Funny how the people who object to American sports such as NBA or NFL games being held in Europe do not object when an instalment of the American presidential election campaign comes to town. Democrat candidate Barack Obama was greeted by an adoring crowd in the Tiergarten in central Berlin. But what kind of a president will he be?

Read his speech and it is not clear. Fine-sounding words, but do they really mean as much as those Berliners seem to hope?

Attention has been paid to statements such as “No nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone.” as though they were novel or revolutionary. Other than for the most neo- of the neo-cons, this is surely a statement of the obvious, particularly by an American politician in a foreign country. As to how nations should work together to defeat such challenges, Obama does not tell us, except “through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress”. The strong institutions might be interesting, but the rest is padding.

A lot of comparisons have been drawn between Barack Obama and John F Kennedy, not least implicitly by Obama himself seeking to deliver a speech in Berlin. But JFK became president at a time when the US was the undisputed leader of the free world and its allies desperately wanted it to succeed. The world is different now, and America’s place in the democratic world’s affections has to be earned and not assumed. That will mean policies and not just speeches, and policies may turn out to be rather harder.

After all, George W Bush did not strike out in a completely new direction as American president but actually continued many of the foreign policies of his predecessor Bill Clinton. The Clinton administration launched bombing raids on Iraq, fired cruise missiles at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and effected regime change in countries such as Haiti.

To change American policies to ones that appeal to the rest of the democratic world will mean more than simply undoing the mistakes of the Bush presidency but will require a more far-reaching reassessment of America’s role in the world. Obama has offered fine words of leadership, and his views on nuclear deterrence and climate change are surely welcome around the world, but there is more yet to come before we can be sure.

There is an interesting story in the Guardian today from its archives, recounting the end of American gangster John Dillinger, as reported on 24 July 1934. Read it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/jul/24/5

One of the difficulties law enforcement encountered in dealing with Dillinger (style guides recommend referring to him as Mr Dillinger, but I find that rather hard) was the fragmentation of the police forces between the different states, and their coordination with the federal police. (The FBI was founded the following year.) The problem of inter-state coordination to enforce the law is one we still live with today.

The apprehension of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has been widely acclaimed as a good thing. There are some, though, who disapprove.

There is a group of souverainistes who rate national sovereignty more highly than justice. The idea that someone should be tried in an international court repels them. Criminal justice is something that belongs only within states, they say, even though there are plenty of examples of states where the administration of criminal justice has broken down. Worse, some of the most appalling crimes actually involve the deliberate destruction of the criminal justice system, to ensure that a campaign of genocide can be implemented, for example.

(Daniel Hannan sets forward the argument here.)

The souverainistes are not suggesting that such actions as genocide are morally acceptable – don’t be in doubt about that - but they are insistent on defending a system that renders such actions beyond our capacity to prevent them. One might ask about the moral standing of an act that foreseeably permits others to commit immoral acts.

There is a separate criticism of international justice, which is that it is ad hoc and unreliable. (Daniel Hannan makes this point, too.) This is an argument not against the principle of international justice but against its practice. And they are right, in that ad hoc legal systems are less preferable to well-established ones. But in order to have well-established legal systems, one first has to establish them. Over time, they will develop experience and case law and tradition, which will make them more reliable and predictable in the future. Any institution has to start somewhere.

If the argument that the institutions of international justice are new is an argument against using them, they will never be set up. In which case, the worst dictators and criminals will remain beyond justice. And that cannot be preferable.

It is the habit of this blog to look at major foreign policy speeches, and who better to report on than Barack Obama, the increasingly likely winner of the American presidential election in November. While Federal Union is strictly speaking a British organisation, American foreign policy affects the whole world, so we are entitled to take an interest. And Obama is increasingly likely to win because he is willing to do the things necessary to make himself electable.

For example, his previous pledge to rely on federal funding and reject private contributions to his election campaign (and thus observe federal funding limits) has been abandoned in the face of his ability to raise far more money privately than his Republican opponent, John McCain. Some people might call this hypocrisy or opportunism; others have said approvingly that this shows he has the determination to win.

If he will make that to his campaign finance position, what will he do to his foreign policy plans?

Barack Obama’s chief foreign policy claim to fame – which he used to great effect in the primary contest against Hillary Clinton – was that he opposed the Iraq war from the outset. This position is clearly in his latest speech on the subject, which you can read here. His earlier demand for a precipitate withdrawal from Iraq has been modified somewhat – he now accepts a timetable of 16 months – which again has been described as a lack of principle by some, but which nevertheless puts him into sharp contrast with John McCain who argues that America should escalate the war in order to win it.

Obama’s preference is to send more troops to Afghanistan, in the explicit hope that the Europeans will send more soldiers, too. The problem here is that the Europeans themselves are not yet ready for more fighting on the scale that would be needed to make a difference in Afghanistan: there is a European reluctance to exercise power around the world that still needs to be addressed.

His third priority is to bring under control the tools and materials needed to make nuclear weapons. He is worried about terrorist groups, and also about rogue states, but he is ready in fact to go further, saying “America seeks a world with no nuclear weapons”. This is quite an extraordinary claim, and a quite different approach from that which says that the only way to deal with a heavily armed world is to be heavily armed oneself. This does not mean, of course, that he is willing to drop his guard until other countries do so, too, but he does believe that it will give America enhanced credibility when proposing that North Korea and Iran should renounce any nuclear aspirations they may have.

Fourth, he shares the American obsession with foreign oil. His solution, though, is not to increase drilling at home but instead to develop alternative sources of energy. And he won’t do this alone: he wants to “build an alliance of oil-importing nations and work together to reduce our demand, and to break the grip of OPEC on the global economy.” It is interesting how Obama sees the way in which America is dependent on other countries, not only in the supply of oil but also in the alternatives to it.

This dependence leads him to his fifth point, the need to rebuild America’s alliances. He wants a greater commitment from Europe in Afghanistan, and to reform the United Nations. He also wants to pursue greater cooperation with the democracies of the Asia-Pacific region, such as Japan, South Korea, Australia and India. (Robert Kagan, adviser to John McCain, has outlined something similar in a recent book, “The Return of History and the End of Dreams”.) And he wants to enlist countries all around the world to fight terrorism.

A speech such as this, by a candidate and not by an office holder, has to be understood not as a detailed set of policies – the constraints of office will soon force changes to whatever plans he might have – but as a means of marking himself out as different from the other candidates and showing where he stands in relation to the current president. On that basis, this is a clear rejection of almost everything George W Bush has done, and also shows some strong differences with McCain.

While both Obama and McCain talk about the importance of allies, and also of alliances, McCain appears to be more interested in formalising those relationships. Obama has not spoken of anything as concrete as the League of Democracies idea. However, in many ways, the crucial issue is not America’s relationships with its friends but rather its relationships with its enemies. Obama confirms that “No tool of statecraft should be taken off the table” – a rather more subtle way of threatening Iran than Hillary Clinton ever managed – but he is ready to offer alternatives to confrontation. McCain seems to be more belligerent, whether in fighting the war in Iraq to a conclusion or in dealing with other threats around the world.

There is a long way to go before the election in November, and Obama’s promise of “change” will continue to be applied to his own policies, I am sure. But right now, he is proposing a substantially new direction to American foreign policy, one which no doubt will find favour in Europe during his visit this coming week.

An interesting discussion this afternoon on the rising price of food and what can be done about it. Newspaper headlines claim that prices are rising by 21 per cent a year, but that’s based on very selective research. A broader based measurement looking at what people actually eat (the 21 per cent figure was based on the ingredients for pancakes) gives an annual inflation rate of 6 per cent. Still high, but not shocking.

The reasons for this rise? Speakers at the meeting suggested five:

- the rise of China and India and the concomitant increase in demand for food
- climate change, reducing the supply of some foodstuffs
- the high oil price – oil is needed for transport and making fertilisers
- the diversion of food crops into biofuels
- speculation – inflows of money from the equity and property markets looking for profits in the commodity markets instead

Opinions differed over the relative importance of each of these factors, and it is probably different from one crop to another – rice prices are rising but it is not used for biofuels, for example – but the overall trend is clear and inescapable.

Against this background, what is there that can be done? Obviously, lower trade barriers would reduce fuel prices, but there’s got to be more to it than that. The reason is that the benefits of freer trade will not necessarily be felt equally by all countries, and those countries that experience more pain than benefit have little incentive to agree a deal.

Any progress in the direction of trade liberalisation will have to be accompanied by other measures to capture and redistribute some of the benefits that liberalisation produces. But redistribution has become a dirty word all of its own.

There is an interesting reflection on the fate of the Common Agricultural Policy too. The CAP was set up to provide incentives for farmers to increase output, at the expense of the EU budget. The market would not reward such production increases, so the taxpayer would do so instead. However, prices are now rising so far that the CAP incentives are being overtaken by those provided by the marketplace. The CAP budget is not being spent, because farmers are no longer able to claim all the money. The CAP system has been widely criticised from many different directions, but I don’t suppose that anyone ever imagined it ending like this.

An elegant definition of local politics in an article by P J O'Rourke in the Weekly Standard:

Governor Sununu explained the importance of the "short control loop." Your shower faucets are a short control loop. You turn on the cold faucet, the shower is cold. You turn on the hot faucet, the shower is hot. You fiddle with both faucets, and you take a shower. Now imagine your second-story bathroom has its shower faucets in the basement. That's a long control loop. You turn the water on, climb the steps and get in the shower. It's too cold. You wrap yourself in a towel, go down two flights of stairs dripping water all over the house, go back upstairs. It's too hot. You go back downstairs, etc. "If your federal taxes go up," the governor said, "doing something about it is a protracted process. If your local property taxes go up, you walk over to the town tax collector's house and give him a piece of your mind. So who's more likely to raise your taxes? People in Washington? Or people next door?"

After the Irish referendum, the president of Poland refuses to sign the Lisbon treaty, even though the Polish parliament gave it an overwhelming majority back in April (384 votes to 56 in the lower house, 74 votes to 17 in the Senate).

In effect, President Kaczynski is saying that the votes of the Irish people count for more in weighing up the future of the EU than the votes of the Polish parliament. A strange kind of patriotism, that.