From the Middle East to
Europe to Asia, the Obama Administration looks increasingly adrift. A serious
course-correction has to happen soon.
The world of June 2014 is not
a world the Obama Administration wanted or foresaw. The plan was that six years
of no-drama, no-stupid-stuff diplomacy would repair the damage of the Bush
years, isolate jihadis in a democratizing Middle East, develop a new
relationship with Iran, build a businesslike relationship with Russia, and
pacify East Asia. Europe would sleep, the Middle East would cool, and by
pivoting to Asia the United States would stabilize the world’s most dynamic
economic region and enhance American prestige even as it slashed defense
budgets and stepped away from the global front lines. It was a beautiful plan,
but it hasn’t worked out.
The reset with Russia ended
with Putin mounting the most brazen land grab in Europe since World War Two.
The pivot to Asia brought us to the point where tense standoffs over half a
dozen disputed sites in the waters off China have turned into potential flash
points, and where senior Chinese generals use the harshest rhetoric against the
United States since before Nixon’s visit to Beijing. Al-Qaeda is no longer
“on the run” according to as sober a source as the Financial
Times; it’s in its best shape since October
2001 by
some analyses. The Syria horror continues to grow more intense and the
consequences, more dire; Western intelligence agencies say they are unable to
track the activities of thousands of Western passport holders now being trained
in the finer points of jihad as they fight against Assad. The
Israeli-Palestinian peace process is in ruins despite major pushes by the
President in each of his two terms. Saudi Arabia is cold to the
Administration’s regional policy. Libya is a disaster. Years of “democracy
promotion” in Egypt revealed the depth of American illusions about the Arab
Spring and exposed the limits of our influence in Egypt. Congressional support
for the Administration’s Atlantic and Pacific trade initiatives appears to be
withering away. The President’s surge in Afghanistan (the war, let it be
remembered, that he called a just and necessary war and vowed to win) is
faltering ingloriously as officials race to redefine “success” faster than
conditions deteriorate on the ground.
It increasingly looks as if
Secretaries Clinton and Gates made the right move in getting out when they did.
The contrast between the hope of the first term and the change of the second
could not be more marked. But for the President and his embattled team
contemplating the new world disorder, the going keeps getting tougher. And it’s
not just that the foreign news makes for unpleasant reading; the sense that the
President’s foreign policy has gone seriously awry is undercutting his
authority at home and contributing to the GOP’s chances of taking the
Senate and blocking the President’s agenda during his remaining two years.
The White House seems aware
of the problem; the President’s
speech at West Point last week was a rare, high-profile effort to seize
control of the foreign policy discussion. But the speech (like so many others
by the man once hailed as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln) soon sank
without a trace.
At this point, none of
President Obama’s foreign policy problems can be solved by a teleprompter. The
President doesn’t need more speechwriters or better ones. He needs something
totally different: He needs some real-world wins. You don’t demonstrate your
mastery of world events by making smart speeches about how intelligent your
foreign policy is; you demonstrate your mastery of world events by having
things go your way.
If, for example, as America
stepped up support for the Syrian rebels, President Assad suddenly found that
the climate in Damascus was no longer salubrious and went shopping for a
retirement home on the shores of the Black Sea, we would hear much less about a
crisis in American leadership. If the United States and its NATO allies
committed to major new defense installations in the Baltic republics and
Poland, there would be less chest thumping in Moscow. If Ukraine’s military and
security forces gradually became more effective, were better equipped, and
began to drive the noisy rabble of Russia-sponsored thugs back over the
frontier, President Obama wouldn’t need to make speeches about America’s
commitment to eastern Europe.
The world is a big place,
and there are lots of issues to choose from, but the President now urgently
needs to put some points on the board. Otherwise, his authority will continue
to erode.
As it is, the President
appears to be second guessing himself, but in the worst possible way. He is
stepping up support for the Syrian rebels, but not by enough to make a
difference on the battlefield. He is proposing new military spending for
Europe, but at such a low level that his proposal disappoints his allies and
reassures his opponents. One can hope that some things are happening behind the
scenes, but from what we can read in the press, President Obama is still
splitting differences and splitting hairs when he could and should be making a
stand. This is President Obama at his worst: months of agonizing and logic
chopping ending in a strategy that fails.
The essence of strategy is
to align your ends with your means: to match your goals and your resources. The
core problem that has dogged this President from the beginning is a failure to
do that. His goals have always been high and difficult, but he hasn’t wanted
(or perhaps felt able) to invest the political, financial, or military
resources that such large goals require. To heal the breach between the United
States and the Arab world, for example, is a noble and a worthy goal, but it is
extremely hard to do and would take much more money, political engagement, and
policy change than President Obama has been willing to put on the table.
Nuclear disarmament, a global climate change treaty, democracy in the Arab
world, victory in Afghanistan, detente with Iran, the establishment of R2P
as American doctrine, Israeli-Palestinian peace: This is less a foreign policy
than a catalog of Holy Grails.
Choosing high goals is not
necessarily a bad thing, even if you fail. As GK Chesterton put it, anything
worth doing is worth doing badly. But to choose extraordinary goals without
putting extraordinary resources into the quest to achieve them is a sign of
foolishness and arrogance, not idealism. If you want to rid the world of
nuclear weapons, for example, you would have to be willing to make a real issue
of the Budapest
Memorandum. Ukraine is a nation that did what Obama would like many others
to do: It gave up nuclear weapons in exchange for an agreement that its
territorial integrity would be respected. The United States signed that
agreement; President Obama must either commit himself to a vigorous defense of
Ukraine now, or accept that the goal of a nuclear-free world is beyond his
grasp. Characteristically, President Obama seems to be trying to split the
difference. He doesn’t want to give up his high goal, but he doesn’t really
want to pay for it, either. In Kiev this week he restated America’s commitment
to Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity, but only
offered $5 million in additional (non-military) aid to a country under
attack by a larger, more powerful neighbor. Tyrants, tremble: the check
is in the mail.
The mix of ambitious goals
and mingy means doesn’t just leave the President suspended in the gap between
his soaring words and sketchy deeds; it gets him and the country he leads into
trouble abroad. This Administration, for example, prides itself on making U.S.
diplomacy an instrument of human rights and democracy promotion. USAID and
other U.S. agencies gave large grants to foreign NGOs working to train “civil
society activists” and to build the capacity of independent groups to act in
defiance of government censorship and controls. This is certainly a commendable
idea from the standpoint of democracy promotion, but we ought to be clear that
governments in countries like Russia, China, Egypt, and Cuba consider this an
extremely hostile and confrontational policy. They are not wrong; it is a
policy of soft regime change, seeking to undermine non-democratic regimes and
hasten the day when they fall.
As the White House saw
things, the United States was pragmatically seeking a businesslike relationship
with Russia (unlike that stupid hardliner George W. Bush) while nobly
keeping faith with our enduring commitment to democratic values. From Putin’s
point of view, President Obama was babbling incoherently about “resets” while
clumsily and ineffectively trying to undermine his regime. Putin’s puzzle was
to figure out whether Obama was a knave or a fool; whether he was consciously
deceptive in holding out the olive branch to Russia with one hand while
concealing a dagger in the other, or whether Obama simply failed to understand
that his Russia policy was an incoherent mess. Either way, there was very
little chance that the Obamian policy mix would lead to better relations with
Russia, and it is likely that the mix of hostility and incompetence that Putin
thinks he sees in American policy informed his calculations about what he could
do in Ukraine.
It is likely that China’s
calculations about how hard it can press to challenge the United States are
grounded in similar lines of thought. It is not that they think Obama is “weak”
or “dovish”; they can count drone strikes as well as anybody else, and they are
under no illusions about America’s instinctive hatred for authoritarian
governance. Like the Russians, they see Washington’s move in Libya as revealing
our deep-seated drive to get rid of regimes we don’t like and assume we would
do the same to them if we could. But they also think that American policy is
confused and narcissistic: that we proclaim ambitious goals because we like to
flatter ourselves about our power and our nobility of character, but that we
lack the resolution to achieve them. They think we will make speeches about
rebalancing in Asia and commitments to our allies, but that as we perceive the
risks and costs such commitments entail we will gradually back down.
Obama’s mix of high
rhetoric, noble ideals and risk-averse decision-making plays into the
stereotypes that Russians, Chinese, and others around the world have about the
American national character. The idealistic speeches and the
human rights gestures feed their fear of American purposes; the risk aversion
plays into their contempt for American resolve.The
idealistic speeches and the human rights gestures feed their fear of American
purposes; the risk aversion plays into their contempt for American resolve.
The result is to tilt policy in both Moscow and Beijing toward aggressive
anti-Americanism. The governments in both countries believe that we are a
threat to their internal security, but that we can be buffaloed if our
opponents get tough.
What feels in the Obama
White House like a smart mix of idealism and pragmatism looks very different
abroad; unwittingly, the Administration’s “house style” of foreign policymaking
is virtually guaranteed to promote aggressive behavior abroad.
What we have now is a deeply
dispiriting spectacle: The world is not going Obama’s way, and the White House
PR machine attempts to offset this with faux triumphs like the painfully
overhyped Bergdahl exchange. For his own sake, and the sake of the nation
he heads, President Obama needs to revisit his basic approach to world affairs.
Fundamentally, he must either dial back his idealism or dial back on his
promises to pull the United States back from the global front lines.
This is not, I fear, really
a choice. In the abstract, there are good arguments for either course, but in
the real world American opinion is unlikely to sustain a foreign policy that
consigns human rights to the dustheap of history. I’ll return to this topic in
another post, but it’s worth remembering that in the aftermath of the Vietnam
War Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon attempted to chart a purely realist
course in pursuing detente with the Soviet Union, recognition of Mao’s China
(during the Cultural Revolution, no less), support for Pakistan against
India, and otherwise following a cold, realist calculus of national interest
and limited engagement. By the middle of the 1970s both parties were in revolt
against what was seen as an immoral and un-American foreign policy.
In any case, the reset
America needs now is in the White House, and we must hope that the President
presses the button soon. It is much easier to lose credibility than to regain
it; the longer U.S. policy drifts in its current odd mix of ambition and
retrenchment, the less likely it is that the President will be able to turn
things around.
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