Paper
Douglas H. Paal
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Source: Getty
In The Media
Quick Take: Obama's Foreign Policy One Year In
Although the Obama administration’s new diplomatic approach of engagement has filled in obvious gaps in U.S. foreign policy, this coming year will test whether it can produce tangible results.
Published on Jan 11, 2010
Source: PBS NewsHour
He withdrew troops from cities in Iraq and increased troops in Afghanistan. He tried to defibrillate the Mideast peace process.
Douglas Paal takes a look at the state of U.S. foreign policy a year into Mr. Obama's term:
Now that a year has passed, "we're starting to enter a kind of crunch period where we're going to find out whether a new diplomatic approach is enough to change the calculations of the actors in Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, Jerusalem, and in Palestine to a new approach to accommodate the attempts of the Obama administration to make change," said Paal. "That looks less likely to happen than likely, although we might get lucky somewhere -- for example, in Iran. And in Asia, I think we're going to find that some of this will prove to have been a period of reconsolidation of American influence in the region, which is a good thing but not an avenue to solution of a lot of big problems which will persist as they did under the Bush administration."
About the Author
Douglas H. Paal
Distinguished Fellow, Asia Program
Paal previously served as vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase International and as unofficial U.S. representative to Taiwan as director of the American Institute in Taiwan.
- America’s Future in a Dynamic Asia
- U.S.-China Relations at the Forty-Year MarkQ&A
- +1
Douglas H. Paal, Tong Zhao, Chen Qi, …
Recent Work
Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
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