The Long Game

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

The Long Game

“
The Long Game
is Derek Chollet's penetrating and wise examination of the foreign policy of a deeply unorthodox president. Rational, cool, and analytical (much like the man he is writing about), Chollet takes us deep inside the formerly opaque decision-making process of an administration that has upended longstanding assumptions about the way America should behave in the world. Chollet's conclusions are controversial, and will be debated fiercely in Washington and beyond, but no one could deny that he has brought intellectual rigor to his important task. Nor could anyone deny that he has had a front-row seat to some of the great international dramas of our time.”

—JEFFREY GOLDBERG, National Correspondent,
The Atlantic

“Derek Chollet defines and explains the Obama foreign policy as grand strategy.
The Long Game
goes against the conventional wisdom of our moment. Though an insider's account, it views the present as history and puts down a marker that will shape how historians interpret the Obama years.”

—GEORGE PACKER
,
author of
The Assassins' Gate
and
The Unwinding

“Foreign policy in the twenty-first century requires realism mixed with an element of idealism in order to navigate the intensifying anarchy of the world system. Derek Chollet shows this philosophy in action in this terrifically brisk, insider account of the Obama administration's travails in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Agree with it or not, I know of no more compelling defense of Obama's record.”

—ROBERT D. KAPLAN, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and author of
In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond

“Drawing on his front-row seats in the White House, State Department, and Pentagon, Derek Chollet provides a very insightful picture of President Obama's foreign policy. Memoirs are first drafts of history, and future historians will need to pay close attention to this one.”

—JOSEPH S. NYE JR., Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, former dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and author of
Is the American Century Over?

“Obama's foreign policy has been misunderstood as much as it has been criticized, and a virtue of Derek Chollet's lucid account is that it explains even more than it defends. As both a participant and a keen observer of American foreign policy, Chollet is well-positioned to provide powerful insights into what guided the president through these confusing times.”

—ROBERT JERVIS, Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics, Columbia University, and author of
American Foreign Policy in a New Era

“In
The Long Game,
Derek Chollet has given us a comprehensive, detailed inside account of the ideas and strategy underlying Barack Obama's foreign policies. Chollet, who worked in several positions in the Obama administration, describes what went into Obama's policies toward Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iran, Russia, and Ukraine. Even when he disagrees with a few of Obama's decisions, Chollet lucidly lays out the thinking behind them and responds to the most frequent criticisms. At least until Obama writes his own memoir, Chollet's insightful book will probably stand as the best single guide to his reasoning and his policies.”

—JAMES MANN, author of
The Obamians
and
Rise of the Vulcans

ALSO BY DEREK CHOLLET

The Road to the Dayton Accords: A Study of American Statecraft

America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11

(with James Goldgeier)

The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World

(coeditor with Samantha Power)

Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide

(coeditor with Tod Lindberg and David Shorr)

Copyright © 2016 by Derek Chollet

Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15
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Floor, New York, NY 10107.

PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail
[email protected]
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chollet, Derek H., author.

Title: The long game: how Obama defied Washington and redefined America's role in the world / Derek Chollet.

Description: First edition. | New York: PublicAffairs, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016010114 (print) | LCCN 2016010384 (ebook) | ISBN 9781610396615 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: United States--Foreign relations--2009- | Obama, Barack.

Classification: LCC E907 .C459 2016 (print) | LCC E907 (ebook) | DDC 327.73--dc23

LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2016010114

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my own long game:

Lucas and Aerin, and most of all, Heather

CONTENTS

     
Introduction: The Long Game

1
   
The Red Line

2
   
The Foreign Policy Breakdown

3
   
Rebalance, Reset, Resurge

4
   
A Cascade of Crises

5
   
The Tide of War

6
   
The Bear Roars Back

7
   
Playing All Four Quarters

     
Conclusion: History's Web

     
Notes

     
Bibliography

     
Acknowledgments

     
Index

“Good policy depends on the patient accumulation of nuances; care has to be taken that individual moves are orchestrated into a coherent strategy. Only rarely do policy issues appear in terms of black or white. More usually they depend on shades of interpretation; significant policy deviations begin as minor departures whose effect only becomes apparent as they are projected into the future.”

—
HENRY KISSINGER

“Politics is not about objective reality, but virtual reality. What happens in the political world is divorced from the real world. It exists for only the fleeting historical moment, in a magical movie of sorts, a never-ending and infinitely revisable docudrama. Strangely, the faithful understand that the movie is not true—yet also maintain that it is the only truth that really matters.”

—
MICHAEL KELLY

“Games are won by players who focus on the playing field—not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.”

—
WARREN BUFFETT

INTRODUCTION

THE LONG GAME

“I
am more concerned with what we haven't done than what we have,” President Obama said in a July 2011 meeting in the White House Situation Room, where he met with a handful of his top advisers to plan his upcoming agenda. As his senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council staff at the time, I had helped prepare the meeting. For several weeks, the president had been consumed by the domestic debt crisis and grinding talks with congressional leadership to avoid a budget default, but as he turned his attention to the world, he seemed energized, and was in an expansive mood. While we had dutifully come ready to discuss his upcoming schedule of meetings, speeches, and trips, he wanted to think bigger.

“Since 9/11, it has been a decade of war,” the president said. “We have an opportunity to make the next decade one of peace.” He went on to add, “We've established that we're tough enough.” Just two months earlier, he had ordered the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, and American planes were then bombing Libya. But, he said, “What's been lost is the hope side of the equation.”

He described the moment as a “pivot”: having spent the previous three years “trying to clean things up” after the Bush presidency, “we need to start a generational opportunity and challenge the international community.” Obama pushed his team to be more creative, and said that we needed to do more to knit together the narrative of economic strength and global authority. Obama wanted the US to be respected abroad not just for its military prowess, but also for its growing economy, domestic vitality, and moral example. “That's where I want to go,” he said, “although we don't know if we can get there because history intrudes.”

In the years that followed, history intruded in ways no one sitting around that table could have imagined. From the disintegration of Syria and rise of ISIS, to the chaos in post-Qaddafi Libya and turmoil in Egypt, to Russia's intervention in Ukraine and its resurgence as a military threat to Europe, the world order is under greater stress than at any other point since the end of the Cold War. In 2016, US leadership is in doubt at home and abroad, and many are again talking about America's inexorable decline.

For how much of this is President Obama to blame? Have his policies diminished or strengthened America's position in the world? When historians assess the Obama years, will they be seen as a period of recovery and repositioning America for the future, or one of abject failure that dragged the country down?

With such an astonishing diversity of threats unfolding simultaneously, it has certainly proven harder for the Obama administration to drive events than be driven by them. As the world seems to unwind, it is even harder to find the “hope side of the equation.” But that does not mean the president has forgotten about it or doubted its desirability.

O
BAMA BELIEVES
A
MERICA
is an indispensable nation, but one that must be careful in its ambitions. His policies at home and abroad have been about renewing and sustaining American power, not
squandering it. And he has worked to diversify the way that America exerts its influence.

Like most other presidents, Obama is wary of one-size-fits-all answers. During the 2011 US-led bombing campaign in Libya, for example, he rebuffed efforts to describe it as a widely applicable model, privately warning about the dangers of a “cookie-cutter” approach to the world's problems because things are so “case dependent.” In this sense, his outlook is similar to that of one of America's greatest strategic apostles, George F. Kennan, who decried the “congenital aversion of Americans to taking specific decisions on specific problems” and “their persistent urge to seek universal formulae or doctrines in which to clothe or justify their actions.”
¹

Despite this aversion to bumper stickers, Obama has structured America's statecraft around certain principles and priorities. Although he may never describe it this way, Obama has what academics call a “grand strategy,” a concept the Duke University scholar Hal Brands describes as “a purposeful and coherent set of ideas about what a nation seeks to accomplish in the world, and how it should go about doing so.”
²
A grand strategy, as Brands puts it, should be “firm and focused enough to keep American policy anchored amid the geopolitical squalls” so that it “can advance towards its highest objectives over time.”
³

The defining element of Obama's grand strategy is that it reflects the totality of American interests—foreign and domestic—to project global leadership in an era of seemingly infinite demands and finite resources. This is playing the “long game.” And those who evaluate it should keep in mind Brands's explication of “the central dilemma of American grand strategy: the fact that it is an essential and potentially very rewarding undertaking, but one that is damned hard to get right.”
⁴

S
O WHY HAS
Obama's foreign policy performance proven so controversial, dismissed as a failure not just by his political opponents, but also, more surprisingly, by much of the Democratic foreign
policy elites and overseas commentariat that once swooned over him? This disaffection is especially curious because Obama has largely remained true to the policies he outlined before taking office.

In sharp contrast to his predecessor George W. Bush—who campaigned for the presidency promising a return to a more humble foreign policy but presided over an era characterized by overreach and arrogance—Obama has followed through on what he promised in 2008: restoring America's power at home by focusing on the economy; revitalizing alliances; pursuing tough engagement with adversaries; reducing the US role in Iraq and Afghanistan while not getting overwhelmed by massive new military engagements; modernizing the military while deemphasizing it as the primary tool of American power; rebalancing towards the Asia-Pacific; trying to involve Congress in decisions about the use of force; executing an even more lethal fight against terrorists while ending excesses like torture; and pursuing bold policy initiatives on such issues as climate change, trade, and nuclear disarmament.

Yet to listen to Washington's foreign policy establishment (of which I have been a card-carrying member for over two decades), Obama's record is one of fundamental failure: Under his leadership, America has been “in retreat,” bereft of a strategy. Less partisan critics categorize Obama as a “retrencher,” ambivalent about American leadership and only interested in keeping America out of trouble.
⁵
Reaching further, some question not just the president's policies, but also his view of America itself. They assert that Obama is an “apologist” who doubts whether the United States can be a force for global good (and among the loud voices on the fringe, there are those who question the president's very “Americanism”). It is because of this, they claim, that the Obama years have left America weaker and unwilling to shoulder the burdens of leadership. The consequence, they argue, is that the US is less confident, less feared, and less admired. If only America were “stronger” or “tougher” then it could solve the world's problems.

A completely contrasting critique comes from those who believe Obama has drifted too far from his ideals. They point to increasing the use of drone strikes and developing terrorist “kill lists” (including the targeting of American citizens), bombing more countries (seven) than George W. Bush, failing to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, snooping in your phones and pursuing bold new free trade agreements that could harm American workers. The problem, they claim, is not Obama's reluctance to deploy power but his unbridled use of it, the result being another “imperial presidency” that is subverting the law.

Obama is thus a paradox: to some he exudes weakness and is afraid to act, but to others he flouts the rules and is too quick to pull the trigger. He is alternately characterized as a woolly-headed, liberal idealist or as a cold-hearted, unsentimental realist. He takes too few risks and too many. So where is the truth?

A
S THE
O
BAMA
presidency nears its end, a different picture is starting to emerge for those willing to take a broader and deeper look at his foreign policy record and America's position in the world.

Instead of Obama leaving a legacy future presidents will run from, I believe Obama's foreign policy legacy will be one future presidents will be measured by; indeed, he has done more to shape American foreign policy—and a new generation of foreign policy leaders—than any Democratic president since John F. Kennedy. Simply put, Obama has redefined the purpose and exercise of American power for a new era.

Of course, the president and his administration have made plenty of policy mistakes. Some missteps have been the result of wrong assumptions or lack of information; others of botched execution or unforced errors. But on the issues that matter most for the Long Game—how and where America uses military force, how the US approaches its enemies and works with its partners, and how America should conceive of its power and exert its leadership—Obama's mark will be enduring and largely positive.

Obama likes to use sports analogies, often referring to the latter part of his term in office as the “fourth quarter” when, he adds, big things happen and games are won or lost. So if his foreign policy legacy could be summarized in the newspaper's sports section, what would the final score be? I believe he would be ahead on points—say, in football terms, 28–21—but this score will look better and better with time. And however narrow, in history's own long game the Obama era will represent a definite win.

P
RESIDENTS OFTEN BENEFIT
from the warm glow of historical hindsight once they are safely out of office. Consider how Obama's immediate predecessors were judged when they left Washington and how they are remembered today.

Ronald Reagan departed the White House in 1989 wounded by the Iran-Contra scandal and with many wondering whether he had gone too far in trying to work with the Soviets; now he is remembered for playing a seminal role in ending the Cold War. In 1993, George H.W. Bush limped out of office criticized that he failed to define what he called the “new world order” and tarnished by the fact that he had not taken out Saddam Hussein when he had the chance after the first Gulf War; he is now lionized as one of America's most effective foreign policy presidents. Bill Clinton was seen as weak in 2001, ill-disciplined and crippled by scandal; today he is praised as the first president who understood globalization. Even George W. Bush, who left office in 2009 with a reputation in worse shape than any president since Richard Nixon, has seen history soften some of the edges of his failures. So, looking toward 2017, Obama has reason to be optimistic.

But Obama's faith in the Long Game is more than just a way to deflect the criticisms of the moment or soothe one's psyche. It defines his unique style of foreign policy—one that is best suited to leadership in the twenty-first century. He prizes deliberation, is
comfortable with complexity and nuance, and is deeply skeptical of decisions driven by passion or the desire to seek maximalist solutions, especially over the short term. He resists knee-jerk responses and empty gestures. As one adviser aptly described it, Obama is a “consequentialist,” far less interested in appearances than in what actually works.
⁶

T
O HELP HIMSELF
make decisions, Obama has closely adhered to a few core tenets—a kind of foreign policy “checklist,” to borrow from an idea popularized by the author and surgeon Atul Gawande.
⁷
Like others who must navigate situations of extreme complexity, uncertainty, and risk (such as astronauts and surgeons), foreign policymakers can benefit by outlining and following a few basic principles.

Although foreign policymaking is a mix of art and science—Obama would say it is more of an imperfect art—a checklist can help leaders make objectives clearer, adjudicate among priorities, and avoid mistakes.
⁸
This is not a to-do list of things one wants to accomplish, nor is it a how-to list that tells what to do in specific circumstances. It is better thought of as a general guide to match means with ends, helping one remain mindful of pitfalls, avoid shortsighted choices, and identify what is most important.

Obama's Long Game checklist has eight criteria: balance, sustainability, restraint, precision, patience, fallibility, skepticism, and exceptionalism.

These eight tenets have never been formally promulgated. They weren't the topic of any White House meetings. You won't find them in any strategic plan or classified document. However, they serve as the framework that has shaped Obama's foreign policy and efforts to redefine American power.

Obama has aimed to achieve
balance
among America's many interests around the world, working to achieve manageable trade-offs among competing priorities.

He has tried to ensure that his foreign policy is
sustainable
in terms of resources, governmental bandwidth, and domestic support—both during his term in office as well as for his successors.

Because the US has a tendency to overreach, investing too much in one issue while underinvesting in others, he believes a strategy that is balanced and sustainable requires a large degree of
restraint.
For a power as dominant as the United States, the question is rarely whether it has the capability to do something, but if it makes sense to do so relative to its competing priorities, finite resources, and overall interests.

This is especially true when it comes to the use of military force, which is why Obama values
precision,
using particular tools for specific problems. He wants to ensure the means achieve the end. This is perhaps the key feature of his counter-terrorism strategy, which is not lacking in lethality but seeks greater precision to take out terrorist leaders.