The new world order

For all the assorted domestic and foreign woes weighing down on it, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is still in the relatively sunlit early days when it can afford to plan a few steps ahead. So when Vice-President Joe Biden showed up at the Munich Security Conference with a sunny and soothing speech, his largely European audience should have known other emissaries with a darker message wouldn’t be far behind.

By itself Biden’s was an extraordinary speech, and when he delivered it on Saturday morning to the world’s foreign policy elite in a packed ballroom at the Bayerischer Hof hotel, it was obvious why Barack Obama had chosen him for the No. 2 slot. Biden enhances the credibility of his boss’s foreign policy message simply by being the guy who delivers it. A veteran U.S. senator, he knows the Munich crowd well. He has attended the annual weekend getaway in the Bavarian capital many times. He knows it is a more focused, less ostentatious and arguably more important gathering than the glittering World Economic Forum in Davos. A perfect place for the Obama team to road-test its message to the world.

Biden entered to a standing ovation, paused to engulf Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy representative, in a bear hug, and chatted for long minutes with Henry Kissinger. Then he headed to the podium to deliver a basic message: Obama wants to make America a more deserving partner for its traditional allies.

“America will not torture,” he said. “We will uphold the rights of those we bring to justice. And we will close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.” He opened his kit bag of Helping Words, offering to “engage,” to “listen” and to “consult.” He promised talks with the bellicose regime in Iran, increases to foreign aid and a global environmental strategy. Catnip for European listeners who had waited long years to see the back of George W. Bush.

Biden barely hinted at the quid pro quo that everyone knew was coming. “America will do more—that’s the good news. The bad news is that America will ask more from our partners as well.”

To find out what “more” entailed, the Munich crowd had to wait only a day. The bill was delivered by David Petraeus, the four-star general in charge of the U.S. Central Command and therefore of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Richard Holbrooke, the veteran diplomat who serves as Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“I would be remiss if I did not ask individual countries to examine very closely what forces and other contributions they can provide,” said Petraeus. And if anyone was unsure what might help, Petraeus had brought along a wish list, like a blushing bride who had registered at the Counterinsurgency Boutique. “More intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms,” he said. “More military police, engineers and logistics elements. Additional special-operations forces and civil-affairs units. More lift and attack helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. Additional air medevac assets, increases in information operations capabilities, and so on.”

How could this much new effort be needed in a war that is already in its eighth year? It fell to Holbrooke to deliver the grim explanation: much of the work of the first seven years was wasted and counterproductive. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” he said in the conference’s closing minutes. “The task ahead of us is far, far more difficult than anything that has been said this morning. I have never, in my experience in the U.S. government that started in Vietnam, ever seen anything as difficult as the situation that confronts the countries involved in Afghanistan and Pakistan at this point.”

The “story of Afghanistan,” Holbrooke said, is full of pledges to do more and coordinate better that lead nowhere. In the U.S. government’s foreign-assistance program, “I have never seen anything remotely resembling the mess we have inherited.” He concluded: “In my view it’s going to be much tougher than Iraq.”