The Long Game (5 page)

A third problem is dashed expectations. By drawing the red line, Obama unintentionally fueled the hope that he would respond with overwhelming force. Or, as many now assert, he should have used the crossing as justification to achieve a
different
goal, something that the military strikes were never intended to do: take out Assad.

There was always some ambiguity about how the US would enforce the red line. To some extent this was necessary: to establish deterrence, the US needed to keep Assad guessing about how it might respond, staying ambiguous enough to encourage him to think the worst, wondering if his life was in danger. Still, the overall effect was that by threatening force and then not using it, Obama seemed to make a promise he did not keep. This despite the many occasions—from the bin Laden raid to the Libya war to numerous counter-terrorism operations—Obama had shown a willingness to use force decisively and at considerable risk.

To be sure, it was harder for the administration to claim this as a strategic success because of the improvised way it arrived. In retrospect, the US could have tried earlier to use the specter of intervention
to get Russia on board to pressure Assad. But it hadn't. Once the red line had been crossed, one can imagine a circumstance where the US went to Assad with a clear demand: “we'll strike unless you give up all of your chemical weapons.” The substantive outcome would not have been any better, but perhaps it would have generated a greater sense of American leadership.

O
BAMA IS WILLING
to live with this perception as long as the result serves the country's—and in his view, the world's—long-term interests. Because he was defying Washington's expectations—what he mockingly calls the “Washington playbook”—he knew he would face a barrage of criticism. But he has stayed confident enough in the result to suffer some reputational costs. In retrospect, Obama remains immensely proud of his decision. As Jeffrey Goldberg describes, this moment was Obama's “liberation,” and the more scorn critics heaped on him, the more convinced he became that he had done the right thing.
²⁷

“I'm less concerned about style points,” Obama told an interviewer after he pulled back from using force. “I'm much more concerned about getting the policy right.” If given the choice between removing Syria's chemical weapons or not, the preference should be clear. When asked about the criticisms, Obama said that “folks here in Washington like to grade on style…and so had we rolled out something that was very smooth and disciplined and linear, they would have graded it well, even if it was a disastrous policy. We know that, because that's exactly how they graded the Iraq war.”
²⁸

What's instructive—and for many of Obama's critics, inconvenient—is to listen to the foreign leaders who are most complimentary of the way things turned out: the Israelis. Syria's vast chemical weapons arsenal was an acute threat to Israel—a threat for which it had no viable military answer. Israeli military officials later told me that they had done their own planning for airstrikes to take out the chemical weapons, yet all the scenarios had “horrific” civilian casualties.

While some Israelis were initially very worried that by pulling back from military action Obama had undermined his credibility, they were relieved by the outcome. The removal of Syria's chemical weapons is an accomplishment that Prime Minister Netanyahu, a leader who has had his share of disagreements with Obama, described as “the one ray of light in a very dark region.” Such sentiments were echoed repeatedly by senior Israeli defense officials, who by 2015 considered the Syrian chemical weapons threat so insignificant they did not include gas attacks as a scenario in their annual emergency home front drills.
²⁹

T
HE RED LINE
is remembered quite differently than what the phrase was really about—the massive threat from Syria's chemical weapons. Instead, it has morphed into a short-hand critique of Obama's handling not just of Syria, but of his exercise of American power entirely. Even inside the administration the phrase became loaded, as though it were a slur, politically incorrect to utter.

There is no question that the Syrian war is the greatest catastrophe of the post-Cold War world, with hundreds of thousands killed, millions of refugees, states disintegrating, and extremists filling the vacuum. But there
is
a question about what America can and should do about it, and whether Obama's approach reflects a sensible balance of competing interests and a healthy recognition of limits, or whether it simply derives from timidity and defeatism.

When and how America should use its military power has been one of the most vexing questions President Obama has faced. And it has been one of the most contentious issues within the administration. In Syria, Obama was ready to use force to deal with one major threat to US interests—chemical weapons—but ended up achieving an even better outcome through diplomacy. Since 2014, the US has been using force to address another direct threat to US interests: ISIS.

Numerous critics (including some former administration officials) have made the case that the US should be willing to use additional military power to achieve its other stated policy goals—to accelerate Assad's departure, build a lasting political settlement, combat extremists, or simply to reclaim leadership. The challenge is how one reconciles this understandable impulse to act with the desire to prevent a problem like Syria from overwhelming American foreign policy.

The debate is often defined as “doing something” or “doing nothing,” but those are false choices. The policy disputes exist between these extremes—deciding the way to address a problem like Syria somewhere between being all-in (like the Iraq invasion in 2003) or standing aside entirely. How the United States navigated these competing interests and managed the trade-offs is one of the central stories of the Obama presidency. And it is a defining characteristic of his Long Game.

CHAPTER 2

THE FOREIGN POLICY BREAKDOWN

B
arack Obama arrived in 2008 with some entrenched criticisms of his own about how Washington handled America's role in the world. His skepticism of the foreign policy establishment was rooted in more than the political expediency of needing to take on Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. It reflected the core of his view of politics. He decried the “smallness” of Washington, its obsessions with the fleeting, petty, and trivial, and its penchant for division over consensus.

Obama had conducted his 2008 presidential campaign in a way that defied prevailing views of how it should be done—eschewing the cable news, political talking-head wisdom, while using innovative methods to attract new voters and compete in places most pundits ignored. The core message of his candidacy—“change”—was to him about more than simply replacing who sat in the White House. Obama wanted to transform the culture of politics, which he believed had become deeply misguided and corrosive. This was especially the case when it came to foreign policy. For Obama, the mentality and
incentives of Washington's professional political and policy class were the main obstacles to pursuing a Long Game strategy.

Obama believed that conventional thinking had generated a huge strategic mistake, the biggest since Vietnam: the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Instead of laying the blame solely on the Bush administration and a government hijacked by a neo-conservative cabal (as many Democrats wanted to do, so as to absolve themselves of responsibility), Obama saw the Iraq War as a systemic failure in which the entire Washington establishment—Democratic and Republican politicians, foreign policy experts of all stripes, and the press—was responsible. And, importantly, it was an issue he had gotten right from the beginning.

A
LTHOUGH
O
BAMA WAS
more than an antiwar candidate, his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq fueled his political rise. His decision to speak out against the war in 2002 crystalized in one moment everything that he believed was flawed about the foreign policy debate—and how he wanted to change it.

“The American people weren't just failed by a president,” he said in an October 2007 speech at DePaul University in Illinois, when few in the foreign policy world were watching. “They were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. By a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war. And most of all by the majority of a Congress… that voted to give the president the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day.”
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The DePaul speech, delivered before a crowd of nearly five hundred students on the fifth anniversary of Obama's famous statement against the Iraq invasion at a Chicago antiwar rally, was a broadside against what he called Washington “groupthink.” To drive this point home, that same day he delivered this speech twice more, in Iowa. Throughout the campaign Obama had sparred with his more
experienced opponents (including his future vice president and secretary of state) over such issues as how to engage adversaries like Iran and whether to get tough with countries like Pakistan. He turned their criticisms back on them, once saying during a Democratic primary debate that he found it “amusing that those who helped to authorize and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation are now criticizing me” for such stands.
²
In the DePaul speech, Obama went further, observing that “you might think that Washington would learn from Iraq. But we've seen…just how bent out of shape Washington gets when you challenge its assumptions.”

Such themes carried through his 2008 campaign, and he would return to them often as president. During his early years in the White House, establishment critiques would gnaw at him. But in the latter part of his presidency he wanted to take on such critics more openly—trying to engender a sense of accountability.

For example, Obama characterized opponents of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 in similar terms to those who had criticized his policies in 2007—explicitly drawing a direct line of argument between the two. In a fiesty speech at American University in August 2015, he laid out his critique of this “mindset,” intentionally calling out his critics:

When I ran for president eight years ago as a candidate who had opposed the decision to go to war in Iraq, I said that America didn't just have to end that war—we had to end the mindset that got us there in the first place. It was a mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy; a mindset that put a premium on unilateral US action over the painstaking work of building international consensus; a mindset that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence supported. Leaders did not level with the American people about the costs of war, insisting that we could easily impose our will on a part of the world with a
profoundly different culture and history. And, of course, those calling for war labeled themselves strong and decisive, while dismissing those who disagreed as weak—even appeasers of a malevolent adversary.

In public and private, Obama would frequently express frustration with what passed for smart thinking from Washington's unceasing chorus of commentary. While Obama was open to ideas and liked to engage his critics—and at times, quietly hosted them at the White House for informal discussions to hear them out—he was usually left underwhelmed by what they recommended he do differently (he engaged both sides; for example, two of the more notable critics he met with privately were conservative Robert Kagan and liberal Andrew Bacevich). Obama would decry that the foreign policy debate was not, as he often put it, “on the level,” meaning it sought to elide complexity and deny trade-offs just to score points or win the news cycle, with little consequence for being wrong. Sober reflection hardly attracts attention. Proving the point, the DePaul speech was barely noticed at the time, garnering scant coverage in the national press (this despite Obama having delivered it three times that day).

Obama's views as president are aptly summed up by an observation he made in 2007 as a candidate at DePaul: “Conventional thinking in Washington has a way of buying into stories that make political sense even if they don't make practical sense.”

A
LTHOUGH
O
BAMA FRAMED
his candidacy against the establishment, he was hardly a fringe candidate or some reincarnation of George McGovern. He still drew upon the ideas of leading foreign policy thinkers, and benefitted from the tough lessons Democrats had learned during the Bush years. While the 2008 primary debate
between Obama and Clinton became quite bitter (especially among their rival camps), their actual policy differences were exaggerated.

In fact, Democrats found themselves more unified and ready to debate foreign policy in 2008 than in any other election since the end of the Cold War. To be sure, some of this confidence was a result of Bush's foreign policy failures, and the fact that Obama's 2008 opponent, John McCain, could be tied to so many of those policies, especially the war in Iraq. But just as important, Democrats had coalesced around a set of ideas to bring bold changes to American foreign policy.

To understand the foreign policy debates of the Obama years—and to appreciate better Obama's perspective on American foreign policy and how he set out to change it—one must consider the broader historical context.

A SECOND CHANCE

Obama's Long Game approach was far more than a knee-jerk response to the Bush years and America's post-9/11 policy decisions. It was another chapter in the quarter-century-long struggle to define American leadership after the Cold War.

For the quarter century since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, conservatives and liberals have grappled with the very nature of the world order and America's place in it. The core questions included: How much should the United States care about the legitimacy of its actions—such as adhering to international law or working through international institutions? How much should it care about what happens inside other countries? When should the US use military force to solve problems?

Fundamentally, the debate has revolved around how the United States should pursue its interests; how the exercise of American power can be reconciled with limits; what, if anything, is necessary to
justify US actions; and how one should define “strength” and “leadership” in today's world.

The end of the Cold War presented a paradox. Even though the Soviet Union had been defeated, America's initial triumphalism soon gave way to pessimism. The US may have been victorious, but after the Cold War many American leaders and analysts believed the country was in decline (“the Cold War ended, and Germany and Japan won” was a popular quip). Some politicians argued that traditional national security policy would take a back seat to domestic issues, or “softer” challenges like international economics and globalization.

The collapse of the Soviet Union also scrambled US domestic politics. For decades, the core of conservative foreign policy had been to be tough on Communism, and their assertions of strength were used to cudgel liberals as feckless and weak. In many ways, the Soviet threat had been at once the grip holding modern conservatism together and the wedge driving liberals apart. With the Cold War over, both sides were compelled to remake themselves.

During the 1990s, conservatives and liberals found agreement on certain foreign policy questions, such as the interventions in the Balkans or the enlargement of NATO. But common ground on some issues did not create a new foreign policy consensus. However vigorous these debates sometimes proved to be, they remained in the confines of elite circles. The broader public never really engaged in them.

That changed only after 9/11. For many Americans, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks marked a stark turning point for the United States' role in the world. After years in which American leaders seemed to careen from crisis to crisis, none of which quite rose to the level of grave threats to national security, the US now faced a determined enemy and a generational struggle. Foreign policy in the “post-Cold War era” finally had an overriding purpose: to defeat al-Qaeda
and its ilk. America, it seemed, needed to fight “the long war”—which became the organizing framework for US foreign policy.

During the 2000s, analysts such as former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski offered sobering assessments of the mistakes the US made under the “long war” banner. In his 2007 book
Second Chance,
Brzezinski argued that during the Clinton and Bush years, the US had led “badly,” and that “after its coronation as global leader [in 1989], America is becoming a fearful and lonely democracy in a politically antagonistic world.” American leadership was headed in the wrong direction, too often defining itself as a matter of military strength alone, and succumbing to fears that led us into misadventures like Iraq. So the US needed to seize a second chance. Obama and his team had read this book and shared its assessment—in fact, Brzezinski was one of Obama's informal advisers during the 2008 campaign.
³

I
N HIS OWN
book that helped launch his 2008 White House bid,
The Audacity of Hope,
Obama expresses the view that, in many ways, the post-Cold War era was one of lost opportunity (most campaign books are dismissed as ghost-written policy pablum, but Obama's is worth reading carefully, and once in office he would often remind people that it provides a clear description of his views). Although there were accomplishments—such as ending some long-festering conflicts and promoting democracy and free trade—Obama concluded that “in the eyes of the public, at least, foreign policy in the nineties lacked any overarching theme or grand imperatives.”
⁴

The stage for the immediate post-Cold War period had been set by President George H.W. Bush and his principal national security advisers, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, who had earned plaudits for their skilled handling of complex events that came at a dizzying pace. In less than four years, the Berlin Wall fell, the Warsaw Pact
disappeared, Germany reunified, Saddam was kicked out of Kuwait, and the Soviet Union crumbled.

The Bush team handled all of this with prudent and steady management. But they failed to translate these huge successes into a lasting strategy that the American people could understand and rally around. George H. W. Bush's attempt to begin sketching a doctrine—his much-maligned “new world order”—was never much more than a slogan. If anything, the idea quickly became shorthand for an unimaginative, traditional conception of stability, not a bold way forward. Bush admitted his discomfort with the “vision thing.” (And Bush's successes abroad sowed the seeds for his demise at home, as Americans found his domestic agenda less compelling.) Obama is an admirer of the elder Bush, yet he, too, saw that “his skill in building international coalitions or judiciously projecting American power did nothing to salvage his presidency.”
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Bill Clinton had a different problem. He was brimming full of ideas and had a lofty if somewhat abstract vision for America as the “indispensable nation.” In the 1990s, Clinton helped put American foreign policy on a steady course, accumulating so much military and economic might that some foreign leaders described the US as a “hyperpower.” Yet Clinton was frustrated that he had not brought enough Americans along: “I still don't think I've persuaded the American people by big majorities that you really ought to care about foreign policy, about our relationship to the rest of the world, about what we're doing,” he said in one of his last foreign policy speeches as president.
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George W. Bush and his team agreed. In the year 2000 they swept into office asserting that Clinton had failed because he had not defined a lasting doctrine for America in this new era. They, too, were seduced by simplicity—if the United States looked strong and acted forcefully, the world would follow and problems would come to a heel.