The Long Game (2 page)

Another Obama hallmark is
patience.
Famously deliberative, he is willing to take the time (and endure many meetings) to get it right. But more than that, he believes in strategic patience—giving intricate policies the time to unfold, blocking impulsive moves, and outwaiting the adversary (as well as the attention span of many observers).

Perhaps most controversially, Obama is not afraid of admitting America's
fallibility.
Critics deride this as apologizing for America, but he believes that to be aware of and open about imperfection is a way to avoid mistakes and earn respect.

Obama also has a great deal of
skepticism
of the political and foreign policy debate, which includes many of the ideas pushed by the bulk of the professional punditocracy. Whenever there is a wise man consensus in Washington, his first instinct is often to defy it.

Finally, Obama is a champion of American
exceptionalism,
a conviction he has said he upholds “with every fiber of my being.” This captures the optimism that is fundamental to his outlook; with the
right decisions and policies, America is best positioned to lead. And by having the confidence to admit flaws and working to overcome them, constantly seeking renewal and innovation, one generates strength, credibility, and legitimacy.

O
BAMA BELIEVES THAT
success at playing the Long Game requires a clear North Star to aim toward, with persistent and steady progress to get there. Obama is comfortable with incremental outcomes, believing that some problems can only be managed, while just a few can be immediately solved—and the trick is to distinguish between the two. Obama explained his approach in 2015: one tries “to steer the ocean liner two degrees north or south so that ten years from now, suddenly we're in a very different place than we were. But at the time… people may feel like we need a fifty-degree turn.”

Yet often, the president continued, the temptation is to oversteer. “If I turn fifty degrees,” he said, “the whole ship turns. And you can't turn fifty degrees.” This is how Obama looks at policy issues like race, the environment, and ending discrimination in the United States. And it accurately describes how he looks upon many of the issues that challenge the United States in the world, whether it is confronting terrorist groups, curbing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, or defending and revitalizing the liberal international order.
⁹

Obama swept into office riding a wave of hope and exuding a sense of possibility, but he has governed with humility, acknowledging that it is often difficult for meaningful change to come instantly. As he told the
New Yorker
's David Remnick, one of the things he has come to understand as president is that “you are essentially a relay swimmer in a river full of rapids and that river is history…you don't start with a clean slate, and the things you start may not come to full fruition on your timetable, but you can move things forward. And sometimes the things that start small may turn out to be fairly significant.”
¹⁰

This outlook reveals Obama's fundamental challenge: to conduct a Long Game foreign policy in a political and policy ecosystem that is becoming synonymous with reality television or taking on the characteristics of professional wrestling, rewarding over-the-top rhetoric and concocted drama instead of results that can only be truly appreciated with time. His Long Game approach may seem unexciting, often shining only after considering the alternatives. As Robert D. Kaplan explains, realism “is respected only after the seeming lack of it has made a situation demonstrably worse.”
¹¹
In the moment, a policy that seeks a pragmatic middle course can seem less dazzling and satisfying than one of shimmering but unreal ideological purity.

This is a big part of what makes Obama's Long Game so frustrating for so many in the political and foreign policy establishment. Too many critics live in a self-contained world dominated by this play-acting, where the answer is almost always for the US to do
more
of something and to act “tough,” though usually what that something is remains very vague. But doing more of everything is not a strategy.

As one of Obama's most influential advisers, Ben Rhodes, put it, “the discourse in Washington becomes like a self-licking ice cream cone,” something that benefits only those directly involved, without regard to the larger picture or what would actually work.
¹²
Or, as the president once testily described what he gets when he asks his critics what they would do differently, “what you get is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.”

Think of it this way: Obama is like a foreign policy version of Warren Buffett, a proudly pragmatic value investor less concerned with appearances or the whims of the moment, focused instead on making solid investments with an eye to long-term success. The foreign policy debate, on the other hand, tends to be dominated by policy day traders, whose incentives are the opposite: achieving quick results, getting rewarded with instant judgments and what will make the biggest splash, and reacting to every blip in the market.

Of course, today's geopolitical turbulence feels like more than the usual market ups and downs. It is understandable that when looking out at the world, Americans are frustrated, pessimistic, and scared. The Middle East is in turmoil not seen since the fall of the Ottoman Empire a century ago; Europe is facing its greatest test since the end of the Cold War with millions of refugees, fears of terrorism, and questions about the future of the European Union; Putin's Russia is acting in ways reminiscent of the worst days of the Soviet Union; China's continuing rise is challenging the status quo in Asia and increasingly around the world; and common global threats like a warming climate and terrorist groups continue to loom large.

These are big, systemic challenges, and the United States cannot solve them alone, if at all. Yet there is nostalgia for an era when the US allegedly called all the shots and could fix problems easily if it just tried harder or asserted itself more. That moment never existed. In fact, our most costly mistakes in the past have come when we were seduced by the idea of our omnipotence. Washington's policy decisions may not be able to solve today's big problems, but they do make a big difference for better or worse. So the question is how the US can best invest its power and use its tools to bring countries together to shape outcomes, set agendas, and address these problems in a sustainable way. That is what Obama's Long Game grand strategy has been all about—and, despite all the world's challenges, it has left America stronger at home and abroad, in a better position to lead.

T
HIS BOOK IS
a personal reflection on Obama's effort to redefine America's role in the world, drawing on my experience of over six years serving at the State Department, the White House, and the Pentagon. It is not intended to be a comprehensive narrative history of Obama's foreign policy—several important memoirs and excellent first drafts of that history have already been written, and
many more will come. Instead, by exploring some of the toughest, most consequential, and controversial national security decisions of the Obama administration—focusing specifically on its handling of the “Arab Spring” crises in Syria, Libya, and Egypt; its approach to powers like China and Russia; its response to the war in Ukraine; and its effort to deal with Iran's nuclear threat—this book examines the intellectual foundations of Obama's foreign policy. It also aims to shed light on why policymakers navigated the course they did and how they struggled with the choices that confronted them.

In doing so, this book is also an exploration of the broader debate about America's role in the world and the politics that infuse these arguments. One must see the Obama presidency in the context of the policy debates that followed the end of the Cold War and shaped American foreign policy and politics in the post-9/11 years. This includes the George W. Bush administration's fateful choices, as well as the efforts of Democrats to forge a coherent foreign policy agenda in the 2000s—to be seen as “strong” and to overcome their perceived weakness on national security. This history has influenced the choices Obama has made, and helps explain how he has tried to redefine America's global role—and the resistance he has had to confront while doing so.

The late diplomat Richard Holbrooke observed that “a memoir sits at the dangerous intersection of policy, ambition, and history,” warning of the temptation to see events as linear and outcomes as foreordained—especially the decisions that turned out well.
¹³
Depending on one's perspective, successes are credited either to sheer brilliance or dumb luck, while failures are seen as the result of either honest mistakes or gross incompetence. To learn from history, one must try hard to understand what actually happened, appreciating the full context in which decisions were made and all the uncertainties and risks involved. That is the approach taken by this book.

Policymaking is the collision of aspirations and limits, in which leaders are rewarded for aligning their goals with resources, and punished when they become out of balance. When approaching issues, leaders must constantly make difficult decisions and manage unpleasant trade-offs, often with little information and no time.

Henry Kissinger describes the making of foreign policy as “an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important,” observing that the central struggle for policymakers is “to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.”
¹⁴
This struggle is particularly difficult in today's world, where the pressure of circumstance seems so overwhelming. And nowhere is that more evident than in the Middle East, the region that has been America's twenty-first century crucible, and therefore where this story of the Obama administration's foreign policy begins.

CHAPTER 1

THE RED LINE

O
n the last Saturday of August 2013, Labor Day weekend, the United States was once again about to go to war in the Middle East.

Less than two weeks earlier, in the middle of the night on August 21, the Syrian military had attacked rebel-controlled areas of the Damascus suburbs with chemical weapons, killing nearly 1,500 civilians, including over 400 children. Horrific video footage showing people with twisted bodies sprawled on hospital floors, some twitching and foaming at the mouth after being exposed to sarin gas, had ricocheted around the world. This atrocity opened an ugly new chapter in a brutal Syrian civil war that had already cost over 100,000 lives, and America needed to respond.

The day after the attacks, President Obama's national security advisor, Susan Rice, called an emergency meeting at the White House to discuss what to do. Because it was the end of summer, many cabinet officials were out of Washington, so they participated by secure video while those of us in town assumed our customary seats around the Situation Room table.

We first tried to establish exactly what had happened and who had done it. There was considerable discussion of the intelligence we had collected. We knew chemical weapons had been used, but we wanted to be sure we could conclusively establish the Assad regime's culpability. The evidence turned out to be overwhelming: it included eyewitness accounts from medical personnel and information about Syrian military officials giving specific instructions to mix the chemicals and use them. This brazen assault had clearly crossed the “red line” that President Obama had enunciated a year earlier.
¹

The discussion quickly turned to whether and how the US should respond militarily. There were a variety of targets that could be hit, from the chemical sites themselves to military headquarters, runways, and even Assad's palace or presidential helicopter fleet. But there were many concerns about the danger to American pilots (Syria had one of the most sophisticated air defense networks in the world), as well as the possibility of escalation.

Everyone understood the risks. There was no question the US had the capability to act decisively, but there was deep uncertainty about where military intervention would lead. The mood in the room was tense but resigned. A decade after the invasion of Iraq, there was a sense that America was about to go over another Middle Eastern waterfall.

As Rice went around the room (or asked those on the screen) for a recommendation, nearly everyone advocated for quick action. The most notable voice of caution came from Denis McDonough, the president's influential and highly effective chief of staff. McDonough questioned the effectiveness of airstrikes and warned of the risks of getting bogged down in yet another Middle East quagmire. A forceful advocate, he seemed to be putting extra emphasis on this point to ensure that he preserved for the president what he called “decision space.” I sensed he felt the need to play a role similar to that of
George Ball, the great diplomat who, in that same room decades earlier, had intentionally assumed the part of “house dove” during Lyndon Johnson's fateful deliberations about the Vietnam War.

The meeting concluded with a unanimous decision to prepare for military strikes. To do this right, it would take some time to prepare. Tasks were handed out to scrub the intelligence further with an eye to what could be released publicly, construct the legal basis for action, build a campaign for diplomatic support, intensify outreach to the Congress and, most important, begin to make the case to the American public.

Military planners at the Pentagon started working around the clock to prepare for a series of air strikes, with the specific aims of deterring Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad from launching more chemical attacks and degrading his military's ability to do so. As the assistant secretary of defense whose portfolio included Europe and the Middle East, I had two roles: in addition to working with the secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, and other senior defense officials on various aspects of planning the strikes, I stayed in daily contact with my counterparts from the two countries most likely to contribute to them, the United Kingdom and France, to coordinate our positions and ensure nothing was overlooked. We also were in close contact with the Israelis, who, while not involved in the military planning or potential operations, were keenly focused on Assad's chemical weapons and knew something about conducting airstrikes in Syria, having destroyed a North Korean-supplied nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert in September 2007.

B
Y
L
ABOR
D
AY
weekend, all the pieces were in place. The Pentagon planners had narrowed the target list to around fifty sites, with the initial wave of strikes involving Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from five Arleigh Burke-class destroyers positioned in the Mediterranean Sea. The ships were in position—in Pentagonese, they were “in the
basket”—poised to launch strikes within minutes of the president giving the order. The French were ready to go as well. The British, however, had bowed out after the UK House of Commons had refused to support the Prime Minister's request that the country join the US.
²

Secretary of State John Kerry laid out the public case for intervention. In a speech encouraged (and partly crafted) by the White House and delivered in the State Department's ornate Treaty Room on Friday, August 30, he outlined what we knew about the chemical attack and Assad's role in it. Citing the “indiscriminate, inconceivable horror of chemical weapons,” Kerry made a forceful call for action, arguing that the whole world would be watching what the US did or did not do.

For Kerry, this moment was rich with irony. In 2004, his campaign for the presidency had been defined by, and ultimately faltered over, his position on the Iraq War. A key event in the lead-up to that conflict had been when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the UN Security Council to make the case for war, citing specific evidence of Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Now Kerry was speaking to the world from the State Department about another threat posed by such weapons, detailing intelligence and delivering a stark warning about the costs of inaction. While he was careful to note that no decision had been made, the speech was an unmistakable signal that intervention was coming.

H
EADING INTO THE
weekend, the Pentagon had made plans for round-the-clock staffing coverage over the holiday, when we thought the operation would start. And on Friday night, we received word that the president wanted to see his top advisors at the White House at 10 a.m. on Saturday. We assumed this would be the final signals check before the Tomahawks flew.

Early Saturday morning, as I was walking with my wife and young son to grab a quick breakfast before heading into the Pentagon for what I expected to be a long and dramatic weekend, my Blackberry buzzed with a call from “Cables,” the office of the secretary of defense's switchboard. It was Mark Lippert, an old friend who was then Hagel's chief of staff, with surprising news: the president had called Hagel late the night before and told him he “wanted to explore another option.” Instead of ordering strikes immediately, the president wanted to pump the brakes and first go to Congress to ask for its authorization.

I was shocked. I had been in most of the White House meetings up to that point, and while the issue of legal authorities and Congress had come up, it was clear the president had all the domestic legal authority and international justification he needed to act. The question of asking for a congressional vote had never been discussed at length; some had suggested we should ask for a vote, but there was skepticism it would pass, and therefore a feeling the question should not be asked. For an administration that prized careful and inclusive deliberation, it was unusual that a decision this big would arise so suddenly without first being thoroughly pored over in the interagency process.

Once the surprise wore off, I found myself thinking that, while abrupt, unexpected, and unorthodox, this was the right move. Not because of any legal reason or question of constitutional powers, but because Congress and the American people needed to be fully invested in what we were about to do and prepared to accept the consequences.

It turned out that the president had decided to do this on his own the night before. After a now-famous walk around the White House South Lawn early Friday evening with McDonough, he told his advisors huddled in the Oval Office that he had decided to take the question to Congress. Subsequent accounts of the meeting described his closest aides being as surprised as the rest of us, with some arguing that it was a bad move.

There were many reasons for the president's hesitation. As he later explained to the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, he worried Assad would use the UN inspectors on the ground as human shields (as had happened in Bosnia and Iraq in the 1990s) and that the strikes would merely dent Syria's massive chemical weapons arsenal, creating an even more dangerous situation. Most fundamentally, Obama believed that intervening in Syria could prove to be such a consequential decision—one that could evolve in an unpredictable and dangerous way, consuming the remainder of his presidency—that he was convinced it would be a grave mistake to act in haste and without the country fully engaged in what we were getting into.

As he would later explain in an address to the nation: “I believe our democracy is stronger when the president acts with the support of Congress. And I believe that America acts more effectively abroad when we stand together. This is especially true after a decade that put more and more war-making power in the hands of the president, and more and more burdens on the shoulders of our troops, while sidelining the people's representatives from the critical decisions about when we use force.”
³

For years we had been struggling over what to do about Syria. We had stepped up to the brink of conducting air strikes before, only to pull back. Recent experience had taught us to expect the worst. After a decade that had been dominated by the war in Iraq—a conflict that had begun with promises of easy victory and limited American sacrifices, only to bring terrible costs—the country needed to be in this together. Our eyes were wide open about what might come, and we had concluded the risks were worth it, but we wanted the American people to understand and support our case as well.

Moreover, Obama wanted to make a larger point about the exercise of presidential power and the use of force—something, he later said, he had been “brooding on for some time.”
⁴
Having taught constitutional law before entering politics, he often thought in terms of
precedents. He knew that his successors would be measured by his actions.

Since his first presidential campaign, Obama had argued that presidents had the constitutional authority to use force on their own, especially in an instance of a direct threat to America's security or an immediate emergency like genocide. But in instances in which there was no immediate threat and therefore more time to consider the full spectrum of potential responses (like in Syria), it was always preferable to act with the support of the Congress and with as many allies as possible.
⁵
As Obama said to his aides gathered in the Oval Office debating his decision, he wanted to “break the cycle” of presidents not going to Congress before using force. His recent experience in Libya—in which the US acted without congressional authorization, something I think in retrospect he saw as a mistake—only reinforced this conviction.

So when the president stepped into the sunny Rose Garden that Saturday morning, he announced that he had made two decisions: first, that the US would act against Syria, and second, that he would seek explicit authorization from Congress to do so. “I've long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might,” he said, “but in our example as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” With that, the administration set out on a different campaign than the military one we had been preparing for: to convince the American people that intervening in Syria was in the country's interest.

N
OW THAT ALL
of Washington had a stake in the decision, the next three weeks were a frenzy of political drama, raucous debate, and second-guessing. Despite Syria having dominated the news for so long, few politicians had thought deeply about it, relieved that it was not their problem. None were happy to share the responsibility of being accountable for what America would or would not do about it. And the foreign policy punditocracy was pirouetting between the
wisdom of getting involved in Syria and Obama's decision to have this debate at all.

What transpired was one of the most revealing episodes in eight years of Obama's foreign policy. Despite the administration's strong advocacy and the support from a small minority of hawkish politicians, Congress and the American people proved strongly opposed to the use of force. They did not want to risk getting involved in another conflict like Iraq. In the end, however, the threat of military action ended up achieving something no one had imagined possible: the peaceful removal of most of Syria's chemical weapons.

Yet, while the outcome unquestionably made America safer, the episode is almost universally seen—by the national security establishment, foreign officials, including those from our closest allies, the media, and even current and former members of the administration—as one of Obama's most consequential mistakes, an enduring symbol of his foreign policy failures. That the outcome and the interpretation should be so at odds reveals how poorly understood foreign policy is once it is reduced to politicized sound bites and ninety-second news items. They simply eliminate the complexities of the problem and the knotted history that has created it.

THE TOUGHEST PROBLEM