In 2007, early in the improbable presidential candidacy of Barack
Obama, the young first-term senator began a series of foreign-policy
speeches that seemed too general to provide a guide to what he might do
if elected. Aside from making it clear he was not George W. Bush and
would get out of Iraq, the rest read like liberal boilerplate: “We have
seen the consequences of a foreign policy based on a flawed
ideology….The conventional thinking today is just as entrenched as it
was in 2002….This is the conventional thinking that has turned against
the war, but not against the habits that got us into the war in the
first place.” In 2008, he visited Berlin and told an enraptured crowd:
“Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for president, but as a
citizen—a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of
the world…the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us
together.”
In Obama’s fifth year as president, it is increasingly clear these
vague phrases were not mere rhetoric. They did, in fact, accurately
reflect Obama’s thinking about America’s role in the world and
foreshadow the goals of the foreign policy he has been implementing and
will be pursuing for three more years. Obama’s foreign policy is
strangely self-centered, focused on himself and the United States rather
than on the conduct and needs of the nations the United States allies
with, engages with, or must confront. It is a foreign policy structured
not to influence events in Russia or China or Africa or the Middle East
but to serve as a bulwark “against the habits” of American activism and
global leadership. It was his purpose to change those habits, and to
inculcate new habits—ones in which, in every matter of foreign policy
except for the pursuit of al-Qaeda, the United States restrains itself.
I
In the beginning came
“engagement.” In his first State of the Union speech in February 2009,
Obama told us that “in words and deeds, we are showing the world that a
new era of engagement has begun.” A few days later he delivered a speech
about the Iraq war and said again that “we are launching a new era of
engagement with the world.” There would now be “comprehensive American
engagement across the region.” In his first speech to the United Nations
General Assembly, in September 2009, he repeated the phrase: “We must
embrace a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual
respect….We have sought, in word and deed, a new era of engagement with
the world.”
What did the word
engagement mean in this context? The message
here was that people around the world hated us for our heavy-handedness
and our militarism, which were the product not only of George W. Bush’s
policies but long-standing patterns dating back to the beginning of the
Cold War. This would now change. Our new president, the first to
recognize fully the regressive quality of activist American foreign
policy, would in the service of this goal be willing to meet even with
Iranian leaders, indeed almost any hostile dictator. The days when we
snubbed and demonized other nations were over. With Russia and other
nations there would now be a “reset”—the term that, along with
“engagement” and “global citizenship,” came to represent Obama’s foreign
policy in his first year in office.
These terms applied to the world as a whole, but Obama added a
special concern with the Muslim world. Here the Bush years had, in his
view, brought near-catastrophe, and he was uniquely able to solve the
problem. “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the
region where it was first revealed,” he remarked, and “as a boy, I spent
several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break
of dawn and the fall of dusk.” In his fifth month in office, he visited
Cairo not to address Egypt’s growing problems but to ignore them and
address every Muslim in the world: “I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a
new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,
one based on mutual interest and mutual respect….And I consider it part
of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against
negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
Astonishingly, he did not say he had equal responsibility when it
came to negative stereotypes of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism,
Hinduism, or other world faiths, only Islam. Even more astonishing was
his view that American interests were best served addressing Muslims not
as Egyptians and Malaysians, or Nigerians and Omanis and Indonesians—as
residents of nations with discrete interests and goals that might
intersect with those of the United States and make us valuable friends
and allies—but as Muslims first and foremost.
This was an innovation. There was nothing new in the notion that a
president would “engage” in a different manner from the way his
predecessors had. What was new was the idea that the president of the
United States would engage directly with the followers of an entire
faith tradition. Indeed, it would appear that in his view, this new kind
of engagement—with the citizenry of the planet—was going to change
everything. Obama told the UN in his first address there: “It is my
deeply held belief that in the year 2009—more than at any point in human
history—the interests of nations and peoples are shared.” Presumably
this was a reference to his preachment in Berlin in 2008: “This is the
moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve
that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and
famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.”
This global citizenship we all share would, at first glance, seem to
reflect a genuine concern with how average men and women and families
are living around the world. Such a concern ought to lead to two sets of
policies: one to help them overcome political oppression, and one to
help them meet the daily challenges of poverty and disease. And here is
the second innovative aspect of Obama’s foreign policy: the startling
absence of concern on either front.
On the human-rights side, administration policy has been marked by
indifference. When the people of Iran flooded the streets to protest the
theft of their presidential election in June 2009, President Obama was
silent for 11 days. This was an early sign that “engagement” was to be
with regimes and rulers, not populations—not even, as it turned out,
with Muslim populations, and not even with Muslim populations rising up
in protest.
In an even earlier sign, when asked during a visit Mubarak made to
Washington in March 2009 about human-rights violations by his regime,
then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton replied: “I had a wonderful time
with him this morning. I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to
be friends of my family.” This approach never changed: In 2011, when a
military regime replaced Mubarak, Clinton visited Cairo and said, “We
believe in aid to your military without any conditions, no
conditionality.” In 2012, she waived congressional restrictions on aid
just as the military regime was putting young American aid workers on
trial for the crime of promoting democracy in Egypt.
This was typical. Asked why she was not pressing the Chinese harder
on human rights, Secretary Clinton replied that “we pretty much know
what they are going to say” and “our pressing on those issues can’t
interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate-change
crisis, and the security crisis.” While the Obama years have been a time
of steadily increasing oppression in Russia, the administration has
reacted with near silence. In 2009, Obama visited Moscow and told
civil-society activists that they had his “commitment” and his “promise”
to support their human-rights efforts. But after he met with Putin in
2013, Obama said the two leaders had “a very useful conversation” and
“extensive discussions about how we can further deepen our economic and
commercial relationships.” “I began by thanking him for his
cooperation,” Obama said, and he spoke about “the kind of constructive,
cooperative relationship that moves us out of the Cold War mind-set.”
Genuine support for human rights is, apparently, a “Cold War
mind-set” that leads to confrontation rather than “engagement” with
regimes. It is one of those old habits we need to break. Worse yet is
the new habit of “humanitarian intervention,” with which the Clinton and
George W. Bush administrations sometimes justified American activism.
It is apparently a cause for sadness that 100,000 people have been
killed in Syria during Obama’s tenure, in other words, but it would be
dangerous as a justification for action. Given the unsettled state of
the world, “humanitarian intervention” could lead to another bout of
military activity—precisely the kind of foreign policy Barack Obama got
himself elected to end.
So does “global citizenship” instead mean people-to-people
assistance, avoiding politics and military action to aid the millions
facing poverty and disease? Such an approach might well justify
engagement with certain regimes we would otherwise seek to isolate, and
in any event it would show deep solidarity with fellow human beings
whatever their religion, nationality, or politics. But the Obama
administration has shown no interest in such an approach. Its maligned
predecessor developed vast programs to stop the spread of malaria and
AIDS. PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief) had spent $18
billion by the time George W. Bush left office, and even in the view of
Bush skeptics has saved millions of lives. By contrast, Obama largely
ignored Africa during this first term, leading to news stories with
terms like “unmistakable sense of disappointment,” “widespread cynicism
on the continent,” and “positively neglectful.” If “global citizenship”
requires assisting people who are poor or sick, the key post for
advancing it in Africa is that of assistant administrator for Africa at
the Agency for International Development. Obama left that post vacant
for more than three years. Similarly, the post of ambassador-at-large
for international religious freedom was vacant for half of the
president’s first term—another indication of his interests and
priorities.
The pattern, then, is one of considerable indifference to the fate of
the poor, the persecuted, and the oppressed. They are allocated their
fair share of rhetoric, but their plight does not much impinge on
policy. Now, such an approach can theoretically be defended—as a return
to realpolitik after the excesses of the Bush administration’s “freedom
agenda” and in the face of America’s economic and fiscal crisis.
Hardhearted, perhaps, but realistic: This is the age of limits. Such
would be the defense. The problem is that a realpolitik policy would
build on American alliances to maintain and magnify American power. It
might downplay ideological or ethical matters and marginalize human
rights (wrongly, in my view), but it would do so in an effort to secure
and advance the American national interest. Is that the Obama approach?
In one area the answer is unambiguously
yes, and that is the
fight against al-Qaeda terrorism. The Obama administration has vastly
expanded the use of armed drones, and concentrated a great deal of
diplomatic effort on building and maintaining alliances that share
information about terrorists, provide access to get near them, and then
strike against them. The president understands the political benefits,
of course: He and other officials have made a great deal of political
hay out of the killing of Osama bin Laden and like to say that al-Qaeda
is on the run. This works as long as there is no mass-casualty attack on
the United States attributable to al-Qaeda or a related group. But
there is no reason to doubt the sincerity the president and his team
bring to this effort. They are hard at work every day protecting
Americans from international terror.
But what
other aspects of Obama’s policy appear to be dedicated to maximizing American power and national-security interests? There are none.
II
Start with American military strength, where massive cuts have left
us with a Navy of 286 ships—the smallest number since 1917. When Mitt
Romney pointed this out during a presidential debate, Obama replied
sarcastically: “Well Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets.
Because the nature of the military has changed.” This retort was
effective in a smart-ass way, but while the cavalry may be a historical
relic, the Navy is not, and it is getting smaller. So are the Air Force,
Army, and Marines, because their budgets are shrinking. This is not the
result of technological improvements, as Obama’s quip suggested. Nor is
it the unavoidable effect of deficits. It is a policy choice in a
Washington where entitlement spending is more sacrosanct than military
spending.
More telling, Obama avoided turning to defense when urging spending
on “shovel-ready” projects to stimulate the economy during 2009 and
2010. Due to Iraq and Afghanistan, all the services had logistical needs
that would have created tens of thousands of good jobs—building tanks
and airplanes and armored personnel carriers and jeeps, and restocking
the military’s larder. But that was not the stimulus the administration
had in mind. Meanwhile, as conventional strength declines, the
administration seeks to reduce the size of our nuclear arsenal as well,
entering negotiations with Russia while ignoring persuasive reports of
Russian cheating on the 1987 treaty limiting intermediate-range
nuclear-armed missiles. Nor is the president’s “global zero” campaign,
aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons entirely when nuclear weapons
represent a qualitative American advantage, likely to strike those who
believe foreign policy should be about maximizing American power as a
sensible program. Certainly the administration’s efforts to reduce the
size of America’s nuclear arsenal send shivers down the spines of the
South Koreans and Japanese who depend on American deterrence as they
face a rising China.
Practitioners of realpolitik would be seeking to strengthen existing
alliances, as the first Bush administration’s foreign-policy team did at
the close of the Cold War. That has not been the Obama way. In 2009,
the administration left allies in the Czech Republic and Poland high and
dry by canceling a ballistic missile defense site in Eastern Europe in
an effort to curry favor with Russia. Lech Walesa, the great
anti-Communist Polish leader, and others criticized the policy reversal
and worried about American efforts to tilt toward Moscow rather than
Warsaw and Prague. And those East European politicians who had run risks
to defend the American proposal on missile defense in 2007 and 2008
learned a painful lesson about sticking their necks out for Washington.
But closer allies have faced the same lack of respect as well. The
British learned that the bust of Winston Churchill was removed from the
Oval Office as soon as Obama arrived. Then they learned what the new
team thought of them and of the so-called special relationship. During
the visit of Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2009, a State Department
official notoriously said: “There’s nothing special about Britain.
You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You
shouldn’t expect special treatment.”
These may have just been words, but when it came to the Western
intervention in Libya in 2011, the British and French learned that the
Obama administration’s limited view of allied solidarity posed
real-world dangers. British and French leadership finally brought all of
NATO (including the Americans, who were “leading from behind”) into the
struggle against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, and the United States
had certain military assets that the others simply did not possess.
These were offered slowly and grudgingly and were then withdrawn as soon
as possible. The operation therefore took longer than was predicted or
was necessary: At one point the rebels appeared to have considerable
momentum and were nearing the capital, Tripoli, but they did not get the
backing they needed from the United States. Later, in April 2011, the
U.S. withdrew its warplanes, leading to advances by the Gaddafi forces.
“Your timing is exquisite,” Senator John McCain told Secretary of
Defense Gates at an oversight hearing. (Gates acknowledged the timing
was “unfortunate.”)
Then, in 2012, came Mali. Al-Qaeda-linked rebels based in the
northern part of that West African nation threatened to take over the
entire country. UN plans (supported by the United States) would have
trained and positioned African troops to combat them. But that would
happen so slowly, if it really happened at all, that these would-be
troops would present no real obstacle to the terrorist victory. France
acted, sending in troops and asking for American help in the form of
refueling the planes they were using to ferry in soldiers and police the
skies. The White House first balked at supplying the requested tankers,
then agreed to supply a few cargo planes (and asked the French to
reimburse the costs). In the end, the United States did more, because
the struggle was placed in the “counter-terror, fighting al-Qaeda”
category rather than that of mere allied solidarity (or worse yet, the
category of helping the French keep order in Africa).
This kind of drama has been playing out in Syria as well. Here, both
the strategic and humanitarian arguments for intervention are powerful.
There are now well over 100,000 dead and more than a million refugees,
in addition to several million internally displaced persons. The burdens
on Turkey and especially Jordan to cope with the refugees are growing.
The Assad regime has survived largely due to the dispatch of
expeditionary forces by Iran and Hezbollah, who are leading the fight
against the rebels. President Obama said more than two years ago that
Assad must go and called Assad’s use of chemical weapons a “red line,”
but the administration has done next to nothing to turn that threat into
reality. When justifying his decision to join the fight in Libya, Obama
said in 2011 that “when innocent people are being brutalized, when
someone like Gaddafi threatens a bloodbath that could destabilize an
entire region, and when the international community is prepared to come
together to save many thousands of lives, then it’s in our national
interest to act.” Well, in Syria, a bloodbath is a reality rather than a
threat, and the Iranian and Hezbollah intervention truly has
destabilized an entire region. But month after month, as the world
watched, Obama took no action beyond nonlethal aid to the rebels.
Finally the administration announced in June that it would provide some
military aid, but its words were not followed by deeds for several
months. Meanwhile, Sunni jihadis from around the world have been
gathering in Syria to fight the regime, creating a new threat of their
own—especially for the post-conflict period. Battle-trained, armed, and
experienced, would these jihadis stay in Syria? Or would they leave to
fight in Shia-led Iraq, against Hezbollah in Lebanon, or against Israel
in the Golan Heights? Perhaps 1,000 or 1,500 of them are European-born,
and might return to Amsterdam or London or Madrid and bring additional
violence with them.
So there are obvious realpolitik arguments for intervention in Syria,
or at the very least against the remarkable passivity of the Obama
administration there. Among those arguments is the fact that the
president has taken clear sides against Assad and has laid down his
chemical-weapons red line. His word, and American credibility, are at
stake in large measure because
he chose to intervene
rhetorically. The impression left with our allies—Israeli and Arab and
European alike—is that American policy reflects less a careful weighing
of the arguments for and against action than a simple desire, visible to
them in Mali and Libya, to stay out of any military engagement that
goes beyond drone strikes.
Watching the administration in Syria, what conclusion must the rulers
of Iran reach about their own nuclear-weapons program? Must they really
abandon it? Thus far they have plowed ahead steadily. As the
Economist,
a journal far closer to the realpolitik view than to neoconservative
positions, stated last summer: “Iran has installed more than 9,000 new
centrifuges in less than two years, more than doubling its enrichment
capability….Thanks to heavy investment in nuclear capacity by the
mullahs…Iran will soon be able to produce a bomb’s worth of
weapons-grade uranium in a matter of weeks.” The editors’ conclusion is
that “the balance of power between Iran and the rest of the world has
been shifting in Iran’s favour” due to its nuclear progress and to its
presence in Syria, where they urge Western intervention: “It is not in
the West’s interests that a state that sponsors terrorism and rejects
Israel’s right to exist should become the regional hegemon.” But to
Obama, a struggle against Iranian and Hezbollah soldiers seems like a
morass to stay out of at all costs. It is more important that
we avoid being a “regional hegemon” than that we prevent
Iran from taking that role.
As for Israel, the administration has of course followed a twisting
path since the days of Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009. On that trip he not
only skipped visiting Israel but showed no real understanding of its
history or sympathy with its situation. Military and intelligence
cooperation has been excellent, but diplomatic confrontations were
frequent, including clear evidence of Obama’s distaste for Prime
Minister Netanyahu (and vice versa). The diplomatic low point came in
early 2011, when then UN ambassador Susan Rice was forced by the White
House to veto a resolution criticizing Israeli settlements. She did as
instructed, but her explanation of her vote on behalf of the United
States could not have been more hostile: “We reject in the strongest
terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity [which]
has corroded hopes for peace and stability in the region…violates
Israel’s international commitments, devastates trust between the
parties, and threatens the prospects for peace.”
Relations were patched up when Obama visited Israel in 2013, where
among other things he acknowledged the country’s biblical (rather than
Holocaust) roots and reiterated in tougher terms than ever before that
Iran could not be permitted to have a nuclear weapon. Whether the
Israelis credit that line and whether the ayatollahs do as well remain
the greatest questions facing Obama’s second-term foreign policy. After
Libya and Mali and Syria, after the withdrawals from Iraq and
Afghanistan, it is difficult to believe.
The overall impression in the Middle East is that America is pulling away. That
Economist
editorial ended with a plea: “When Persian power is on the rise, it is
not the time to back away from the Middle East.” This is an expression
of deep anxiety, politely phrased in London but spoken with less
restraint in Jerusalem and nearly every Arab capital. In fact, the very
same words are often heard because so many Arab states—from Jordan and
Morocco to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates—have, like Israel, tied their
security to our willpower and ability to act. The prevailing mood is
trepidation. The Middle Easterners are keen students of power, and they
realize that the administration’s so-called “pivot to Asia”—the supposed
refocusing of American foreign policy away from the Middle East and
onto the Far East instead—is a weak excuse: They see that a diminishing
of the American position in their region cannot possibly help build
respect for American strength in and around China. They know that no
one, from Khamenei to Assad to Putin to Chavez, has ever seemed to fear
Barack Obama; no one has been deterred from crossing him. They watch
carefully the withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, unsurprised by the
fact that the Americans are ending the wars unilaterally but studying
the terms. The administration made so little effort to work out a way to
keep a force in Iraq (through a status-of-forces agreement) that the
fair conclusion is total withdrawal was its preferred outcome. Same for
Afghanistan. In June the administration floated a new “zero option”
policy for Afghanistan: Withdraw every single American soldier next year
despite any previous pledges of support to the Afghan government. Ryan
Crocker, who was President Obama’s ambassador to Afghanistan, described
the new plan this way: “If it’s a tactic, it is mindless; if it is a
strategy, it is criminal.” The best description of Obama policy these
days seems to be “We want out.”
A former Obama administration official, Vali Nasr (now dean of the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies), stated all of
this most strongly in his book about the administration he served, which
he entitled
The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat.
There, Nasr described America as “dragged by Europeans into ending
butchery in Libya, abandoning Afghanistan to an uncertain future, [and]
resisting a leadership role in ending the massacre of civilians in
Syria….Gone is the exuberant American desire to lead the world. In its
place there is the image of a superpower tired of the world and in
retreat.”
III
So the Obama administration is pursuing neither an idealistic foreign
policy based on altruistic considerations of “world citizenship,” nor a
realpolitik policy designed to maximize American power and influence in
an age of limits through careful assertions of power and the
strengthening and utilization of alliances. What foreign policy is it
pursuing, then?
Nasr has a theory about Obama: “His policies’ principal aim is not to
make strategic decisions but to satisfy public opinion.” This is a
damning indictment, and it is an unfair one. It is true that public
opinion wanted the American role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to
end and, no doubt with those long and costly conflicts in mind, opposes a
deeper role in Syria. But public opinion does not explain the many
other stances the Obama administration has taken, from the very weak
human-rights policy and the effort to reduce the American nuclear
arsenal to the tension with Israel and the lack of support for European
allies. The argument that Obama has no real foreign-policy goals and
simply bows to the wind does not explain his actions as president. What
does?
There are two aspects to Obama’s policy. As I’ve said, the first is
the protection of the country against an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist
attack. Whether one believes this focus is motivated entirely by
patriotism or is also the product of a political calculation and fear of
public opinion is immaterial: The administration is working tirelessly,
and employing considerable violence, to attack al-Qaeda and disrupt its
plans. In pursuit of its aims it has bravely ignored the Democratic
base, which dislikes drones and electronic surveillance in general. For
four and a half years, this policy has been successful, and there is
every reason to believe it will be carried forward with equal
dedication.
The limits of this approach, however, are significant. As Thomas
Donnelly has written, “Obama was construing Bush’s ‘war on terror’ in
the narrowest possible sense: The war was a reaction to the attacks of
9/11, properly focused on Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership
cadre, and not on the al-Qaeda network and certainly not on the overall
Middle East balance of power.” Thus the initial reluctance to help the
French in Mali despite the nature of the terrorist groups there, and the
passivity as jihadis gathered in Syria. Thus the refusal to conduct
anything like ideological warfare against Islamist extremism,
substituting instead the themes of the Cairo speech. There, Obama said,
“America is not—and never will be—at war with Islam. We will, however,
relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our
security.” Absent in this phrase are the nonviolent Islamic extremists,
who are perhaps better described as the not-yet-violent Islamic
extremists. Tony Blair’s government tried the same approach and it
failed, for the British found that the key division was not between the
violent and the not-yet-violent extremists, but instead between
extremists and those who rejected extremism and hatred and were willing
to fight it. The struggle against Islamic extremism is a battle of ideas
as well as a military and police activity, and it cannot be won if the
only weapon employed is the drone strike. So one may fairly say that
fighting terrorist attacks is part of Obama’s policy, but fighting
Islamic extremism is not.
The second aspect of Obama’s foreign policy is more central and more
significant. It is the president’s effort to kill those old “habits” of
American leadership, what Nasr so well describes as “the exuberant
American desire to lead the world.” It is not enough to get out of Iraq
and Afghanistan; the
lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan must also be
learned so that those mistakes are never repeated. And the lesson Obama
has learned, and wishes to teach to others, is that the exercise of
American power, with the sole exception of direct strikes on al-Qaeda
terrorists, should be avoided for practical and moral reasons.
This, I believe, is what the president was really talking about when
he said, in Berlin: “We are not only citizens of America or Germany. We
are also citizens of the world. And our fates and fortunes are linked
like never before.” He wants us to see that “exuberant desire” as
outmoded at best, and dangerous, and morally wrong.
In 2008, Obama said: “One of the things I intend to do as president
is restore America’s standing in the world. We are less respected now
than we were eight years ago or even four years ago.” Obama is not
blind; he can see that respect for us has fallen still further. He can
see that engagement with dictatorial regimes such as Iran and Syria has
failed. Relations with Russia were not “reset” and have grown worse.
There has been no improvement with China, and absolutely nothing
substantial came out of his meeting with the new Chinese premier in June
of this year. As for Iran, Obama said in 2008 that “ultimately the
measure of any effort is whether it leads to a change in Iranian
behavior.” By that standard—with Iran closer than ever to a nuclear
weapon and an Iranian expeditionary force in Syria—Obama’s Iran policy
is disastrous. America’s allies, in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe,
see a superpower that is weaker—and that continues the policies that
will make it weaker still.
Even some of Obama’s highest appointees came to see that things were
not going well and demanded bolder American action. There are press
reports that in the summer of 2012, Hillary Clinton, with the support of
then Secretary of Defense Gates, urged a far more active (covert)
effort to arm the rebels against Assad. In 2013, Clinton’s successor,
John Kerry, argued in cabinet-level secret meetings for American air
strikes at Assad’s airplanes and air bases, to shift the balance toward
the Syrian rebels and assert American power. Clinton and Gates lost;
Kerry lost; policy was unchanged; tens of thousands more Syrians died
and hundreds of thousands more fled their homes; and thousands more
jihadis arrived in Syria. With details like these in mind, one can say
that the most committed, ideological, and intransigent official in the
administration is clearly Barack Obama.
People like the Ayatollah Khamenei or Vladimir Putin are, in the
Obama view, retrogressive: They see power, defined in a very
old-fashioned manner, as the means to achieve their goals. For Obama,
national power is an improper goal. In 2013, he returned to Berlin and
this time said about people striving for freedom—he named Israelis,
Palestinians, Burmese, and Afghans—that “they too, in their own way, are
citizens of Berlin.” As Matthew Continetti wrote in the Washington Free
Beacon: “If everyone is a citizen of Berlin, then the concept of
‘citizen,’ which implies rootedness, partiality, particularity, has no
meaning. If we are citizens of everywhere, we are also citizens of
nowhere.”
Just as the British were told they were not special, so we Americans
must learn that we are not special, either—except perhaps that we are
more dangerous because we are more powerful. Thus we require more
strenuous efforts from our leaders to hold us back, as Obama is doing.
American leadership is a dangerous narcotic, one that can make us feel
good for a while but will in the end bring tragedy to us and to many
others around the world. Obama’s task is to explain this to us and,
using the powers of office, keep us away from this drug for eight years
and diminish our capacity to use it when he is gone.
This also explains the treatment of American allies such as Britain,
France, and Israel. For in this “global-citizen” view, what are allies
except people who are likely to get you into trouble? You do not plan to
intervene anywhere, so
you will not need to call on
them.
The danger is that they will call upon you, as happened in Mali and
Libya, and now Syria, and perhaps tomorrow Iran. Historically, America’s
closest allies were often backward in their domestic and foreign
policies, and in this view on the “wrong side of history.” What better
proof of this is there, for Obama and those who see the world as he
does, than those nations’ reliance on America and American power, and
their role throughout the Cold War as cat’s-paws for Washington?
The Obama administration appears to view allies not as nations whose
young people may someday bravely bear arms alongside ours, in the image
of World War II and Korea, but as nations likely to agree to house
secret CIA prisons. There are in this view just three sorts of nations: a
few bad actors; many dependents who may get you into trouble, and were
formerly called allies; and then of course the global citizens, who have
risen above narrow nationalist goals.
IV
Some of this is a familiar critique from the left, which rose to
influence in the 1960s and came into the White House with Jimmy Carter.
But to give the 39th president his due, the Carter Doctrine stated that
we would never permit an outside power to gain control of the Persian
Gulf. And Carter was capable of acknowledging error: In 1979, he said
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had “made a more dramatic change in
my opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve
done in the previous time I’ve been in office.” In the Obama
administration, no action by a foreign power has elicited any such
statement of a change in perspective or approach. The president appears
to hold, unchanged, the views with which he arrived in office—and for
that matter with which he arrived in the Senate and indeed arrived at
Columbia University in 1980 (or at least with which he left Columbia
upon his graduation).
Ronald Reagan said of Jimmy Carter that his administration “lives in
the world of make-believe…where mistakes, even very big ones, have no
consequence.” Carter came to understand (briefly, in any event) that his
opinion of the Soviets had been a great mistake with whose consequences
he had to deal. But is there anything that appears to Obama to be a
mistake? Is the growing difficulty of exercising American power, is the
waning of American influence, the product of mistake—or the goal of
policy? Reagan went on in that 1980 speech to say the following:
Disasters are overtaking our
nation without any real response from the White House. Who does not feel
a growing sense of unease as our allies, facing repeated instances of
an amateurish and confused administration, reluctantly conclude that
America is unwilling or unable to fulfill its obligations as leader of
the free world? Who does not feel rising alarm when the question in any
discussion of foreign policy is no longer “Should we do something,” but
“Do we have the capacity to do anything?”
Today, China takes risky measures in Asian seas to show its neighbors
who is boss in that region and builds its military power even as ours
is reduced. Putin pressures nations in his orbit and brings a new age of
KGB-style oppression to Russia. Iran moves steadily closer to a nuclear
weapon in defiance of a hundred UN and IAEA resolutions and Obama
speeches, and it is now bold enough to send troops to fight in Syria to
protect its hold there on the shores of the Mediterranean and its
alliance with the terrorist group Hezbollah. Our Arab allies in the Gulf
see an America unwilling to act to protect its interests and theirs,
and wonder if a hegemonic Iran will really displace the United States as
the region’s dominant power. The wave of democratization in Latin
America is now receding, and dictators rule in Venezuela, Bolivia,
Ecuador, and Nicaragua. Cuba violates UN sanctions to do military trade
with North Korea—and North Korea makes fools of the United States by
taking our aid and improving its nuclear weapons and missiles. The
world’s bright spots in these last four years—yes, things seem more
stable and more democratic in Burma and Senegal—throw a mocking light on
the rest.
And while this is happening, from Washington come not cries of alarm
but the self-satisfaction of an administration that believes we are
moving closer each year to our proper place in the “international
community.”
Who does not feel a growing sense of unease, then, and who does not
feel rising alarm? The answer may be the president who is the author of
these policies, for they are doing just what they were meant to do. If
not reversed, they will produce an America that is a “citizen of the
world” like all the others, shorn of the ability to lead and believing
that leadership means little more than hubris and risk. For Barack
Obama, this will mean his foreign-policy ideas have won the day.
About the Author
Elliott Abrams is senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies
at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as deputy assistant to
the president and deputy national-security adviser in the administration
of President George W. Bush. He is the author, most recently, of Tested by Zion, published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press.
