Jeffrey Goldberg has a very long article up at the Atlantic discussing Obama’s foreign policy. Go read it. I’ve got some quotes here, but if you’re interested in our role in the world you should read it.
For someone like me, who is sharply critical of the drone program and also critical of the Libyan intervention, it reminded me how much I like Obama’s foreign policy in broader strokes. The article is broad-ranging, but one of the crucial bits lays out what happened during the Syrian “red-line” episode. That episode illustrates the difference between Hillary and Obama when it comes to foreign policy, intervention and the use of military force.
Briefly, back in August 2012, Obama had declared that any widespread use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime would result in American strikes. He said:
We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.
Assad is widely believed to have used the chemical agent Sarin a year later, in August 2013 in Ghouta (near Damascus). This attack killed several hundred people including many children. The red line was crossed. Preparations began to strike Syrian targets, and then the day before the strikes, Obama cancelled them.
This was widely seen as a moment of weakness, by many within and outside the administration.
Right after Obama’s reversal, Hillary Clinton said privately, “If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice.”
Obama is fully aware of where he diverges from Washington group-think, and pretty cynical about what drives this group-think.
“Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power,” he [Obama] said. “That is the source of the controversy. There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply.”
I have come to believe that, in Obama’s mind, August 30, 2013, was his liberation day, the day he defied not only the foreign-policy establishment and its cruise-missile playbook, but also the demands of America’s frustrating, high-maintenance allies in the Middle East—countries, he complains privately to friends and advisers, that seek to exploit American “muscle” for their own narrow and sectarian ends. By 2013, Obama’s resentments were well developed. He resented military leaders who believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign-policy think-tank complex. A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as “Arab-occupied territory.”
Yes, even Obama is “anti-establishment”.
Goldberg goes into Obama’s view of “free riders” at length. Briefly, these are “allies” who refuse to put up men and materiel, relying instead on our enormous military might. It’s also instructive that Obama distinguishes between what is, and what isn’t an existential threat:
“isis is not an existential threat to the United States,” he [Obama] told me in one of these conversations. “Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.” Obama explained that climate change worries him in particular because “it is a political problem perfectly designed to repel government intervention. It involves every single country, and it is a comparatively slow-moving emergency, so there is always something seemingly more urgent on the agenda.”
That is actually closer to Bernie’s position that many admit and Obama is quoted on Climate Change later in the article again.
Almost exclusively, the focus of foreign policy in the primary debates (on both sides), revolves around the middle east. Asia in a broader sense, is an after-thought, though fully half the world’s population lives there. Obama does focus on Asia though, and once again there’s a distinction with Hillary:
Many people, I noted, want the president to be more forceful in confronting China, especially in the South China Sea. Hillary Clinton, for one, has been heard to say in private settings, “I don’t want my grandchildren to live in a world dominated by the Chinese.”
“I’ve been very explicit in saying that we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China,” Obama said.
Obama also has a broader sense of history and our place in it than most of the candidates running for president:
“We have history,” he [Obama] said. “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people’s suspicions.”
You rarely hear Hillary discuss this history or the long arc of our interventions. Which is surprising since she vacations with Kissinger, but it sounds like regret for bombing South-East Asia to smithereens never comes up (Obama remembers the lesson). Though he doesn’t park his beach-chair next to Kissinger, Bernie in contrast does bring up our Latin American interventions, our Iranian interventions, our Asian interventions, etc.
Oh, there’s also the Libyan example:
That intervention was meant to prevent the country’s then-dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, from slaughtering the people of Benghazi, as he was threatening to do. Obama did not want to join the fight; he was counseled by Joe Biden and his first-term secretary of defense Robert Gates, among others, to steer clear. But a strong faction within the national-security team—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, who was then the ambassador to the United Nations, along with Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Antony Blinken, who was then Biden’s national-security adviser—lobbied hard to protect Benghazi, and prevailed. (Biden, who is acerbic about Clinton’s foreign-policy judgment, has said privately, “Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir.”) American bombs fell, the people of Benghazi were spared from what may or may not have been a massacre, and Qaddafi was captured and executed.
But Obama says today of the intervention, “It didn’t work.” The U.S., he believes, planned the Libya operation carefully—and yet the country is still a disaster.
When I read the article, I note that the nuclear deal with Iran had the same dynamic in some ways as Syria. Credible threats of use of force and sanctions, leading to disarmament. Obama’s take on Saudi Arabia is also revealing, in the article he highlights the role KSA has played in promoting a fundamentalist view of Islam around the world. To some extent, the Iran agreement is as much about that as it is about disarmament and reducing the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. Let’s not forget though, that Obama’s been working on disarmament for a long time. In his first year in the Senate, he traveled to Ukraine with Dick Lugar to help promote a bill that would destroy conventional weapons stockpiles, including:
These vast numbers of unused conventional weapons, particularly shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles that can hit civilian airliners, pose a major security risk to America and democracies everywhere. That's why we have introduced legislation to seek out and destroy surplus and unguarded stocks of conventional arms in Asia, Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.
Now, I have my disagreements with Goldberg. In particular read this:
History may record August 30, 2013, as the day Obama prevented the U.S. from entering yet another disastrous Muslim civil war, and the day he removed the threat of a chemical attack on Israel, Turkey, or Jordan. Or it could be remembered as the day he let the Middle East slip from America’s grasp, into the hands of Russia, Iran, and isis.
The Middle East should not be in America’s grasp. Or the hands of the Russians, the Iranians or ISIS. It should be in the grasp of the people of the Middle East. Obama gets this, I wish more people did. I walked away from the article in broad agreement with Obama:
Part of his mission as president, Obama explained, is to spur other countries to take action for themselves, rather than wait for the U.S. to lead. The defense of the liberal international order against jihadist terror, Russian adventurism, and Chinese bullying depends in part, he believes, on the willingness of other nations to share the burden with the U.S.
And as you read that, you want to keep in mind Bernie’s repeated insistence that American troops should not be bearing all the burden in the Middle East. Nations in the region have to step up.
Sometimes, you have to read about events and people in a different context to gain new insight. In re-evaluating Obama’s foreign policy instincts after watching this primary play out, I believe that Bernie is closer to Obama on foreign policy. And the perfect example is the Iraq vote which Bernie is right to bring up repeatedly:
In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” WhenThe Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’ ” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman announced that the two would “hug it out” on Martha’s Vineyard when they crossed paths there later.)
Yes, you read it right, “hug it out on Martha’s Vineyard”. La-dee-daa.
And once again: GO READ IT, if you haven’t already.
In part to encourage you, I will give you one more nugget of wisdom from Obama:
“It is literally in my DNA to be suspicious of tribalism,” he told me. “I understand the tribal impulse, and acknowledge the power of tribal division. I’ve been navigating tribal divisions my whole life. In the end, it’s the source of a lot of destructive acts.
PS. There is also a critique of Kissinger embedded in the article and an absolutely delicious assessment of how DC has mythologized Reagan’s foreign policy.
