Front matter
- Chapter 1. A Post-American Foreign Policy for the Post-American World
- Chapter 2. The “Human Ink-Blot” : Obama, Foreign Policy and the 2008 Election
- Chapter 3. The Obama Doctrine : “Leading From Behind”
- Chapter 4. Afghanistan, Pakistan and the War on Terror
- Chapter 5. Iran
- Chapter 6. Israel, Palestine and the Arab Spring
- Chapter 7. China
- Chapter 8. Russia
- Chapter 9. Continuity We Can Believe In : Keep the Change
Back matter
Barack Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy
The Limits of Engagement
Bloomsbury Academic 2012
Bloomsbury Open Access
[97]I
hope that Obama will have as successful a term as I had in dealing with our nation's domestic and international affairs.
—Jimmy Carter, September 19, 2010
[98]...
Barack Obama seems to have chosen Carter's ideological path over
Clinton's pragmatic one. As his foreign policy appears more
and more ideologically driven, erratic, uncertain and out of the
mainstream, the president's response is to try to finesse
the glaring contradictions in his initiatives by the power of his
person. If there is no midcourse steering correction towards
a more moderate appreciation of American interests, Obama might
find that the people of this country will become disturbed
by America's increasingly precarious position in the world and the
messianic pretensions of their transnational commander
in chief.
[99]I
greatly admire his insights and understanding. I don't really think he has a policy that's implementing those insights and
understandings. The rhetoric is always terribly imperative and categorical: “You must do this,” “He must
do that,” “This is unacceptable” ... He doesn't strategize. He sermonizes.
Scholars
of US foreign policy, rather like Republican and Democratic Party
lawmakers
in the contemporary US Congress, are not well known for easily
achieving lasting consensus. But even by the polarized and
reliably fractious standards of today's political commentary, the
breadth and depth of academic disagreement over Obama's
foreign policy is striking. Obama's approach to international
affairs since assuming the presidency has seen him defined and
defamed variously as a foreign policy “realist,”[100] an “accommodationist,”[101] a “liberal
internationalist,”[102] a “neo-conservative,”[103] an “isolationist,”'[104] a “liberal-realist,”[105] and a “war addict.”[106]Daniel Drezner raised the question of whether
Obama actually followed a clear grand strategy in foreign affairs, only to conclude that his administration has pursued no
fewer than two such strategies – “multilateral retrenchment” and, subsequently, “counter-punching.”[107] The administration's central failure, for Drezner, has consisted principally in failing to articulate
its latter-day pugilism sufficiently clearly to the American people.
Such dissensus seems to confirm Obama's own belief – and, arguably, as the
last chapter suggested, his wilfully opaque self-definition – as a human Rorschach test: exactly what Obama thinks about
the world seems to be strongly in the eye of the beholder. The originator of the term “post-American world,” Fareed Zakaria, even responded to such critical tumult by concluding
that the elusive search for a comprehensive “Obama Doctrine”
was simply futile – the doctrinal approach to foreign policy no longer making sense in today's complex and multi-layered
world – and should simply be abandoned as unhelpful to understanding the multifaceted nature of Obama's internationalism.[108]
In fact, fleshing-out the campaign
commitments that he had staked-out as a candidate during the 2008
campaign, Obama's grand strategy became quite rapidly apparent
in his early months as president, building on but clarifying those
commitments and undertakings from his presidential campaign.
Seeking to blend together a combination of the types of hard
military and economic power employed by previous US administrations
with a greater appreciation of the utility of soft power in an
increasingly networked era, the administration's deployment
of “smart
power” was premised on the tough reality of
rising powers, American decline, and power diffusion in an
international order that was simultaneously changing and challenging
Washington on multiple fronts around the globe. With an increasing
range of rising powers competing for influence and resources,
and the US quest to maintain primacy running directly against the
opposition to such leadership in many parts of the world,
the Obama approach resisted a one-size-fits-all dogmatism in favor
of an eclectic mixture of instruments and tactics. What
united them was a conviction in the need for Washington to
calibrate its commitments carefully to its newly constrained capacities
in order to maintain and maximize its potential still to lead a
post-American world.
The
fault-line of American foreign policy debates has for several decades
fallen
squarely between realists and idealists. Crudely put, this pits
those primarily concerned with states' external behavior and
relations – for whom “regime type” is simply an irrelevant black
box – against those for whom the
internal nature of states matters greatly, both as an intrinsic
issue and as a guide to their external behavior (and for whom,
therefore, the quest to shape that internal configuration, however
difficult, should be a vital part of foreign
policy). But Obama consistently sought to resist – or, more
precisely, transcend – such traditional categories and
conventional ideological tendencies. As one account put it, befitting
a former editor of the Harvard Law Review,
“Obama has emphasized bureaucratic efficiency
over ideology, and approached foreign policy as if it were case
law, deciding his response to every threat or crisis on its
own merits.”[109]
Keenly anti-ideological, Obama appeared to have taken to heart H.
L. Mencken's injunction that for every complex problem there is an
answer that is clear,
simple, and wrong. Instead, the Obama Doctrine appeared to consist
in a steadfast rejection of doctrine or visionary thinking
as inappropriate and ineffective for today's especially complex
world. In its place was a style
of international leadership that resembled the one Obama had
previously employed as a community organizer on Chicago's South
Side – assiduously seeking broad consensus, working closely with
allies, and assembling or enabling coalitions to achieve
shared collective goals. In eschewing traditional foreign policy
divisions, following a relentlessly cost-benefit logic, and
seeking a pragmatic balance in US foreign policy, Obama's approach
alternately frustrated realists and idealists alike. Increasingly,
as his term progressed, Obama offered what one of his White House
advisors infelicitously termed a “different definition
of leadership than America is known for”: “leading from behind.”[110]
As his 2008 election campaign had made clear, Barack Obama's election as forty-fourth
president promised major change in US foreign policy and a new phase in America's international relations; one calibrated
to the arrival of a “post-American world.”[111] Although relatively short on detailed policy
specifics, the public record of Obama's many statements and speeches – from The Audacity
of Hope through the long 2008 election campaign to his
inaugural address – repeatedly emphasized several distinct
but interrelated themes that implied a decisive break with the
divisive George W. Bush years: America's growing interdependence
with the world; the persistence and centrality – for good and ill –
of globalization;
the need to strengthen alliances and international institutions to
tackle shared global challenges, from terrorism and failed
states to climate change, nuclear proliferation and pandemics;
reinvigorating multilateral action and institutions like the
UN, NATO and G20 that conferred legitimacy upon collective action;
engaging US adversaries in a spirit of mutual respect;
and restoring the vital ethical link – widely viewed as having
been fatally compromised under Bush – between America's
internal values and external policies. Such clear commitments to
renewing US foreign policy on a platform of strategic restraint
served as an emphatic repudiation
of his predecessor, and signalled a keen willingness
to adapt the US to the emergence of a more multi-polar, interconnected and interdependent world.
Simultaneously, though, for all the obvious historic contrasts with its forty-three
predecessors, Obama's administration also appeared as only the latest in the modern era to be committed to preserving and
– if possible – enhancing and extending US primacy. In her US Senate confirmation hearings to become Secretary
of State, in January 2009, Hillary Clinton declared that “we
must strengthen America's position of global leadership” in order to ensure that America remained “a positive
force in the world.”[112] Similarly, although expressly recognizing the emergence of a “changed world”
in his relatively subdued inaugural address of January 20, 2009, Obama also stated explicitly that “we are ready to
lead once more.”[113]
The Obama administration thus commenced office in January 2009
apparently conscious
of a changing world but at the same time committed to renewing US
leadership in ways that – both directly and indirectly
– implied that the international order had perhaps not altered so
dramatically after all. This inherent and abiding
tension, and the difficult accompanying adjustment to an era of
limits on US international leadership, influence and global
reach, emerged as constant features of the administration's first
term and its various attempts at strategic retrenchment
and restraint.
That
was hardly surprising, given the unpropitious circumstances of Obama's
arrival
in the White House. From the outset, Obama's foreign policy
“in-tray” was at least as problematic as his domestic
inheritance. US forces were deployed in two major interventions of
uncertain course and Obama was the first American president
since Richard M. Nixon to enter the White House with a shooting
war in progress. The threat of mass fatality attacks from
al Qaeda, its affiliates and “home-grown” Islamist terrorists
remained serious, even if the Bush-era rhetoric of the war on
terror had been abandoned as counter-productive. Rising autocratic
powers and petrodollar states were increasingly assertive from
Latin America to Central Asia. Iran and North Korea's ambitions
for nuclear weapons threatened regional destabilization in the
Middle East and Northeast Asia. The unending Israel-Palestine
conflict fueled Muslim extremism and threatened further wrenching
Middle East wars. Failed, failing and weak states from Somalia
and Yemen through Mexico and Haiti to Pakistan and Afghanistan
continued both to experience terror at home and to export lethal
violence to their neighbors (and further afield). International
cooperation to advance free trade, combat climate change and prevent pandemics remained fitful
at best.
The
international challenges facing Obama on his entering the White House
were therefore
multiple, grave and urgent. But Washington's leverage in the
international order appeared substantially diminished after the
Bush era. American power was widely resented and US judgment
questioned. The financial crisis and Great Recession compounded
the spiraling budget deficits and national debt from 2001–09,
raising serious questions regarding the material foundations of American power and the reality of “imperial
overstretch.” Attempts at increased burden-sharing with NATO
and other allies remained only episodically successful.
The
US public, moreover,
was now disinclined to endorse major foreign commitments after the
Afghan and Iraqi wars had cost so much in American blood
and treasure, with so little to show for the profligate
expenditure. A 2009 Pew Research Center/Council on Foreign Relations
poll, for example, found that 49 percent of Americans believed
that the US should “mind its own business internationally”
– the largest-ever plurality recorded favoring such an
“isolationist” stance. 44 percent of Americans also
inclined towards unilateralism, agreeing with the statement that
“we should go our own way in international matters,
not worrying about whether other countries agree with us or not” –
the highest proportion since Gallup first asked
the question in 1964.[114]
Although the US has military defense treaties with more than fifty
allies, by
2010, majorities of Americans endorsed US military assistance to
another nation-state that was under external attack in only
five instances: Canada, the United Kingdom, Israel, Germany and
Mexico.[115] A mere 11 percent of Americans
believed that the US should continue to act as the “world's
policeman.”[116]
Upon becoming president, Obama therefore confronted some pressing political dilemmas
that had major influences on shaping his presidency. First, as the New York Times foreign
correspondent, David Sanger, presciently observed prior to Obama's
entering the White House:
The world he is inheriting from Bush will constrain his choices more than he has acknowledged, and certainly more than the throngs of supporters believed as they waved their signs proclaiming CHANGE. His biggest risk is that he will take the anti-Bush turn too far – that his cool, analytic approach will be seen, in times of crisis, as a lack of resolve; that his control and calmness might be viewed, over time, as a mask for an absence of conviction.[117]
Compounding that first challenge was a second major problem: the febrile pressures,
poisonous partisan divisions and intense ideological conflicts of contemporary Beltway life. Obama had been elected to the
US Senate in 2004, and had effectively served only three years in the chamber (since all of 2008, his fourth year –
and a good proportion of 2007, too – had been given over to the heavy demands of the constant presidential campaign).
Obama's exposure to Washington politics, while intense, was therefore decidedly brief. As Richard
Wolffe, one of Obama's favorite American journalists, noted, a key
dilemma for a president committed to a transformative agenda
was whether he could “change the nation before the nation's
capital changed him.”[118]
Equally, in
terms of a phrase of which Obama was fond, would the president be
able to exert a serious influence on the “arc of history”
in the wider world, encouraging its incline towards justice,
despite prioritizing domestic policy and having to overcome the
extraordinarily polarized nature of partisan politics on Capitol
Hill?
But
the third, and arguably most difficult, dilemma that shaped his
administration's course was that the urgency of the geo-political
problems confronting Washington in the world at large sat
uneasily with the need for sufficient strategic patience to bring
about concerted international action to resolve them. Precisely
because US hard and soft power resources alike were severely
strained – not only by economic malaise and the military
interventions of George W. Bush, but also because of the
diplomatic confrontations, alliance fissures and public opposition
that accompanied them in many nations – the policy instruments
which the Obama administration could employ to effect
decisive and rapid global change were relatively few and weak.
Undoubtedly,
the US was still the strongest single power in the world and still
constituted, as Madeleine Albright had (in)famously termed it, the
“indispensable nation” – as an (even
“the”) essential component of any global system of collective
security. But, whether or not one termed it a post-American
era, it was increasingly manifest that the US would now have to
share more fully the responsibility of maintaining global
order with other rising powers and emerging power centers. While
the US could not easily be excluded from regions such as
East Asia and the Middle East, nor could rising powers such as
China and India, the European Union (EU) or Brazil. Similarly,
prominent international challenges, such as those related not just
to the economy, environment and energy but also to broader
questions of poverty and injustice, could not be regionally
delimited. As two former US national security advisors argued,
Washington's great task after the Bush years would be to align
America with a “global political awakening” in
which, for the first time in human history, “all of humanity is
politically active”[119] – a reality
brought vividly to life in 2011 with popular protests erupting around the world in a “year of global indignation.”[120]
The cumulative result of the shifting international order meant that renewing US
leadership in an increasingly multi-polar – or even, as Richard
Haass termed it, non-polar[121]
– international order required an intelligent and imaginative approach
by the incoming administration. Obama's response was to emphasize a
pragmatic but nonetheless ambitious international strategy
that attended carefully to a new era of limits on unilateral US
power while simultaneously devoting substantial resources
to rebuilding America's faltering domestic base. The term most
commonly invoked over 2009–12 to define Obama's foreign
policy was strategic “engagement.” The National Security Strategy (NSS) document of May 2010 defined engagement rather broadly
as “the active participation of the United States in relationships beyond our borders.”[122] A more precise
definition might be “persuasion”: employing positive and negative inducements to convince or cajole others to
change their behavior, as their most rewarding or least harmful course of action. (Although, technically, a “pure”
policy of engagement would abandon negative inducements or threats altogether,[123] the terms “engagement” or “strategic engagement” will be used here to cover
both variants.)
As Thomas Wright argues, strategic engagement under Obama comprised five sets of interlocutors
whom the administration sought to address: civilizations, allies, new partners, adversaries and institutions.[124]
The underlying
logic of such a strategy for the post-American world was
reasonably clear and for many of Obama's admirers, compelling, in
representing an important shift from the approach adopted by
George W. Bush that targeted multiple audiences. Four elements
combined here to endorse a new emphasis on a more engaged and less
combative approach to international affairs.
First, as Obama pointedly declared in the NSS, “Our national security begins
at home.”[125] As Miles
Taylor noted,
unusually for a document typically focused on Washington's
international challenges and grand strategic designs, fully one-quarter
of the NSS was instead devoted to domestic policies and goals,
such as rebuilding the nation's crumbling infrastructure and
strengthening the American economy.[126] Second, the Bush administration's organizing US foreign policy primarily around
national security threats such as al Qaeda and an “axis of evil” (comprising the “rogue states” of
Iraq, Iran and North Korea) had simultaneously militarized American diplomacy while mistakenly marginalizing globalization as – for good and for ill – the primary driving force in twenty-first
century geo-politics. Third, framing a threat-based global war on terror was dysfunctional diplomatically and invited “blowback,” at
once elevating terrorism
to an unwarranted pre-eminence among America's
multiple foreign policy challenges and placing unacceptable
burdens on the US military, while at the same time alienating
and radicalizing the world's 1.5 billion Muslims. Fourth, in a
post-American international environment of rising powers, transnational
challenges, and widespread anti-Americanism, overemphasizing American
exceptionalism and the singularity of US leadership weakened Washington's capacity to persuade other states to responsibly
burden-share in policing the fissiparous international order. As such, Bush had been persistently preaching to an American
choir when he needed the global congregation.
In place of such a failed grand strategy, the Obama administration would substitute
a new and distinctive approach. As Secretary Clinton declared on
the publication and launch of the NSS:
We are looking to turn a multi-polar world into a multi-partner world. I know there is a critique among some that somehow talking this way undercuts American strength, power, leadership. I could not disagree more. I think that we are seeking to gain partners in pursuing American interests. We happen to think a lot of those interests coincide with universal interests.[127].
Amplifying this, James
B. Steinberg, US Deputy Secretary of State, later explained – on the ninth anniversary of 9/11 – the two central
strategic premises that underpinned the Obama administration's foreign policy.[128]
First was the
conviction that the changes in the international order that had
occurred since the end of the Cold War now placed a premium
upon mobilizing international cooperation to deal with
opportunities and threats that were manifestly shared, not isolated.
But, second was the unchanged centrality of the US to enabling and
coordinating such cooperation, in the absence of which
shared threats were simply likely to grow or go unaddressed. The
overarching problem for the Obama administration was how
to facilitate strong US leadership in an era of imposing
constraints, when US leadership capacities were constrained and its
legitimacy doubted post-Bush, and when the shared interests that
states identified did not automatically or easily translate
into a commonality of purposeful action among them.
The
administration's response
was to place continuing importance on US strategic partnerships
and alliances and to encourage their durability, but also
to stress their adaptation to new circumstances quite different
from those that originally inspired them. The latter aspect
required the careful building – or rebuilding – of cooperative
relationships with key players in the international
system such as China, Russia and India, as well as with rising
powers such as Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia. Moreover, these
bilateral relationships would need to be embedded within a set of
revived international institutions and stronger regional
multilateral architectures, some of which needed to be more
efficient and some more representative of changing power balances.
As Steinberg described it, Washington's commitment to the “twin
pillars” of global cooperation and US leadership
could together advance important international efforts to deal
with challenges as diverse as opening up the Arctic's resources,
combating climate change and ending nuclear proliferation:
“ultimately, the decision to reinvigorate global cooperation
is not ours alone. But America's actions can powerfully shape the
choices that others face.”[129] In effect,
it fell to Washington to “nudge” others in the international system in the appropriate directions.
Under Obama, then, as Wright observed, strategic engagement effectively “redefines
international politics as a complex problem-solving exercise.”[130]
By emphasizing shared interests
that necessitate every stakeholder in the international order
exercizing responsibilities in addition to rights, engagement
attempted to reframe the parameters of international action,
incentivizing others to a greater role in establishing and enforcing
norms of international conduct and, thereby, sending unmistakeable
signals to those entities – terrorist networks, failed
states, crime syndicates, outlaw regimes and others – who refused
to follow the order's agreed rules. In the latter
case, the unambiguous character of their failure should smooth the
road to effective sanction and isolation by the broader
international community. As the NSS expressly stated, “Rules
of the road must be followed, and there must be consequences for those nations that break the rules – whether they are
non-proliferation obligations, trade agreements, or human rights commitments.”[131]
Strategic
engagement
therefore not only recognized but also embraced the international
order's shifting tectonics at a time of American economic
stringency, military overstretch and public insularity. Faced with
the need to exercise damage-control post-Iraq with a limited
range of policy options, a more modest and humble US foreign
policy appeared not only desirable but, in a sense, unavoidable
in a post-American era. By “resetting” relations afresh with Russia
and China, abandoning the war
on terror's militaristic and supposedly anti-Islamic frame,
pledging the US to adhere once again to common norms and shared
international conventions, and addressing not only traditional
allies but also long-established adversaries – and, moreover,
by appealing to individuals and civil societies as well as
governments among friends and foes alike – the Obama administration
sought to convey the most potent symbolic and substantive contrast
with its ill-loved predecessor. While no American administration,
Democrat or Republican, would completely disavow the promotion of
certain cherished ideals and values, democracy promotion and the “freedom
agenda” were now clearly secondary to security concerns. Force, by
necessity and choice, took a back seat to vigorous
diplomacy. Open markets, in the aftermath of the Great Recession,
required new global coordination and enhanced regulation.
National sovereignty – whether that of the US or of China –
needed to recognize and incorporate shared responsibilities.[132] Seeking greater balance and reciprocity
in US foreign policy, Obama repeatedly stressed its essence as forging new global relationships “on the basis of mutual
interests and mutual respect.”[133]
It remains debatable whether these various assumptions and tenets really amounted
to the oft-attributed return to “realism” that Obama was widely celebrated for overseeing after Bush. As the next
section notes, in terms of his foreign policy personnel, realists – many of whom had previously served in the Clinton
Administration (1993–2001) – certainly tended to occupy the key administration positions and to shape policies
over 2009–12. But few American administrations can completely or consistently reject idealist strains in foreign policy,
especially when – as occurred under Bush's tenure – international events can conspire to frustrate a purely realpolitik approach. Equally, a strong case can be made that Obama's case-by-case approach
was not so much realism in action as simple pragmatism. Indeed, as
Colin Dueck compellingly argues, in keeping with the Democratic Party's
general direction since the Vietnam War, American power itself appears to be part of the problem on this interpretation:
Obama's most fundamental instincts seem to be not so much realist as accommodationist ... Obama and his supporters appear to view the president as someone uniquely qualified to bridge divides over cultural, economic and political lines, an approach he first developed during his days as a community organizer in Chicago. This bridge-building approach is applied abroad as well as domestically. Tremendous emphasis is laid on the importance of conciliatory language, style, and personality. The president's instinct, in many cases, internationally, is not so much to think in geopolitical terms as to try to lay out multifaceted understanding of points of view on every side, recognizing some validity in each perspective ...[134]
Moreover,
for some critics on the left, even the design of the supposedly
“new” US approach to foreign affairs under Obama
was highly questionable. Far from vindicating the campaign slogans
of “Yes We Can” and “Change We Can Believe
In” that together had heavily implied an urgent and major break
with the Bush administration, the parallels and continuities
between the two administrations were instead at least as striking.
As Inderjeet
Parmar argued:
President Obama's 2010 National Security Strategy ... strongly echoes that of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and is also almost identical to that suggested by a large group of elite academics, military officials, businessmen and former Clinton administration insiders brought together as the Princeton Project on National Security (PPNS) back in 2004–2006. The Princeton Project was led by Princeton academics Anne-Marie Slaughter and G. John Ikenberry, featured Reagan's secretary of state, George Schultz and Clinton's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, as co-chairs. Francis Fukuyama, erstwhile neo-con, sat on the steering committee and was co- author of the Project's working paper on grand strategy. Henry Kissinger acted as adviser, as did Harvard's Joseph Nye, author of the concept of “Soft Power”, morphing more recently into “Smart Power.” PPNS represented a new cross-party consensus on how to “correct” the excesses and reckless enthusiasm for American power of the Bush administration.[135]
But
whether the theoretical underpinnings of strategic engagement amounted
to a
decisive break from Bush and an internally coherent “Obama
Doctrine” – the search for which, among the commentariat,
proved decidedly more elusive than under prior presidents – was,
for the administration, mostly secondary to their translation
into effective practice and concrete international results. As Benjamin
Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, put it, in terms of foreign policy:
The project of the first two years has been to effectively deal with the legacy issues that we inherited, particularly the Iraq war, the Afghan war, and the war against Al Qaeda, while rebalancing our resources and our posture in the world ... If you were to boil it all down to a bumper sticker, it's “Wind down these two wars, re-establish American standing and leadership in the world, and focus on a broader set of priorities, from Asia and the global economy to a nuclear non-proliferation regime.”[136]
The
vast academic literature on the making and implementation of US foreign
policy
emphasizes that its relative success depends critically on a
combination of presidential priorities and attention; the principals
appointed by the president to relevant departments and agencies;
his management of their inevitable personal, political and
bureaucratic tensions, conflicts and rivalries; and the collective
execution of optimal strategic and tactical prescriptions
through effectively employed policy instruments. Obama's avowed
intention during his
presidential transition was to ensure that his foreign policy principals and advisors operated as a “team of rivals”[137] rather than rival teams, as had too often characterized US foreign policy under previous administrations
(Democratic and Republican alike).
If
an implicit model existed for both the content and structure of foreign
policy-making,
it was that of George H. W. Bush, whose foreign policy team from
1989 to 1993 was one of the most experienced, cooperative
and effective in modern American history, and one unashamedly
pragmatic rather than doctrinaire in its approach to world affairs.
As Thomas Donilon, Deputy and subsequently National Security Advisor
under Obama observed, his National Security Council (NSC) was “...
essentially based on the process that was put in place by Brent Scowcroft and Bob Gates in the late nineteen-eighties,”
to ensure that the NSC – based at the White House – was “the sole process through which policy would be
developed.”[138] Although controversies were to surround the operations of the White House, the
control of the foreign policy-making process was one of the most highly centralized and heavily politicized of any modern
American administration, with Obama effectively serving as his own National Security Advisor and Secretary of State.
Obama's
foreign policy nominees were widely approved within the Beltway,
representing
a blend of experience and freshness, policy expertise and
political nous, drawing on experts from the academy and think-tanks
such as the Brookings Institution and the Center for American
Progress, and bridging the distinct realist and liberal internationalist
foreign policy strands within the Democratic Party's coalition.
(With the exception of “global rejectionists,”
Obama's team of rivals included all of the tendencies identified
by Kurt
Campbell and Michael O'Hanlon within the Democratic foreign policy
coalition: “hard power advocates,” “globalists,” and “modest-power Democrats.”[139]) With a strong
– and, briefly, filibuster-proof – Democratic Party majority in the Senate during 2009–10, few nominees
encountered confirmation problems.
Hillary Clinton's selection
as Secretary of State was especially bold, imaginative and unifying – the third woman to hold the post being widely
respected and, politically, tied closely to Obama's success as his principal diplomat. Retaining the Bush holdover, Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense made both political and policy sense, as a bipartisan
pick and in ensuring continuity of control in the Pentagon during wartime (Gates and Clinton proved, with the exception of
the Libyan issue in 2011, reliably united on foreign policy, a stark
contrast to prior relationships between the Pentagon and State, such as Rumsfeld and Powell's repeated clashes in the Bush
administration). The choice of James Jones as National Security Advisor
consolidated the bipartisan and, as a military man and former John McCain advisor, centrist cast of the team (although he
was increasingly marginalized and questioned
as the first two years of the administration wore on, before resigning). Vice President Biden,
a former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with
extensive experience and contacts, promised to play an important
role as well (albeit not the highly activist one of Dick Cheney).
With Rahm
Emanuel as Chief of Staff and David Axelrod contributing the more
overtly political calculations, Obama's selections suggested a Chief Executive comfortable with a broad array of views and
advice, albeit from a relatively narrow, centrist (and, prior to William
Daley's replacement of Emanuel as Chief of Staff in late 2010, non-business) spectrum of opinion.
At the same time, those principals – along with key officials such as Donilon, Rhodes and Denis McDonough, another Deputy National Security Advisor – tended to err on the
realist side of the realism/idealism divide. In line with the deliberate
stepping-away from the idealism of the post-9/11 Bush years, those foreign policy officials whose pedigree tended to be on
issues of humanitarian intervention, human rights and democracy promotion received less senior posts: Samantha
Power was appointed Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs at the NSC; Anne-Marie
Slaughter, a proponent of a “concert of democracies,” was made Director of Policy Planning at the State Department;
and Michael McFaul, another advocate of democracy promotion, was
awarded a mid-level job at the White House. With the exception of Obama confidant Susan
Rice, who was named US Ambassador to the United Nations, the ranks
of the major Cabinet and NSC positions were held by realists
rather than idealists (raising implicit issues about a gender
divide at the heart of the Obama administration's foreign –
as well as domestic – policy-making).
The implementation of strategic
engagement rapidly became a dominant imperative for the members of the new administration, from the top down. As Stephen Wayne argues, Obama is not short of self-confidence and believes powerfully in
the efficacy of his “going public,” the value of the bully pulpit and his own ability to educate elites and mass
publics in a series of “teachable moments”:
Obama has used the bully pulpit more than any recent president. During his first year alone, he gave two addresses before joint sessions of Congress; held six press conferences; gave 152 one-on-one interviews; made 554 public remarks, statements, and comments to assembled individuals and groups inside and outside the White House – and this was all in addition to his weekly radio addresses ... By the end of 2010, he had given 428 speeches and remarks, issued 245 statements, many of them hortatory, in addition to his weekly radio broadcasts, nomination announcements, disaster declarations, bill signings, and letters and messages to Congress.[140]
Initially, Obama appeared to take the high-profile positive outreach agenda as his
own, while dispatching Clinton to do more of the “bad cop”
diplomacy with America's more ambiguous and adversarial interlocutors. That
partly reflected the president's confident belief in his own ability to shape and sway opinion at home and abroad –
not dissimilar to the prior self-regard of British Prime Minister, Tony
Blair. From the outset of the Obama administration, its foreign
policy
principals engaged in one of the most concerted efforts at
strategic engagement and renewed diplomacy seen by a new US
administration,
the symbolism of which was especially forceful after the
polarizing Bush era. Hillary Clinton's first overseas visit was to
China and Southeast Asia, while specially appointed envoys such as
George
Mitchell and (the late) Richard Holbrooke made several missions to
their respective regions of Israel-Palestine and South Asia. In an important symbolic act, Obama gave his first media interview as president to Al-Arabiya,
an Arab television satellite station. In a passage clearly intended to
mark a decisive
break with his predecessor, Obama also highlighted that a major
part of his new job was to “communicate the fact that
the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim
world, that the language we use has to be a language of respect.”
In his landmark Cairo speech of June 2009, the president reiterated this message
with even greater emphasis, repeatedly quoting the Koran and heralding a “new beginning between the United States and
Muslims.” In calling for an end to the mutually damaging cycle of acute distrust that had arisen between America and
Islam since 9/11, the president declared:
I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based on mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based on the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive; and need not be in competition.[141]
Stressing the need to confront “violent extremism”
in all its myriad forms, Obama defended the US mission in Afghanistan
while simultaneously emphasizing that US actions in America's self-defense should nonetheless be “respectful of the
sovereignty of nations and the rule of law.” While calling for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the
president also signalled his readiness to engage in negotiations with Iran “without preconditions and on the basis of
mutual respect.”
In addition to the potent symbolism, the ambitious pace and impressive scope of
Obama's global ambitions also quickly became apparent. In only his
first year as president, Obama: announced the intention to close the Guantanamo
Bay detention facility in Cuba, end torture and approve the US rejoining
the UN Human Rights Council and paying its UN dues; initiated a major
campaign on nuclear non-proliferation that resulted in his chairing a UN Security
Council session in September 2009 – the first time that a US president had done so – and convening thirty-eight
heads of government in a Washington, D.C. security summit in April 2010; traveled
to Ankara and Cairo to open a new dialogue with the Muslim world,
to Accra to reach out to Africa, and to Prague
and Oslo to advance the cause of a non-nuclear world (even if not achieved in his lifetime) and accept the Nobel Peace Prize, respectively; opened a bilateral diplomatic initiative to Tehran and
spoke directly to the Iranian people; announced a firm date of August 2010 for the withdrawal
of all US combat forces from Iraq and a comprehensive revised
strategy for Afghanistan; and pledged to “reset”
relations with Russia and advance strategic arms reductions while
repairing US relations with Europe, Latin America and Asia.
In terms of global perceptions, the dedicated effort to establish a
new beginning after Bush could hardly have been clearer,
better delivered or more pointed.
To
this end, too, Obama visited more countries in his first year of office
than
any other American president in history, making ten trips in 2009
to twenty-one nations; his closest competitor was George
H. W. Bush, who visited fourteen countries in 1989. The speeches
the president made were undeniably crucial in transforming
the tone of US foreign policy, especially those in Prague, Cairo
and Oslo. The award of the Nobel Prize, while politically
problematic for Obama at home and decidedly premature in terms of
actual achievements, nonetheless testified to the overwhelmingly
positive attitudes outside America towards the president. Indeed,
the attention devoted by the president to foreign policy
abroad contrasted markedly with Obama's domestic preoccupations
and politics within Washington; the president did not even
address international affairs in a direct televised White House
broadcast to the nation until August 31, 2010.
Obama's dedicated efforts at renewing America's image paid off in terms of a decisive
increase in pro-US attitudes, especially in Europe. But, as Table 3.1 shows, his restoration
of US favorability ratings was not universal. Obama's immense popularity in Western Europe – confirmed in the “Obama Bounce” detailed in Table 3.2
– was somewhat less the case in central and eastern Europe,
India and Israel. But the most conspicuous and consequential
exceptions were those where the president expended the greatest
effort to project an empathetic image: countries with
predominantly Muslim populations. From his explicit and direct inaugural
declaration that America was not at war with Islam, through his
inaugural offer of an “outstretched hand” to Iran
and repeated speeches emphasizing America's eagerness for a new relationship
based on mutual interest and respect, Obama prioritized changing
Muslim attitudes towards the US. His success, however, was
slight. While polls during his first three years mostly documented
a higher level of approval than had been obtained under
Bush, this increase occurred from a very low base and still
registered strong animus in many Muslim states, not least those
formally classified as US “allies” (such as Egypt, Turkey, Jordan
and Pakistan.) In the cases of Turkey and Pakistan,
even fewer respondents approved of Obama's foreign policy than had
that of George W. Bush, an “achievement” of some note.
Table 3.1. US favorability rating
1999–2011 (in percentages)
Pew Research Center, Pew
Global Attitudes Survey of 22 Nations, Q7a; 1999/2000 survey
trends provided by the Office of Research, US Department of State;
figures for 2011 from: http://pewglobal.org/2011/07/13/china-seen-overtaking-us-as-global-superpower/3/#chapter-2-views-of-the-u-s-and-american-foreign-policy.
The
difficulty here, however, was that while Obama earned some significant
political
capital with his new tone and transparently sincere desire to
establish a new beginning with the Muslim world, the raised
expectations of his first-year efforts – culminating in the Cairo
address – could potentially be squandered in
the absence of actual progress on the ground across the Middle
East and South Asia (and, to a lesser extent, in terms of intra-American
and intra-European relations) in terms of results. Much as he had
done with his
American supporters, by raising exaggerated expectations that this US leader was not simply another “more of the same” figure but rather a transformational and visionary president, the more prosaic realities of national and international politics were obscured. The overlapping tensions between the “all-American” and the “post-American” Obama, the conflict between American nationalism and a rooted cosmopolitanism, and the problems of strategic coherence inherent in a posture of “leading from behind” were nowhere more vivid than in this aspect of his engagement strategy. As one sceptical account argued, Obama's combined attempts to re-boot US soft power and restore American legitimacy could go only so far to rebuild US credibility and legitimacy among the world's Muslims:
The Muslim world continues to scrutinize the President's actions as much as his speeches. 24-news channels broadcasting images of US troops still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza, serve to undermine any message of reconciliation. Obama's quiet abandonment of democracy advocacy, highlighted by recent congressional cuts in democracy and governance aid for Middle Eastern states, similarly risks increasing cynicism towards the new administration's approach. Whilst Bush's democracy promotion at gunpoint was detested, the Obama administration's continued support for unpopular dictators such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, its propping up of Mahmoud Abbas' legally questionable presidential mandate extension, and the near-farcical acceptance of Hamid Karzai's fraudulent re-election in Afghanistan have dampened any Muslim optimism Obama may have earned in Cairo.[142]
Moreover, despite Obama's best intentions and his efforts at outreach, important
developments during his presidency implied a dangerous downward spiral in US efforts to combat Islamist terrorism. One, as
detailed in a report by the National Security Preparedness Group
(co-chaired by Tom Kean and Lee
Hamilton), was the increasing efforts of groups such as al Qaeda to radicalize and recruit American
Muslims. The success of such efforts, according to one senior US national security official, rested on disaffected American Muslims who had “internalized the idea that the United States is at war
with Islam.”[143]
With the non-Muslim US population's concerns about domestic terrorism
indicating
an increasing popular suspicion of all American Muslims, the
possibility gained ground that the two disturbing trends could
reinforce each other – making the warnings of Bernard Lewis
and Samuel
Huntington about a “clash of civilizations”
a reality – with Muslims convinced of a US at war with Islam and
non-Muslim Americans convinced of an Islamic world
at war with America. Should it materialize, such a development
posed a significant threat for future US and Western national
security.
Much
as his broader foreign policy had sought not to impose results but to
create
and cajole choices for other states and institutions, so Obama had
clearly wished to create the conditions for a new beginning
with civilizations (most notably, Islam), old allies, new
partners, adversaries, and institutions alike. But while his mix
of symbolic and substantive departures from the Bush years was not
lost either on Americans or peoples outside the US, its
desired effects remained muted and unfulfilled. In the key case of
the Muslim world, the raised expectations of Obama's first
year became mostly dashed in the realities of the Hindu Kush,
Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen and, latterly, in the Arab Spring
of 2011. The rhetoric of mutual respect and mutual interest
foundered on the increased US troops and drone strikes, the incursions
of special forces and the CIA into Pakistan and elsewhere,
alongside the lack of progress on a rapid and just settlement to
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For all his efforts, global
Muslim opinion barely shifted in attitudes to the US under Obama.
At the same time, the “teachable
moment” that his presidency sought to employ to deepen and broaden
American understanding of Islam and the US role in
the world also foundered. Far from assuaging popular American
concerns about the homeland's vulnerability to terror attacks,
those that were attempted on Obama's watch deepened them. Nativist
attempts to besmirch Obama's own credentials as an “authentic”
American saw the proportion of Americans
who
believed their president was a Muslim rather than a Christian
actually increase rather than decrease over his first two years,
to one in five (encompassing over one-third of conservative Republicans).[144] Although he retained the support of most Muslim Americans and had pledged early in his presidency
to combat negative stereotypes of Islam “wherever they appear,” Obama's
outreach to the community was largely invisible: by the autumn of
2011, the president – in marked contrast to his predecessor
– had neither visited a mosque in the US nor held a single event
with Muslim Americans outside the White House.[145]
More ominously, amid periodic American moral panics over the “Ground
Zero mosque” in Manhattan, threatened burnings of the Koran and
attempted
terrorist attacks, polls demonstrated that a large plurality of
Americans continued to hold unfavorable views of Muslims.
According to the biennial Chicago Council on Foreign Relations
2010 survey of national US opinion, Americans' attitudes towards
relations with the Muslim world had deteriorated, with a growing
overall pessimism gaining hold. Only a bare majority of Americans
(51 percent) concurred that “because Muslims are like people
everywhere, we can find common ground and violent conflict
between the civilizations is not inevitable” (that compares with
66 percent who agreed with the statement in 2002).
Instead, a substantial proportion of Americans (45 percent) agreed
with the statement that “because Muslim religious,
social, and political traditions are incompatible with Western
ways, violent conflict between the two civilizations is inevitable”
(an increase of 18 points from just 27 percent in 2002.)[146]
Reflecting,
responding to, and in part reinforcing such sentiments, the president's
own approach to counter-terrorism necessarily evolved over his
first term. After the attempted Christmas Day Detroit bombing
by the “underpants bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in 2009, when
Obama's initial (mistaken) response that he
had acted alone had come under intense Republican criticism, the
president vowed – in language reminiscent of the Bush
era – to “... use every element of our national power to disrupt,
to dismantle and to defeat the violent extremists who threaten us, whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia;
or anywhere ...”[147]
In seeking a pragmatic middle ground that vindicated his aspirations
for a new
beginning with the Islamic world while reassuring Americans of his
dedication to preserving US national security, the authenticity
of Obama's voice became increasingly questioned by Muslims,
progressives and – especially – conservative Americans
in turn.
The flipside of Obama's impressive, if not wholly successful, international outreach
efforts was how these comparatively unusual initiatives by a US president would
be received within the US, where his controversial domestic agenda had rapidly ignited intense opposition from Republicans
and conservatives, alienated Independents and spurred the Tea
Party
movement into mobilizing nationwide by the spring of 2009.
Although censure of the quantity of his foreign trips was relatively
muted, the content of the president's international travels quickly
earned him trenchant criticism, typically of two forms.
The
most common conservative tactic was to portray Obama as simultaneously
weak,
naive, narcissistic and arrogant. Obama's apparently sincere
belief that his mere appearance and well crafted set-piece speeches
via the ubiquitous teleprompter could change the deep-seated
attitudes and beliefs of tens of millions of peoples towards
the US and also alter substantive international policies was at
once excessively self-confident and naive about the way the
world works. Critics on the right charged Obama with conducting an
abject and nationally embarrassing “apology tour,”
in which the president failed to sufficiently venerate the US, and
not only conceded America's historic wrongs and missteps
but also denied the reality of American exceptionalism – the
notion that America had a distinctive, and even unique, God-given destiny.
Although
Obama often referenced his own meteoric rise as ample proof of
America's
distinctive merits – the implicit message being, what chance a
black British prime minister or French president? –
his occasional downplaying of America's virtue, especially when
abroad, offered at best an indistinctly American internationalism
and an inviting target to his many critics. His reply to a
question on his first tour of Europe as president, in April 2009,
aptly illustrated this. When asked by the Financial Times journalist, Edward Luce, whether he subscribed – like his predecessors – to a view of
America “as uniquely qualified to lead the world,” Obama's response appeared to encapsulate a cultural relativism
that rendered the US just one ordinary nation among others: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect
that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”[148]
The implication
appeared to be that if everyone is exceptional in their own eyes,
then no-one is truly exceptional, our differences trumped
by our common humanity.
The result was that, for the first time in modern American history, according to
Shelby Steele, “in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with
ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead”:
Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-'60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America's exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil – an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America's greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street – as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his “leading from behind” profile abroad – an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his “hope and change” campaign slogan came to look like the “hope” of overcoming American exceptionalism and “change” away from it.[149]
A
second variant of this type of criticism of the president's
de-emphasizing American
virtue was to acknowledge that Obama had indeed restored US
prestige in much of the world post-Bush, but to question its efficacy
in terms of substantive international achievements. As James Ceaser
put it, the president was behaving in an “un-presidential” manner:
Obama still retains an aura of charisma abroad, though to date it has yet to bring any of the benefits that were promised. But this kind of soft-power realism hardly bespeaks a foreign policy conducted on the basis of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” where principles are set down as markers designed to help open eyes to the rights of man. It represents instead a foreign policy based on promoting an indecent pandering to an evanescent infatuation with a single personality.[150]
The award of the Nobel
Prize for Peace was merely another such illustration, with Obama's
good intentions being rewarded long before they had been
translated into good results.
Given the hyper-partisan and sharply polarized nature of contemporary US politics,
it was unsurprising, and arguably inevitable, that a sharp conservative critique should rapidly emerge of Obama's foreign
policies. Although Obama attempted a brief rapprochement with some nationally influential
conservative commentators at the outset of his presidency – sitting down to dinner with, among others, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer,
at George Will's house before his inauguration in January 2009[151] – the deep-seated divisions between the American left and right were never going to be transcended
by a president who, in his own way, mirrored for the right the bogey-man that Bush had previously represented to the left.
As Richard Skinner argues, the presidency since Ronald Reagan has
become an increasingly partisan institution, one where partisans
approve strongly of their president's job performance while overwhelmingly disapproving of the performance of a president
from the other party.[152] Obama was only the latest Oval Office occupant to experience this bifurcated
response where a substantial share of Americans perceive an enemy in the White House.
Moreover, strategic engagement,
smart power and American renewal, however artfully constructed, effectively amounted to the Obama administration pursuing
a goal of calibrated strategic retrenchment: scaling back commitments,
reducing costs,
minimizing unilateralism, encouraging multilateralism, cutting
defense, and espousing less rather than more US assertiveness
abroad. The central charge of the conservative critique of Obama
foreign policy was that, rather than gracefully managing
the inevitable decrease in US power that was the prevailing
scholarly consensus about a post-American world, as Charles Krauthammer put it: “decline is a choice.”[153] To many on
the right, that purported choice was a deliberate decision by an ambitious president who, as Fouad
Ajami had predicted, and as was noted in Chapter 2, was not a conventional centrist Democratic liberal but rather a genuine leftist and avowed
cosmopolitan. Just as some conservatives had been insouciant about spiraling budget deficits and debt in the 1980s, on the
basis that these would “starve the beast” of increased domestic spending, so Obama's combination of fiscal stimulus
and spiralling deficits and debt at home seemed calculated to rein-in US adventurism overseas. As one former Bush official
described it, Obama's choices were far from accidental or forced upon the president. Instead, Obama possessed a “grand
strategic vision” that envisaged the president as an historic figure in the mould of Ataturk or Sadat in re-orienting
his nation's foreign policy, and that encompassed – as part of that turnaround – a major downgrading in the US global role.[154]
In turn, the central conservative charge of ending American exceptionalism through
choosing decline rested on three subsidiary claims about Obama's uniqueness as president.
First,
Obama's evident desire to “normalize” America in the community
of nations was both unprecedented and fatally misjudged. As the
outspoken former Ambassador to the UN in the George W. Bush
Administration, John Bolton, put it with typical acerbity:
Obama is the first post-American President. Central to his worldview is rejecting American exceptionalism and the consequences that flow therefrom. Since an overwhelming majority of the world's population would welcome the demise of American exceptionalism, they are delighted with Obama. One student interviewed after an Obama town hall meeting during his first presidential trip to Europe said ecstatically, “He sounds like a European.” Indeed he does.[155]
In
place of a confident articulation and celebration of American values
and virtues,
Obama's carefully qualified speeches offered a lesson in humility
rarely to be found in American Commanders-in-Chief. Following
Obama's speech to the United Nations of September 2009, in which
the president called for “a new era of engagement based
on mutual interest and mutual respect” and “new coalitions that
bridge old divides,” the conservative commentator
Michelle Malkin even declared that the president had “solidified
his place in the international view as the great appeaser and the groveler in chief.”[156]
Speaking to
the annual convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio,
Texas, in August 2011, former Massachussetts governor, and
past and future Republican presidential aspirant, Mitt
Romney, asked rhetorically, “Have we ever had a president who was so eager to address the world with an apology on his
lips and doubt in his heart? ... He seems truly confused not only about America's past but also about its future.”[157] At the same event, echoing the theme of a “weak” America under Obama, Texas governor
Rick Perry and one-time Republican presidential frontrunner declared
that, “We cannot concede the moral authority of our nation to multilateral debating societies, and when our interests
are threatened, American soldiers should be led by American commanders.”[158]
The
second claim in the conservative charge sheet was that backtracking
from the aggressively militaristic approach of the Bush
administration was ill-conceived and counter-productive, simultaneously
damaging traditional allies' confidence in US commitments while
unduly weakening key elements of homeland security. The very
idea that the Justice Department of the Obama administration could
even entertain the idea of filing lawsuits
against former federal employees – CIA operatives and the Office of
Legal
Counsel officials who drew up the standard operating procedures
governing interrogation practices after 9/11 – was indicative
of a worrying lack of firmness on counter-terrorism and homeland
security. Similarly, the linguistic convolutions that sought
to allay popular Muslim sensibilities and abandoned Bush-era terms
such as “terrorist,” “Islamist,”
“Islamo-fascist” and “jihadist” in favor of “militants” and
“extremists” did
a drastic disservice to the American public's wartime mentality
and the reality of the global Islamist threat.
Third, but related, Obama's instrumentalist view of alliances
– in terms of their contingent relevance to current US strategic challenges rather than by historical bonds of common
experiences or shared values – neglected crucial relationships and allowed traditional ties to fray.[159] The decidedly
cool reception given in Washington to Prime Ministers Gordon Brown
of the United Kingdom in 2009–10 and Binyamin
Netanyahu of
Israel throughout Obama's term suggested to conservatives an
unprecedented and worrying disdain for two of Washington's most
reliable international allies, not least with British troops
losing their lives alongside Americans in war-torn Afghanistan.
The fact that Obama was at the same time making such a concerted
effort to reach out to repressive regimes as brutal as Iran,
Syria and Venezuela compounded the grievous insult to America's
closest friends. America under Obama appeared to be retreating
from its role as an active player on the world stage, taking sides
and making clear preferences, into that of a more neutral
“umpire.” Romney, summarizing the contrasting approaches, claimed
that Obama:
... envisions America as a nation whose purpose is to arbitrate disputes rather than to advocate ideals, a country consciously seeking equidistance between allies and adversaries. We have never seen anything quite like it, really. And in positioning the United States in the way he has, President Obama has positioned himself as a figure transcending America instead of defending America.[160]
Echoing the Ajami critique, Romney argued that the result of Obama's
engagement was “much more than a departure from his predecessor, George W. Bush; it is a rupture with some of the key
assumptions that have undergirded more than six decades of American foreign policy.”[161]
How
far such pointed criticisms from the right had analytic accuracy rather
than
merely ideological bluster and partisan purchase was a matter for
debate. Certainly, elements of the American public were
unimpressed by the president's performance. Obama's job approval
ratings inevitably fell from the heights of his initial honeymoon
period in January 2009, as the American public grew increasingly
unhappy about his handling of the economy, his health care
policy, and the increasing size of the federal budget deficit and
national debt. But from the public's perspective, the president
had actually done a better job on foreign than domestic policy
although, as Stephen
Wayne observed, prior to Osama Bin Laden's targeted killing in May 2011, Obama's “approval ratings have been modest even within this
policy sphere.”[162] As Table 3.3 illustrates, even the “bounce” gained by the president from the
al Qaeda leader's elimination was brief, with – for the first time in his presidency – a majority disapproving
of Obama's handling of foreign affairs by August 2011.
Table 3.3. Public views on Obama's
foreign policy
“Presidential Ratings – Issue Approval,”
Gallup Poll, February 2009–February 2012, www.gallup.com/poll/1726/Presidential-Ratings-Issue-Approval.aspx.
Moreover, not all conservatives or partisans shared the conventional
critique of Obama. As former National Security Advisor, Condoleeza
Rice, argued after an extensive discussion of foreign policy with President Obama on October 15, 2010 that “covered
the waterfront”:
Despite the fact there are changes and tussles, there is still a foreign policy community that believes that foreign policy ought to be bipartisan ... It was really great that he reached out in that way ... Nothing in this president's methods suggests this president is other than a defender of America's interests.[163]
Indeed, a closer examination of Obama's beliefs about the US and American exceptionalism
suggested not a president lacking patriotism, but a leader capable of considerable complexity; a “fox” rather
than a “hedgehog” in Isaiah Berlin's dichotomy. Obama's full reply to the Luce question about his belief in America's
unique ability to lead the world illustrated this well:
I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. I'm enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don't think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe post-war, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we've got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that we're not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us.And so I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone.[164]
By
2011, Obama's speeches regularly invocated America's virtue, his
address to the
joint session of Congress on September 8 of that year a typical
example, ending with a rousing call to the assembled lawmakers
to “... show the world once again why the United States of America
remains the greatest nation on Earth.”[165]
Contrary
to some right-wing
claims, Obama was never so naive as to believe that mere speeches
could leverage US power anew; nor did he refrain from stating
his belief in the distinctiveness of America. Nonetheless,
Table 3.4. Democratic and Republican
support for Barack Obama's foreign policies, 2009
as Chapter 2 argued, the lack of clarity coming out of the 2008 election abetted what limited force the conservative critique held, especially among those sections of the American public that soured on Obama's presidency as America's economic conditions remained stubbornly problematic; as the persistence of attempted terror attacks on US soil became apparent; and as Washington's traction on multiple foreign policy fronts refused to yield tangible gains, visible results or major policy advances. While, as Table 3.4 confirms, the president retained the solid support of his own party on scaling-back defense spending and relying more heavily on diplomacy and foreign aid, according to Peter Trubowitz, “The differences between Democrats and Republicans in each of these areas could not be starker.”[166] Moreover, Obama's domestic preoccupations clearly outweighed his foreign agenda for most Americans.
Table 3.4. Democratic and Republican
support for Barack Obama's foreign policies, 2009
As a candidate, George W. Bush had promised in the 2000 presidential election campaign
to end the divisiveness of the Bill Clinton years, to change Washington, and be a “uniter, not a divider” –
promises that, as Gary Jacobson documented, went exactly unfulfilled
as president.[167] Although Barack Obama avoided the Bush language, as was his wont, his 2008 campaign
had also promised to transcend long-established lines of partisan division. As he had declared in his inaugural address of
January 2009, “The time has come to set aside childish things ... On this day, we proclaim an end to the petty grievances
and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”[168] Moreover, his
campaign relied heavily on the notion that
Obama
was, Mr Spock-like, the quintessential “un-Bush”: cerebral, cool,
cosmopolitan, analytic, detached, and un-emotive.
Despite his impeccably progressive record as a state and national
legislator, his calm demeanor and carefully reasoned speeches
promised a centrist, pragmatic leadership style that eschewed
partisan rhetoric or doctrinaire approaches and placed reasoned
analysis over ideological dogmatism.
To
the extent that, in renewing US foreign policy, the president delivered
on that
leadership promise, the more forceful conservative criticisms of
Obama's foreign policies have had rather limited purchase.
Inasmuch as Obama was never so naive as to believe that speeches
alone could secure substantive policy changes, his efforts
at outreach underscored those other acts of his administration
that suggested a concrete break with his predecessor in the
White House. The State Department assumed a greater prominence,
given the emphasis on diplomacy, and the Pentagon was –
at least by comparison with 2001–08 – somewhat marginalized under
both Gates and, from the fall of 2011, Leon Panetta. A new emphasis was accorded process over decisive or crisp decision-making.
And, in a highly politicized environment in which domestic politics and the electoral timetable loomed large, the process
was very centralized and driven by an activist White House.
As Peter Trubowitz argues,
“At a time when Obama and the Democrats have strong incentives to prioritize domestic needs, a grand strategy aimed
at scaling back commitments and reducing costs is what we would expect of this president ...”[169]
In pursuing
a grand strategy of engagement designed to co-opt others into an
American-led order just as a fading US power faced major
challenges at home, Obama's conviction was that by demonstrating
outreach, humility and appreciation of other cultures and
peoples, the necessary, and possibly sufficient, geo-political
space could be established to restore US standing and credibility
at a time of chronic fiscal strife. In moving from organizing a
South Side community in Chicago to organizing the international
community from Washington, stealth, modesty and an “enabling”
back-seat, reactive role had to supplement traditional
“forward-leaning” forms of US hard military and economic power.
The world's
policeman had to be increasingly preoccupied with the desk job rather than the beat. As Dr McCoy of Star
Trek might have referred to “leading from behind”:
“This is American leadership, Jim, but not as we know it.”
Such an un-heroic style was always destined to prove difficult to prosecute successfully,
clearly or consistently when commentators frequently expect and demand delivery of what George
H. W. Bush famously termed “the vision thing.” As the distinguished historian of US foreign policy, Walter Russell Mead, argued early in the president's term, Obama's strategic tightrope
walk required him to judge carefully how to blend his Jeffersonian instincts – to limit commitments abroad, strengthen
the US economy and renew the example of American democracy at home – with his Wilsonian idealism in support of universal values of human rights, the rule of law
and constitutional liberal democracy.[170]
But the irony – and, perhaps, the Shakespearian-style tragedy – of
Obama's presidency was that a candidate who campaigned as a
centrist, transformational, and even transcendent historical figure
has proven to be anything but such a leader to large sections of
an American public seemingly not reconciled – and apparently,
in some cases, irreconcilable – to his presence in the White
House.
Equally, as the Pew Global Attitudes Project reported, the professorial Obama's teachable
moments all too often resembled more the proverbial “blonde” ones
instead, delivering little in the way of genuine
rather than superficial instruction: in all of the Muslim
countries surveyed, majorities refused to believe that the 9/11
attacks were carried out by Arabs; the Muslim world and the West
still regard each other as fanatical and violent; and Muslims
view Westerners as immoral, greedy and responsible for Muslim
disadvantage.[171] Remarkably, by the summer of 2011,
America's standing among the Arab world under Obama – after Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Afghanistan, extraordinary rendition,
indefinite detention et al – was lower than
at the end of the Bush presidency.[172] As one editorial regretfully concluded, “... for all his fine speeches,
Mr Obama's inept diplomacy ended in humiliation.”[173]
If,
then, elements of the strong conservative critique of Obama's foreign
policy
were excessive, inaccurate and unfair, the concrete results of
Obama's quietly dogged pursuit of strategic engagement were
decidedly mixed. On a number of critical foreign policy
challenges, the Obama administration found itself frustrated, reversing
course, and pursuing divergent paths that satisfied neither
realists nor idealists, conservatives nor liberals, Westerners
nor ‘Resterners.’ By examining a series of these key international
challenges in the following chapters, the extent
to which the attempt to craft a more humble and nimble
post-American foreign policy achieved its intended objectives can be
assessed – and, ultimately, challenged.
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