Obama Team Expected to Ditch Bush Unilateralism at Munich Meeting

The Obama administration is expected to ditch the go-it-alone foreign policy legacy of the Bush years on Saturday when the new vice-president, Joe Biden, delivers the first big speech on global security of the Democratic White House.

Making its debut in Europe, a high-powered team from the new administration is to attend the annual security conference at a five-star hotel in Munich, sparking excitement in European capitals at the prospect of a radical new departure in US foreign policy.

"There is a tremendous air of expectation," said an EU diplomat. "This could be a fundamental weekend in the security of Europe. We really could be in for a big change."

The US team, including Biden; General James Jones, the new White House national security chief; General David Petraeus, the former Iraq and current Afghan war commander, and Richard Holbrooke, Obama's new Afghanistan and Pakistan troubleshooter, is unusually high-profile for the Munich meeting opening tomorrow.

Several former US presidential wannabes, including senators John McCain and John Kerry, will also attend with the German and French leaders, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Russian and Iranian leaders.

Speculation is rife that Biden could deliver a bombshell - offering an end to 30 years of estrangement with Iran, shelving the Pentagon's contentious missile shield plans in Poland and the Czech Republic, or inviting the Kremlin to embark on a new era of nuclear arms control.

Biden will unveil "the first major foreign policy of this White House", a senior administration official told reporters in Washington. It would be "a pretty forceful statement about the new approach ... to foreign policy in general".

But while European diplomats and officials have high expectations of the Obama team, the Americans also sought to dampen anticipation, predicting that Biden would outline a collaborative vision to mark a clean break with the unilateral approach of the neo-conservatives in the Bush White House who treated Nato with contempt, abandoned arms control with the Russians, encountered acute hostility in Europe and generated loathing all across the Middle East.

The Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, discussed the missile defence controversy with Hilary Clinton, the US secretary of state, last week. The Poles expect the Pentagon project to be shelved, parked in a lengthy "technical review". But Warsaw does not expect any US announcement this weekend.

"The administration has not made a decision yet. They want to see whether it [missile defence] works or not," said an official in Warsaw.

This will please the Russians who this week welcomed reports that Obama hopes to re-engage Moscow in reducing nuclear arsenals.

"We have taken note of statements that they are not going to push forward [with missile defence]," said Vladimir Chizhov, Russian ambassador to the EU. "It's not a total reversal of previous positions. No one says scrapping. Perhaps that's coming. It would be reasonable and logical."

Strobe Talbott, head of the Brookings Institution think tank and a former senior Clinton administration official, said the prospects were good for a renewed effort on nuclear arms cuts.

"We now have an administration which actually believes in arms control," he told Reuters.

Iran's influential parliament speaker, Ali Larijani, and foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, will be in Munich, fueling talk of exploratory contacts between Tehran and Washington behind the scenes. Neither side has confirmed any intention to meet.

The broader expectation is that Biden will deliver a paean to the merits of multi-lateralism, pledging to listen to and take account of the views of European allies, while also making veiled demands on the Europeans to bear more of the costs and risks in global security, most notably in committing to the battlefields of Afghanistan.