By JOHN NORTH

The next president of the United States will face a formidable challenge requiring decisions that likely will have an influence of a magnitude seldom seen in human history, foreign-policy expert Casimir Yost said during a May 19 address at UNC Asheville.

“The next president will inherit 200,000 U.S. boots on the ground in two countries” — Afghanistan and Iraq — “and the next president needs to realize we need to bring our global commitments into balance with our power.”

Casimir Yost addresses U.S. challenges.

He said the next president will have to analyze the cost of staying in Iraq, versus the consequences of leaving soon. “We’ll have to decide if we’re in the regime-change business, or the behavior-change business. In the latter, is there a compromise we can negotiate with Iran?”

Yost addressed “Foreign Policy Challenges Facing the Next Administration” for 35 minutes and fielded questions from the audience for 50 minutes. His talk, which drew about 60 people, was sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Western North Carolina and Leadership Asheville and co-sponsored by the UNCA International Studies Program.

Yost was introduced as the director of the Institute for Diplomacy and a professor at Georgetown University since 1994.

Previously, he served as the executive director at the Center for Asian Pacific Affairs and staff director on the Subcommitee on International Economic Policy for the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Yost began by noting that in considering his talk “I was struck by how pessimistic I feel about the contemporary period.” To that end, he urged anyone not wanting to hear a decidedly scary view of the future to leave at once. (Nobody left.)

“Simply put, the next president of the United States is going to inherit a mess,” he said. “We may be reaching a tipping point” when top-level U.S. government decisions could have a profound impact on the nation and the world for decades to come.

Yost said the “mess” is “due to terrible decisions by the current administration” and to situations that have arisen in recent years.

“Had we met in 1988, two years before this (World Affairs) council was founded, who would have guessed today’s problems?”

He cited the impact of the decisions of Hitler, Stalin and Mao on millions of people — and on history — and said “I believe January 2009 (following the U.S. presidential election) will open” an epoch in history “as important as any of these.”

Under former President Bill Clinton, the U.S. “gained power and lost influence,” Yost said, while under President George Bush the nation “has lost power and influence.”

On the economic front, he termed Americas’s skyrocketing indebtedness as frightening.

On the military front, Yost said “U.S. military power is overwhelming — and yet insurgents have bled our armed forces.

 He then noted that his talk would focus on three issues — “drivers of change,” America’s ability to lead the world and the next U.S. president — in which the clash of these forces is having a direct and second-order effect on the world.

“Begin with globalization, which could be described as the removal of barriers from the free flow of trade” among countries, he said.

The “downside of globalization, Yost said, includes, among others, the following:

• Empowers terrorists.

• Creates environmental costs.

• Results in a massive shift of economic power from developed to developing countries.

As an example of his third point, he noted, “China now holds roughly $1 trillion in U.S. debt.”

Yost also cited the jump in oil costs from $24 per barrel in 2003 to $53 per barrel in 2006 to $125 per barrel — as of the day of his talk and rising daily — in 2008.

During the skyrocketing of the price of oil in the past five years, the U.S. dollar has plummeted 50 percent in value, he said.

Further, the world population now is an estimated 6.7 billion people, but that is expected to jump to 9.2 billion by 2012 — for a 2.6 billion growth spurt, according to Yost.

Much of that growth will be in the developing world, he said, and much of it will be in urban areas.
He added that about 70 percent of the population in developing countries is young — below age 30 — while developed countries are graying fast.

In 2005, the World Bank estimated that 2.5 million people migrated across borders to other countries and, “again, the consequences of immigration can be beneficial or destablizing,” depending on the situation, he said.

In trying to project what is going to happen, many experts forgot that each human being is driven by complex motivations, making them difficult to predict.

For instance, Yost said, in developing countries, people are driven by memories of colonization, religious fervor and the fear of loss of authority.

“Identity politics is a painful lesson we’re learning daily,” he asserted.

As for the U.S., he said, “We are a huge — and disruptive — driver.”

However, that could change as the American population ages. “Today, there are many more Chinese cellphone users than Americans. There are more Chinese on the Internet than Americans — and all of that came out of the Silicon Valley” in Northern California.

The U.S. sought to lessen tensions and eradicate terrorists in the Middle East with its military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, but instead “Iran was empowered by the loss of an enemy.”

“The world’s in flux. We’ve gone from a brief unipolar money, where the U.S. led in the ‘90s,” to a world where America is being challenged in its dominance and other countries are questioning its capacity to lead, Yost said.

For example, he said polls show eight out of 10 Americans think the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction. He said polls indicated that only 32 percent of Americans approve of the president’s job performance and, “worse, 22 percent of Americans think Congress is doing a good job.”

He said many see the current leadership as “a dysfunction administration,” which is “driven by idealogy and stubborness.”

However, while Yost said “it’s nice to think that the problems are confined to the present president,” that is not the reality.

What’s more, at a time when the U.S.’ reputation abroad is so frayed and the situation is so volatile and dangerous, “none of the three presidential candidates has international experience.

“We are, as everyone knows, headed for a fiscal train wreck,” with social benefit costs spiraling out of control.

Yost then turned to the matters that the next president will facing, noting that, on the positive side, the U.S. continues to produce 25 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, “as it has done for 100 years” and we have a military next to none.”

However, in even the countries that are considered America’s warmest allies in the Middle East, the U.S. is generally disliked, Yost said.

Specifically, he cited polls that show the U.S. has an unfavorability rating of 83 percent in Turkey, 78 percent in Egypt, 66 percent in Indonesia and 60 percent in Pakistan.

“And these are our friends,” Yost reiterated.  “In each of these countries, we have pretty good relations with the government, but not the people.”

The next president will face the challenge of stratetgic direction involving fundamental choices in foreign relations.

He added, “We must become the off-shore balancer — stop pushing democracy and be mindful of China’s rising influence and take America out of its debilitating ground wars in the Middle East.

Yost asked if the next president will think that economic convergence will occur, inasmuch as “others argue that premise.”

“In time, we’ll be facing Chinese threats, as we are now with the Russians” on various issues.

While President Bush continues to argue that the U.S. will not negotation “with the bad guys,” Yost said that is the very group with which one needs to negotiation.

“The next president of the U.S. could spend 100 percent of his or her foreign policy time on the Middle East, but instead the next president needs to rebalance our focus to other parts of the world, too.” He specifically cited the need for the U.S. to pay attention to the situations in Myanmar (Burma), Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

“We can only be as strong abroad as we are at home,” Yost added, citing many domestic problems troubling Americans, too.

Among the many problems in international relations is that a third of U.S. ambassadors are appointed for political-patronage reasons, he said. What’s more, 22 percent of U.S. foreign assistance “now goes through the Department of Defense,” so “as a result our civilian capacity has atrophied.

“We also have a presidential campaign process that forces candidates to take poor positions (on issues) to get elected,” Yost said. “The Democrats have gone wacko on trade — there are foolish and irresponsible. If we became, again, protectionist,” the ramifications will be staggering, he said, as other countries will retaliate with their own trade barriers.

“The Republicans, on the other hand, are prepared to see America’s power drain away in the Middle East,” he lamented.

“So, I’ve not painted a pretty picture tonight. I suppose I take solace in the words of Winston Churchill, who said, ‘You can always rely on America to do the right thing — after exhausting all other options.’”