WWOD: What Will Obama Do?

An enticing article title, “The Secret Briefing Obama Needs on Day One,” appears on the Foreign Policy site.

Writer Gregory Treverton, the director of the Center for Global Risk and Security at the RAND Corporation, identifies three passages that ought to be in the first President’s Daily Brief (PDB) Obama receives as commander in chief. (He’s been receiving these memos, described as “CNN plus secrets,” since he won the election.)

The three passages in the PDB cover the following issues: Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and the global economic crisis. As most of us watch the equity markets’ nerve-wracking performance, we tend to forget that the economic crisis has foreign policy implications.

“The economic crisis will put pressure on Europe in many ways, as open-source reporting [i.e., mainstream journalism] makes clear,” Treverton writes. “One dimension not yet well understood is that it is pushing countries there and around the world to re-regulate -- and own -- their banking systems as parts of financial bailouts. The largest European bailout came in mid-October, by six European countries and worth more than €1 trillion. Yet it was hardly a fully coordinated response.”

For example, The European Union initially balked at the French government’s move to shore of the capital of its top six retail banks before agreeing to the plan.

Unfortunately, Treverton concludes that (like the thorny situations in Afghanistan and Cuba) there appear to be no clear-cut solutions to the global economic crisis right now, besides “watching developments.” Hopefully, a forthcoming (and real) PDB will bring about a change on this score.