The Long Game (25 page)

Beyond maintaining America's military presence in the Middle East, the Obama administration sought to improve the defense capabilities of our Gulf partners and shift the regional military balance away from Iran. Since 2007, the Pentagon has approved arms sales worth more than $85 billion to the GCC states, nearly as much as in the previous fifteen years combined. In 2011, the administration completed one of the largest arms deals in US history, a sale of F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. In 2013, the Pentagon announced the $11 billion-plus sale of the most modern “standoff” weapons (missiles that could be fired at a long distance far out of range of counterattack) to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In 2014, the United States and Qatar signed an $11 billion deal for Patriot missile defense batteries, Apache helicopters, and Javelin anti-tank missiles.

The US also worked to enable the Gulf states to cooperate more closely together. Compared to Europe and Asia, the Middle East
lacks a common security mechanism. While there are many reasons for this (particularly in a region characterized by mutual suspicion and fierce independence), the Obama team took steps to try to enhance regional cooperation.

For example, we concluded we needed a venue where the United States and its Gulf partners could meet as a group to discuss shared security concerns. So the administration established a high-level “Security Cooperation Forum” to discuss concerns like Iran. Building on this effort, in May 2014 then-Secretary of Defense Hagel helped organize a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with his Gulf defense minister partners. Hosted by then-Crown Prince and now King Salman of Saudi Arabia, the event helped lay the policy foundation for the Camp David summit of Gulf leaders Obama organized in May 2015, who met again in Saudi Arabia in 2016. At these meetings, officials discussed ways to improve the Gulf partners' ability to work together on future threats, including maritime, cyber, and air and missile defense. This included proposals for them to acquire US defense capabilities by pooling resources and making common investments.

Such arms sales raised eyebrows in Israel. As a result we had to spend a lot of energy to ensure that our Israeli friends remained confident in their qualitative military edge. Secretary Gates established a joint US–Israel working group to ensure that Israel's QME was not diminished by such arms sales, and to discuss their specific defense needs to offset such concerns. These could be very difficult conversations, and we tried to convince our Israeli partners that their interests were also served by having capable Gulf countries able to deter and fight Iran.
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Moreover, we reminded the Israelis, if the United States did not provide such capabilities, the Russians and French (and one day the Chinese) would happily oblige, although without any concern for Israel's military edge. The Israelis conceded that while there were
overlapping interests at the moment, none of the Gulf partners were Zionists. They also pointed out that the kind of change that swept away a relatively predictable leader like Mubarak could come soon to the Saudi monarchy.

In the end, the US was able to stay true to its commitments and achieve the difficult balance of strengthening both the Israelis and our Gulf partners. Combined with our own military preparedness in the region, these steps served to increase the pressure on Iran. Despite the popular narrative of American “withdrawal” from the Middle East or assertions that the United States wanted to shirk its role as the regional stabilizer, the end of the Obama years found the United States providing more military capabilities to its regional partners—undergirded by deeper security and intelligence relationships and a sustainable force presence—than ever before.

A FOURTH QJUARTER VICTORY

The dual track strategy of engagement and pressure on Iran began to show progress during Obama's second term as negotiations accelerated. What began as a secret negotiating channel between the US and Iran grew into a multifaceted, multicountry negotiation that was dizzying in its complexity. Leading the charge was John Kerry, as relentless and indefatigable a diplomat as has ever led the State Department.

When the talks concluded in July 2015, the result was an historic achievement. Much has been written about the complicated diplomatic process that led to success. Whatever one's view of the outcome, it was one of the most consequential diplomatic undertakings in American history, standing alongside Richard Nixon's opening to China in 1972, Jimmy Carter's brokering of peace between Egypt and Israel with the 1978 Camp David peace agreement, George H.W. Bush's diplomacy to build the Gulf War
coalition and the “two-plus-four” process to reunify Germany in 1990–91, and the US-led Dayton Peace Accords which ended the war in Bosnia in 1995.

By cutting off the pathways for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon and placing its nuclear programs under a strict regime of inspections and monitoring to ensure that they are for peaceful purposes, the United States achieved through diplomacy what the use of force could not. Even our most optimistic assessments suggested that a military “knock-out punch” would only set Iran's nuclear programs back by a few years. And importantly, this deal was done with the support of our closest partners as well as Russia and China.

This achievement also involved a considerable amount of risk, something that is often harder to appreciate now that we know how things turned out. Obama's approach was a big gamble, of the magnitude many critics say he is unwilling to take. By engaging Iran directly—including through secret talks, which if exposed prematurely would have ignited a diplomatic and political firestorm—he staked his prestige on something that was more likely to fail than succeed. The costs of failure would have been high. But Obama judged that the costs of not trying would have been far greater.

T
HE
I
RAN DEAL
was a significant accomplishment for security in the Middle East. But its implications were far greater. Obama thought the outcome validated his foreign policy approach, and believed the ways it was attacked by his critics—who rejected the agreement before even reading it—revealed the worst of aspects of the “foreign policy breakdown” in Washington.

In many respects, the strategy to thwart Iran's ambitions was the antithesis to the way the United States handled Iraq after 9/11. Both countries were aspiring regional hegemons seeking to
augment their power with weapons of mass destruction (although, of course, Iran actually had an advanced WMD program, and Iraq did not). But while in Iraq the United States chose to use military force, in Iran it addressed the threat by using all of the tools in its toolbox—diplomacy, economic incentives, and military pressure and reassurance.

It also showed contrasting styles of leadership: instead of marching off largely alone as it did in Iraq, leaving disgruntled allies behind, to handle Iran the US reestablished its position, built leverage and brought the world together in common cause. In Iraq, the byproduct of American policy was greater regional instability and resource-draining military occupation; whereas the outcome of the Iran nuclear diplomacy was stronger partner military capacity and a substantial yet sustainable American military presence in the region. And while the nuclear agreement did not solve all of America's problems with Iran—it did nothing to address the regime's internal repression against political opponents, its support for terrorists, its ambitions against Israel, as well as its overall efforts to destabilize regional order—the deal did establish a more transactional relationship, one that in early 2016 made it possible to deescalate crises and free imprisoned Americans like
Washington Post
journalist Jason Rezaian.

Obama relished the opportunity to draw this contrast. Such enthusiasm was on full display during his August 2015 speech at American University, which was his most detailed defense of his Iran policy. Although the speech was specifically about Iran, it contained a broader argument he has been making since his first campaign for president. There is a direct connection between his American University speech and his 2007 speech at DePaul. Obama correctly argued that many who opposed the Iran deal were the same people who had advocated for the Iraq War—and who fell back on the familiar arguments about weakness and futility of negotiations. Obama chastised
those who played on fear and belittled diplomacy. It was this mindset, Obama asserted, that was “offered by the same people who have no compunction with being repeatedly wrong”—those following the “Washington playbook”—and they needed to be held accountable.

The core difference was in the definition of American strength. Obama again returned to the idea of what it meant to be “strong,” calling out his critics for their “vague promises of toughness.” Instead of offering a different solution, critics chose to hide behind the rhetoric of resolve, playing into fears and painting diplomacy as appeasement. “But none of those arguments hold up,” Obama said, recalling the debate about Iraq over a decade earlier. “They didn't back in 2002, in 2003, they shouldn't now.”

Strength isn't narrowing all of your options so all that's left is the use of force—after all, it was that kind of “strong” policy that Obama inherited in 2009, with America isolated and Iran ascendant. Strength is using all of our assets—diplomatic, economic, and military—to build a global coalition to solve a problem. Strength is having the confidence, patience and persistence to implement the strategy over many years and in the face of many obstacles.

At the end of Obama's speech at American University, he recalled John F. Kennedy's observation that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war. But one cannot confuse drama with strength. The Iran agreement exemplifies what a Long Game foreign policy looks like. And, more than any other Obama policy, whether the deal succeeds or fails poses the strategy's greatest test.

CONCLUSION

HISTORY'S WEB

O
ver fifty years ago, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr—a philosopher Barack Obama has often described as one of his favorites—cautioned about the temptation of power, the dangers of hubris, and the necessity of humility. We must remember, Niebuhr observed, that all great nations are “caught in a web of history in which many desires, hopes, wills and ambitions, other than their own, are operative.”
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Appreciating this reality is a crucial first step in understanding Obama's worldview and the making of his foreign policy.

Obama has always had a keen sense of history's web—both for the country and for himself. He sees America's role in the world as part of a broader story—one in which it must play the essential part, but alone does not have the power to dictate outcomes. To best position the US to do what only it uniquely can—bring countries together to solve problems, set agendas, and seize opportunities by channeling the hopes, wills, and ambitions of others—it must make the right strategic choices.

While Obama has tremendous faith in his convictions, he considers his accomplishments with a hint of Niebuhrian modesty. “You
hope at the end of your presidency,” he once reflected, “you can look back and say I made more right calls than not…and that America, as best it could in a difficult, dangerous world was, net, a force for good.”
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So did he succeed? One measure of how Obama's record will stand in the light of history is to explore how his approach, priorities, and management style compares to those of other presidents. Another is to test Obama's policy by its own terms, measuring the Long Game strategy against the eight fundamental components of its checklist: balance, sustainability, restraint, precision, patience, fallibility, skepticism, and exceptionalism.

IKE, BUSH 41…OR NIXON?

Obama's political opponents have tried to “Carterize” him, arguing that like Jimmy Carter, he has left behind a foreign policy legacy of weakness, regret, and humiliation. Reaching further back, historian Robert Kagan cites the examples of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, neither of whom are remembered as presidential greats, comparing their tepid response to the outcome of World War I when America withdrew from the world to Obama's reaction to the aftermath of the Iraq War. Some critics even stretch to compare Obama with failed Democratic presidential candidates like George McGovern or Michael Dukakis.
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Obama's own models are more revealing—and perhaps surprising. Steering away from the bright stars in the Democratic foreign policy firmament—FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, or even Bill Clinton—Obama instead was most attracted to the example of moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush.

O
BAMA AND
E
ISENHOWER
might seem an unlikely pair, but they share more than their passion for golf and Kansas roots.
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Both presidents inherited a country battered by unpopular wars they were determined to unwind. They were dubious of an excessive faith in military force to solve problems, and were wary of the idea that once unleashed, military power could be completely controlled. They were supremely confident in their own abilities, but prized modesty. They often resisted the arguments of more hawkish advisers—and dismissed most foreign policy commentators. They had testy relations with many in the press, who they saw as congenitally disposed to hyperbole and conflict. They focused on returning to a sustainable balance between an ambitious global agenda and domestic resources to support it, worried that if they didn't better match its means with ends, the country would be on the road to bankruptcy.
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Today, such parallels reflect a cultural mood: The Obama years coincided with a renaissance in the historical memory of Eisenhower. For example, plans finally came together to build a memorial to Eisenhower on Washington's National Mall. Several books heralding his foreign policy leadership shot onto the bestseller lists.

In his 2012 book
Ike's Bluff,
Evan Thomas writes admirably about Eisenhower in a way Obama would appreciate, praising him as a leader who “had the patience and wisdom, as well as cunning and guile, to keep the peace.” Many other commentators joined in: Peter Beinart argued that “Ike would be proud” of Obama's restraint and nuance, while James Traub observed that just as Eisenhower was criticized for vacillation and kowtowing to enemies (for example, by not responding forcefully to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956), Obama has been criticized for any number of non-interventions. Fareed Zakaria explained that while most great presidents are remembered for a grand project like the Marshall Plan, establishing NATO, or opening to China, others—like Ike and Obama—deserve credit for a “deliberative process of decision-making, a disciplined evaluation of costs and benefits and perhaps above all an instinctive feel for the power of restraint.”
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Obama and his team would agree. In a 2010 speech at the Eisenhower Library in Kansas, Defense Secretary Robert Gates (another Kansan) said the United States needed to emulate Ike's example when “real choices were made, priorities set, and limits enforced.” Just weeks before stepping down as secretary of state in 2013, Hillary Clinton said she often recalled Eisenhower's approach. “You know,” she said, referring to the lessons of Ike's leadership, “you've got to be careful, you have to be thoughtful, you can't rush in.” In Obama's 2009 speech at West Point announcing his decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan, he cited Eisenhower's guidance on the importance of maintaining balance across “all national programs,” a point that critics derided as defeatist. And speaking again at West Point in 2014, Obama drew on this legacy to remind his audience of graduating cadets that “tough talk draws headlines, but war rarely conforms to slogans,” and quoting Eisenhower, said, “War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.”

Although both Ike and Obama will be remembered for military restraint, they also expanded the role of modern military tools significantly. Eisenhower presided over a massive build-up of nuclear weapons; Obama innovated the military's cyber strategy. Eisenhower emphasized covert operations as an instrument of national policy; Obama vastly expanded the use of drones and the size and deployments of special operations forces. And both leaders stressed the importance of building indigenous forces that would be able to provide, as Eisenhower put it, “the maintenance of order, the safeguarding of frontiers, and the provision of the bulk of the ground capability” to fight local conflicts.
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O
BAMA WAS EVEN
more effusive about the lessons he took from George H.W. Bush. Although he framed his 2008 campaign as a necessary corrective to the actions of the 43rd president, he said at
the time that he had “enormous sympathy” for the foreign policy of the 41st. “I don't have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm,” Obama said of the senior Bush administration. “I don't have a lot of complaints with their handling of the fall of the Berlin Wall.” On the campaign trail Obama described his foreign policy as a “return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father.”
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Like Bush 41, Obama believed he was in a pitched battle between what he described as “ideology” versus his brand of “foreign policy realism.” After all, the elder Bush (as well as his two most influential advisors, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft) was held in suspicion by many conservatives as a non-believer, too soft on communism, often too timid to assert leadership, and too willing to cut a deal with adversaries. Although Bush 41 presided over a remarkable period of American dominance, he was criticized for squandering what Charles Krauthammer memorably dubbed the “unipolar moment.”

When Bush left office in 1993, his foreign policy record was tarnished not for overreaching, but for doing too little. He was pilloried by both liberals and conservatives for failing to exercise American power more forcefully—whether that meant not finishing off Saddam Hussein after America's lightning victory in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, or his reluctance to intervene in the Bosnia conflict. Reflecting back on his son's presidency, the elder Bush sounded a lot like Obama (and Eisenhower) when he lamented to his biographer Jon Meacham about the “hot rhetoric” that can “make it easy to get headlines, but it doesn't necessarily solve the diplomatic problem.” Bush 41 also regretted the “lack of humility” and the influence of the “hard-charging guys [referring to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld] who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East.”
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One can hear the echoes of Baker's infamous admonition about Bosnia—that the US “didn't have a dog” in the fight—in Obama's
approach to Syria. Bush was criticized for being too cautious about the changes that swept Europe after the Berlin Wall fell—saying he would not “dance” on that wall. As the Soviet Union was collapsing in 1991, Bush went to Kiev and warned Ukraine not to secede quickly—which deeply angered the more hard-line Pentagon led by Cheney and was mocked by critics as the “Chicken Kiev” speech. It is also striking to compare the Bush 41 administration's bitter disputes with the Israeli leadership—and showdown with influential political groups like AIPAC—with Obama's own disagreements with Israel and tangles with its supporters in the US. (As secretary of state, Baker became so angry with the Israeli deputy foreign minister he banned him from entering the State Department—that minister was Benjamin Netanyahu.)

It was this sense of clear-eyed caution, humility, and fierce prioritization of interests that attracted Obama and his advisers to the elder Bush and his team, and they frequently sought their counsel. Defense Secretary Gates personified this connection, having served in Bush 41's West Wing as deputy national security adviser before becoming his CIA director. Gates remained very close with the elder Bush, and enjoyed great influence with Obama. Obama also occasionally reached out to Colin Powell, who endorsed him in 2008, and probably preferred to be remembered more for his performance as Bush 41's chairman of the Joint Chiefs than as Bush 43's secretary of state.

Scowcroft was another favorite, so much so that author James Mann described Obama's closest advisers as “Scowcroft Democrats,” and many spoke openly of their admiration for him. “I love that guy,” Obama once said.
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The ultimate insider, Scowcroft embodied the non-ideological modesty and quiet competence that the Obama team valued. Importantly, Scowcroft and Obama had both been early opponents of the war in Iraq. Obama's first two national security advisers, Jim Jones and Tom Donilon, stayed in regular touch with
Scowcroft, and Donilon explicitly tried to conduct the NSC process with Scowcroft's model in mind.

Obama told Jon Meacham that George H.W. Bush was “one of our most underrated presidents,” handling the end of the Cold War “in a way that gave the world its best opportunity for stability and peace and openness.”
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While the elder Bush prized his retirement and never took the opportunity to offer advice (and loyally supported his sons), Obama heaped praise on the former president and took every opportunity to laud his accomplishments, awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.

The similarities between Obama and Bush 41 also reveal something about today's foreign policy debate, especially among Republicans. Although Bush 41 is widely respected—and in his twilight, is the subject of popular books and admiring television retrospectives—his foreign policy approach has fallen out of fashion. In his failed 2016 campaign for president, Jeb Bush spent more time talking about his brother's foreign policy than his father's, and he had to distance himself from family stalwarts like Baker (principally because of Baker's criticism of Israeli policies on the peace process).

It is telling that a quarter-century after Bush 41's presidency, the greatest champion of his foreign policy is not a Bush, or any other Republican—it is Obama. The same is true about Eisenhower. At a moment when Republicans are reeling from the influence of the Tea Party and the rise of demagogues like Donald Trump, some political analysts (including leading conservatives) are urging the party to emulate the “modern Republicanism” of Eisenhower.
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Yet no Republican leader today will carry the Eisenhower foreign policy mantle. Obama willingly does.

The Ike-Bush 41-Obama approach—powerful yet modest, ambitious yet aware of limits, decisive yet suspicious of impulse—tries to steer a middle path. In his speech announcing his 1980 run for president, Bush quoted a line from Eisenhower's first State of the Union
address that sums up the brand of foreign policy shared by these three presidents. “There is in world affairs,” Bush said, “a steady course to be followed between an assertion of strength that is truculent and a confession of helplessness that is cowardly.”
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T
HE COMPARISONS WITH
Eisenhower and Bush 41, while largely favorable for Obama, also suggest some less attractive contrasts.

For example, all three leaders embraced a “team of rivals” approach to picking a foreign policy team, priding themselves as comfortable enough in their own skins to have strong, high-profile players around them. However, while Eisenhower empowered the National Security Council system, and the Bush-Baker-Scowcroft team is remembered as perhaps the best ever, Obama never seemed to get his process to work as well as it could have. There always seemed to be an element of frustration that colored White House relationships with key cabinet players. After leaving office, Clinton, Gates, Leon Panetta and Chuck Hagel—who combined had well over a century of experience in Washington—all lamented how the White House handled decision-making (although they would have to concede it was nothing like the dysfunction that riddled previous administrations). The result sometimes was that the policy process would become bogged down, drawing out decisions and exposing Obama to criticisms of micro-management.