The Long Game (6 page)

I
N THE IMMEDIATE
aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it seemed that conservative foreign policy was ascendant. Despite the Clinton administration leaving the White House with an impressive record of foreign policy accomplishments—boosting free trade, enlarging NATO, making progress in the Middle East peace process, bringing peace to the Balkans—Democrats still found themselves saddled in the 2000s with the reputation of weakness. George W. Bush had run for office belittling Clinton's leadership for being both arrogant and feeble, and he had surrounded himself with widely-recognized foreign policy heavyweights such as Dick Cheney and Colin Powell.

The Bush team exuded confidence and certainty, and while it may seem hard to remember now, at the time most Americans thought that they had good reason to do so. Because of their association with the Cold War's end, these Republicans had a mystique that even Democrats admired. They conceived of themselves as the professionals who had defeated the Soviet Union and believed they needed to bring back decorum in Washington after the tumultuous Clinton years. Their sense of purpose—and self-regard for their own hype, which was widely shared in Washington's power corridors—was summed up by the slogan Cheney used on the 2000 campaign trail: “Help is on the way.” They wanted to restore America's role in the world to the grand imperative that had defined the Cold War.
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Yet by the time George W. Bush left office, America faced a deep crisis at home and around the world—the worst it had faced since the 1940s, when crippled by the Great Depression and World War II. After eight years in power, conservatives were in disarray on foreign and economic policy.

Some of this was due to the Bush team's mismanagement of crises both at home (the response to Hurricane Katrina and the American economy's near collapse) and overseas (the Iraq War), which tarnished their brand as clear-eyed, competent guardians of national
security. In Bush's wake, the Iraq-era conservative generation—like the Vietnam-era liberal “best and the brightest” generation of the 1960s—was widely discredited. Their image of competence was shattered and their ideas challenged.
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The implosion of the Bush foreign policy had also exposed the divisions among conservatives that had been masked in the immediate post-9/11 years, when a new sense of threat from Islamic extremism had unified the right. But by the 2008 election that consensus had broken.

A symbol of this collapse was Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama for president in 2008. When explaining his reasons for doing so, Powell offered a rationale that would become a hallmark of Obama's foreign policy decision-making: Obama, he said, demonstrated “the kind of calm, patient, intellectual, steady approach to problem-solving that I think we need in this country.”
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Powell's support for Obama was important politically, but it highlighted a larger divide that still riddles Republicans. Powell represents a strain of foreign policy thinking that was once dominant, but is now far out of fashion. This school is represented by the elder Bush, who, while believing deeply in American leadership, hoped the US could exercise its influence through global institutions like the UN that had been hobbled by the Cold War's divisions. “Bush 41” and his core team cared about legitimacy and believed it had to be earned, and they reasoned that working through institutions was a key way of doing so. And while they kept faith in the strong use of American power—and when necessary, the unilateral use of force—they also valued restraint.

One of history's ironies is how the instincts of the first George Bush were rejected by the second—and, significantly, it is Bush 43's worldview and conception of American power that became the center of gravity for conservative foreign policy (judging from the 2016 Republican presidential campaign, more accurately it is the Cheney
worldview, which was the most hawkish, nationalist, and extreme version of Bush 43's approach). George W. Bush and his team were less worried about generating legitimacy. Their understanding of American exceptionalism was a little like papal infallibility or Richard Nixon's understanding of presidential power: if we do it, it must be right.

T
HE ASCENDANCE OF
the Bush/Cheney foreign policy was a key impetus behind Obama's rise. Like many Americans, Obama recalls how in the wake of 9/11 he expected the Bush administration to lead by forging a new kind of approach to use America's special strengths and attractive power to build a new international consensus against global threats. Instead, Obama observed, “What we got was an assortment of outdated policies from eras gone by, dusted off, slapped together, and with new labels affixed.” But most concerning to Obama, “the Bush administration resuscitated a brand of politics not seen since the end of the Cold War.”
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For a time, this kind of politics worked as liberals floundered. The 2004 presidential campaign illustrated the dilemmas that Democrats faced. Even though the Iraq War was not going well, national security ultimately proved Democrats' political undoing. The proximate reason was the support most Democrats had given to Bush's decision to launch the Iraq War, which effectively neutralized the issue politically by making it harder to criticize (John Kerry's unfortunate argument that “I voted for it before I voted against it” exemplified the contortions the issue generated). Moreover, there was still a sense within progressive circles that national security could not be a “winning” issue politically. Inside the Kerry campaign, there were constant discussions about how soon they could drop the topic of foreign policy and switch to domestic issues that they believed would win the election.

One lesson Democrats drew was that to be politically successful in a time of war, they needed to look “strong” and “tough,” and so Kerry made his military service in Vietnam a central part of his
candidacy. Yet that experience proved his undoing, as the successful efforts by the Bush campaign to undermine the credibility of Kerry's war record became a large part of his failure as a candidate. Instead, the one person who emerged from the 2004 campaign as a star was then a little known Senate candidate from Illinois, who famously delivered the keynote address at the Democratic Convention in Boston, arguing that “war must be an option sometimes, but it should never be the first option.”

The painful 2004 loss established the foundation for Democrats' rebirth on national security, as progressives were determined to regain their footing on these issues. Most of this happened behind the scenes, under the helpful camouflage of the Bush administration's foreign policy which was self-destructing by the day. Democrats had studied the efforts of conservatives in the 1970s and 80s to build an infrastructure of expertise and policy advocacy that could help build consensus around their efforts, and in the four years after the 2004, progressive national security experts and leaders met and plotted their way out of the wilderness.

They formed study groups and established new organizations to help carry this message forward and create a new generation of leaders, such as the Truman National Security Project, which was established in the days after the 2004 presidential campaign to help build a young generation of Democratic national security leaders, purposely harkening back to the strong Democratic foreign policy hands like those who had served under Presidents Truman and Kennedy, and think tanks like the Center for American Progress and the Center for a New American Security.
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A key part of these efforts was to strengthen the ties of Democrats with the military. Despite the eight years of a Clinton presidency and a largely successful civil-military relationship that had developed over those years, Democrats were still tarnished with the sense that there was an inherent divide between them and the
military. Part of this was cultural—with roots in the Vietnam era—but it also stemmed from the ambivalence many Democrats still had about the use of force, and that view was newly visible.

O
UTSIDE
W
ASHINGTON
'
S FOREIGN
policy elite, there was a larger struggle going on within the Democratic Party, a ferment created by a new class of activists and donors. There were many who discerned from the 2004 election the opposite of what Washington national security experts and politicians had concluded. They believed that the problem for Democrats was that they were too much like Republicans, and that rather than try to remake themselves, Democrats needed to return to a purer form of liberalism. They asserted that by supporting the Iraq War—and by not advocating for defunding the effort and for the immediate withdrawal of American troops—Democrats themselves were culpable in the failures of the Bush years.

This battle was principally about Iraq, but it had actually started years before. The convulsions within liberalism began in the late 1990s, illustrated by the rise of the anti-globalization movement and division over the military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo and the 1998 air strikes against Iraq. They only became more severe and divisive in the post 9/11 years.

Such tumult reflected the pain of the contested 2000 and 2004 election losses and deep anger with George W. Bush. But it was more than that. When it came to national security issues, liberals had become divided in a way not seen since the 1970s, when Vietnam had split the Democratic Party and sparked a reaction, pitting the “new Left” against the liberal establishment. A similar dynamic unfolded in the 2000s, as a new generation of internet-fueled liberal activists (call it the “new-new-Left”) raged not just against Bush, but against the Democratic establishment in Washington.
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At the forefront of this were groups like
MoveOn.org
, which pressed relentlessly for the
Democratic Party to take a stronger stance against the Iraq War. When combined with a conservative movement that was itself splintering and a media culture that was becoming more partisan, instant, and atomized, the result was a more embittered and chaotic policymaking environment.

These internecine battles got ugly. Nothing demonstrated that more vividly than the fate of Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman. A respected Democratic senator for eighteen years, and Al Gore's vice-presidential running mate in 2000, Lieberman was a foreign policy hawk, who had advocated for intervention in the Balkans and getting tough on Iraq. Lieberman was just a few Florida votes away from being vice president of the United States, and ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. Yet by 2007, Lieberman had become a pariah among the “new-new-Left.” He lost a primary election to an antiwar candidate who was bolstered by outside money, and returned to the Senate as an Independent. In 2008, he endorsed and actively campaigned for John McCain for president against Obama.
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This political fratricide sent shockwaves among Democratic foreign policy elites. To the extent that Clinton's presidency had exorcised the ghosts of McGovern—allowing progressives to be comfortable with American leadership, power, and intervention—the new debate seemed to reopen old wounds.

B
ARACK
O
BAMA
'
S VOCAL
stance against the Iraq War gave him legitimacy among this new cadre of liberal activists and donors. But he was not some bleeding heart. Obama made clear he was not against all wars, only “dumb ones.” He argued that while the top concerns of many of these liberals (like withdrawing from Iraq or fighting AIDS) had merit, “they hardly constitute a coherent national security policy…like it or not, if we want to make America more secure, we are going to have to help make the world more secure.”
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Moreover, Obama relied a great deal on those Democratic thinkers and ideas that were the product of the efforts to get stronger on national security after the 2004 election. So, in a way, Obama embodied the hopes and ambitions of both sides. He also embodied their contradictions.

WHAT DOES “STRENGTH” MEAN?

While Obama campaigned for the presidency by positioning himself against the professional foreign policy elite, his approach to foreign policy reflected the views of mainstream progressives, especially as they contrasted with conservatives. Obama might have vigorously campaigned against Hillary Clinton, but in fundamental ways, he embraced the consensus that mainstream Democrats had rallied around after her husband left office.

Many of the policies that progressive foreign policy thinkers had championed and developed in the 2000s—responsibly managing the transitions out of Iraq and Afghanistan; bringing new focus to the war against al-Qaeda; maintaining military strength and willingness to use force while achieving greater balance between defense, diplomacy, and development; revitalizing core alliances, especially in Europe; addressing issues like energy security, climate change, and nuclear non-proliferation; putting greater emphasis on the US role in the Asia-Pacific—became the core of Obama's foreign policy.

In a broader sense, these policies reflect fundamentally different worldviews between liberals and conservatives. For example, the liberal consensus sees the world as “us and them,” where nations' fates are linked and therefore they have to work together to address common problems, while conservatives see things in more antagonistic terms, as “us versus them,” in which the US stands apart. Conservatives believe that what is good for the US is good for the
world, while liberals believe that what is good for the world is good for the US.
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Conservatives prioritize freedom of action, which helps explain their obsessive focus on issues like missile defense and suspicions of international institutions and law. They prize the idea that an America protected cannot be blackmailed. This also fits within a larger strategy: to ensure invulnerability, the US needs to shed any artificial constraints on protecting the country's interests, whether treaties or agreements or institutions, that could hinder its ability to act unilaterally.