White House veteran warns of gathering storm

Professor Stefan Halper, a foreign policy expert who served under four US presidents, will use an appearance at the Festival of Ideas on Thursday to warn of the real possibility of future conflict between the United States and China.

Halper, a panel guest in a debate called The battle for the White House, said: “Neither candidate has come to grips with the profound complexity of the US-China relationship, which has both economic and security dimensions.

“What concerns me is the great separation between these two spheres – that while we have important economic links, our security objectives are becoming increasingly divergent.”

Halper has also highlighted the need for an improvement in the diplomatic skills of Mitt Romney, should he triumph in November’s Presidential election, and says the Republican candidate would face a steep and unforgiving learning curve in office.

He said:  “It’s not easy to travel to London and then to Tel Aviv and to leave a sort of dog’s breakfast in your wake in both places. This is not easily achieved, but he did it. We now know from Iraq and Afghanistan that you don’t deliver democracy out the back of a Humvee – it can’t be imposed. I don’t know whether Romney has learned that lesson. Certainly many of his advisors have not.”

Halper also discussed the importance of pursuing diplomatic sanctions against Iran, rather than drawing a “red line” as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for.

He said: “The Iranians are suffering from these sanctions. Their currency has depreciated by 80%, their oil exports are down by 50%. A red line might serve to stimulate Iranian nationalism, it’s much better to let the Iranians fall under their own weight.”

Elsewhere, Professor Halper believes the future of the ‘special relationship’ between the USA and the UK will prevail, despite the changing dynamics of American society.

He said: “Our grandmothers read us the same nursery rhymes, we learn the same stories. I mean we are acculturated in the same ways, and there is a very special place in the American heart for Britain.”

He did, however, acknowledge potential for change in the future: “We have a large Hispanic population and they have no particular link to Britain. We have a large black population, around 12%, and they don’t either.”

Professor Halper will be discussing these issues as part of a panel, gathered by Cambridge University’s Festival of Ideas, the UK’s biggest free arts, humanities and social sciences festival, on Thursday evening, from 7.30-9pm, at the Babbage Lecture Theatre.

He will be joined by David Reynolds, Professor of International History at Cambridge and presenter of the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series America, Empire of Liberty, who will contend that race remains a fundamental issue in these elections. He will use his background in American history to re-contextualise issues of race in light of demographic shifts in the US over the 20^th Century.

Professor Reynolds said: “An incumbent president sitting on 1% growth and 8% unemployment shouldn’t have a hope in this election. The reason Obama is still a strong contender owes much to the changing demographics of the American electorate – or, more bluntly, the question of ‘race’, which is the big unmentionable in this campaign.

“Obama was hailed as the country’s first ‘black’ president, but over the next quarter-century the terms ‘white’ and ‘black’ will lose their meaning. I want to set 2012 within the demographic revolution quietly taking place in America as Latinos and Asian-Americans come of age politically and as the racial groups that obsessed 20^th century America become genetically intermingled.”

The panel will be chaired by Daniel Franklin, Executive Editor of the Economist, and will also feature Susan-Mary Grant, Professor of American History at Newcastle University. Professor Grant will be exploring the influence of the past on contemporary politicians, and how they exploit it to bolster patriotic or professional credentials.

It will also feature Inderjeet Parmar, specialist in US foreign policy and Professor of International Politics at City University. Professor Parmar sits on the organisation committee for the AHRC Obama Research Network, and in this discussion will be focussing on Barack Obama’s presidency, arguing that his key failings relate not to the dire economic circumstances of his election in November 2008, but rather to his elitist background and outlook.