29 April 2009
Key to Obama Foreign Policy Is Expanded Global Engagement
Washington — President Obama set three major foreign policy goals when his administration began 100 days ago: re-establish America’s standing in the world; create dialogue with friends, partners and adversaries based on mutual respect; and work together in building partnerships.
“We believe in advancing not only the United States’ interests, but also interests globally,” Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said at a Washington Foreign Press Center briefing April 29.
President Obama acknowledged that he is pleased with the progress his administration has made since taking office, but he is not satisfied with the present. “I’m confident in the future, but I’m not content with the present,” the president said at a brief town-hall meeting in a suburb of St. Louis on April 29.
Obama was scheduled to conduct a nationally televised press conference from the East Room of the White House the evening of April 29 to mark his first 100 days in office.
“We have begun to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off, and we’ve begun the work of remaking America,” Obama said.
Hammer, who briefed the press on U.S. foreign policy engagement, said that in the first 48 hours of this presidency, Obama issued executive orders to close the detention center on the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, within a year, to address the treatment and legal status of detainees, and to ban enhanced interrogation methods. “From that he has moved on to conduct reviews of foreign policy and you’ve seen the results of some of those reviews,” Hammer said.
Currently, there are 241 detainees being held at the Guantánamo center, according to the Pentagon, but the United States has begun to actively plan for their release. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced April 29 in Berlin that 30 detainees have been cleared for release under an aggressive review program. Holder has appealed for Europe’s assistance in taking detainees so that the facility can be closed over the next nine months.
On Iraq, Obama pledged while seeking the presidency to remove U.S. combat forces from the country in a responsible way, Hammer said. A month into office Obama said, in a speech to U.S. Marines at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, “Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.”
“On Afghanistan and Pakistan, you have seen the unveiling of a comprehensive strategy that … focuses not only on the military and the need to ensure that we protect the security of the United States and its allies, but also that goes forward in addressing the very real problems that exist there,” Hammer said.
On May 6–7 in Washington, Obama will hold trilateral meetings with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari. The president has scheduled meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to resolve issues surrounding Middle East peace talks that resumed with the 2007 Annapolis Conference initiated by President Bush.
“We will be looking to see what is possible,” Hammer said.
As part of his foreign policy engagement, Obama traveled to Europe in early April to address the global economic crisis at the G20 Financial Summit in London; then to the NATO Summit to address Afghanistan and Pakistan and the need to revitalize the North Atlantic Alliance; and additional trips to Canada, Mexico and Turkey; the European Union Summit; and the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.
“So it’s been a very busy first hundred days, but the president’s view is not one of measuring at the 100-day mark, but rather to seeing how we are laying the foundation to then go further in terms of what we believe is an important agenda that includes not only the economy, not only national security, but an expanded view of national security that includes energy and climate-change issues, issues of addressing poverty [and] disease,” Hammer said.
Additionally, the president has been conducting bilateral meetings with numerous world leaders both in Washington and at the events in Europe and at the Summit of the Americas, Hammer said.
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