. Testimony from civilians is also suspect, because they have obvious incentives to tell whoever is currently in charge of their village or region whatever they think the occupier wants to hear. Remember what a South Vietnamese general told a U.S. official back in the 1960s, in reference to the late Robert McNamara: "Ah, les statistiques! Your Secretary of Defense loves statistics. We Vietnamese can give him all he wants. If you want them to go up, they will go up. If you want them to go down, they will go down."

More broadly, the fact that Obama's team is having a tough time devising good measures is another sign that we don't really know what we are doing there. And I mean that in two senses: 1) what are we trying to accomplish, and 2) what ARE we doing there? I'd also remind everyone that the Bush administration spent a lot of time laying out various "benchmarks" in Iraq, and then focused primarily on the ones where there was progress.

Via Matt Yglesias (linking to Mark Kleiman), we've also learned that the U.S. expenditures on Afghanistan are now more than five times greater than the country's entire annual GDP. That allocation of resources might make sense if we were trying to corner the opium market and sell it ourselves, but otherwise, it suggests that we aren't thinking very clearly about our strategic priorities. It was reasonable to spend a lot of money deterring Soviet expansion in Europe during the Cold War, and one can make a similar case for spending money to preserve a balance of power in the Persian Gulf, because Europe was a "key center of industrial power" and oil is the lifeblood on which the world economy runs. But spending five times more than it would cost to buy up everything a country produces (and committing the U.S. to do so for many years to come), is like putting an elaborate burgler alarm on a tar-paper shack, and then hiring an expensive security service to guard it for the next decade. Not smart.

KNS/AFP/Getty Images

Before I catch up on other developments -- like the new "plan" for Afghanistan/Pakistan, the Netanyahu government in Israel, the G20 summit, etc. -- I thought I’d pass along a few things I learned during my visit to Singapore last week. Here are a few quick impressions, based on my conversations with a number of academics and senior policymakers there, and by a roundtable discussion with Ashley Tellis, Yuen Foon Khong, Vinod Aggarwal, C. Raja Mohan, and myself (sponsored by the S Rajaratnam School and moderated by its Dean, Barry Desker).

First, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got full marks for her Asia trip last month. The decision to make Asia her first foreign destination was much appreciated (especially given the short shrift the region had received under Bush), and the people I spoke with were also impressed by how she handled herself along the way. Singaporeans are looking forward to welcoming Obama there for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in November. If the Obama administration is looking to refurbish ties with various Asian allies (and they should), the groundwork has been laid and the effort will be welcome.

Second, nobody in Singapore seemed enthusiastic about America doubling down in Central Asia. There was some grudging acceptance that the United States still had a role to play there, but even the strongest advocates of U.S. involvement in that conflict saw it as a grim necessity rather than an opportunity. Several officials emphasized that it was important that the United States not get bogged down there. Agreed.

Third, one senior official offered a cautionary note about the recent U.S. opening to Iran. While fully supportive of the initiative, he emphasized that Tehran was bound to drive a hard bargain and that negotiations would be prolonged and difficult. Another person with whom I spoke surprised me by suggesting that if Iran's clerical leadership is interested in dealing with Washington, they will work to ensure the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, thereby keeping a "bad cop" in the Presidency to enhance their bargaining position. I would have thought the opposite -- that it would be easier to engineer a detente between Washington and Tehran if Ahmadinejad were no longer in office -- and it will be interesting to see who's right.

Fourth, virtually everyone I spoke with hoped Obama & Co. would get the U.S. economy moving ASAP, and argued that this was the only way to jump-start the rest of the world. This sentiment is easy to fathom (Singapore's economy is heavily dependent on world trade and is projected to shrink by 5-10 percent this year), but I found myself wondering if it is either realistic or healthy of other countries to expect so much from Uncle Sam. The days where the United States could singlehandedly serve as the engine of the world economy are probably behind us, and prospects for a coordinated global response seem increasingly bleak. Although everyone supposedly understands that "beggar thy neighbor" policies made the Great Depression worse, the global response to the crisis has been "every state for itself" and signs of protectionism are beginning to re-emerge. The draft G20 communique reportedly takes a firm stand against this trend, but it is going to take principled and courageous leadership to resist these pressures. All in all, a good test to see if we've learned anything from the 1930s. 

ROSLAN RAHMAN/Getty Images