The Long Game (7 page)

Liberals see America as the “indispensable nation” and consider US leadership vital to solving problems. But they believe in the power generated by legitimacy, and maintain that treaties, alliances, and agreements are vital ingredients of influence. Such tools can also help create a shared set of norms to shape state behavior, widening the circle of the global order led by the United States.

Liberals are also more comfortable contemplating the limits of American power. Although critics belittle such talk as defeatism or underappreciating America's greatness, it is a reflection of reality in the changing global order. Bill Clinton said after his presidency that the “most important thing is to create a world we would like to live in when we are no longer the world's only superpower,” and to prepare “for a time when we would have to share the stage.”
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Every nation is limited by finite resources and competing demands. Even though the US has fewer limits than any other, it, too, can overextend. So the challenge is how to calibrate its approach.

T
HIS IS ALSO
an argument about how a country defines its strength. What does it mean to be strong? As he campaigned for president, Obama answered this in two ways.

First, Obama believed that being strong abroad started with being strong at home. To say that you could only concentrate on one or the
other was a false choice. When Obama came into office, he saw an America that few believed was strong at home—in the middle of a financial crisis, with education and health care systems that were in shambles, and a deeply polarized political system. With this trajectory, it was hard to argue that America was in a position to continue to lead in the twenty-first century. At that time, the country was far from the model that both liberals and conservatives claim it to be.

So what was needed was what Obama called “nation building at home.” This phrase provoked a torrent of criticism by many foreign policy thinkers who tend to think of domestic issues as detached from what makes America great in the world. But in fact, Obama thought they had it exactly wrong. If not strong at home, America would not be able to project its power abroad. It would not be respected abroad. It would not be the inspirational leader to so many around the world. America's inner strength is an indispensable part of its outer strength. As Peter Beinart observed, “if American power swells overseas but the quality of life for Americans deteriorates at home, then American foreign policy has failed.”
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Second, Obama believed that the way you measure strength is by actually being strong, not just boasting that you are strong. He had little tolerance for posturing. It was something that his closest aides said most frustrated him about the Washington scene. And as his presidency evolved, he was determined to expose those elements of the foreign policy debate he considered the most preening, where politicians and pundits proclaimed the need to be “strong” and “decisive” seemingly just for the sake of doing so, with little regard for what that actually meant in practice. Obama later observed that it was unwise “to indulge in either impetuous or, in some cases, manufactured responses that make good sound bites but don't produce results. The stakes are too high to play those games.”
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Therefore, the question is not whether America should lead, but how, and Obama favored Theodore Roosevelt's adage to speak softly
but carry a large stick. In
The Audacity of Hope,
Obama quotes Roosevelt with admiration, observing that the US “has not the option as to whether it will or will not play a great part in the world. It must play a great part. All that it can decide is whether it will play that part well or badly.”
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O
BAMA OFTEN RETURNED
to this critique about leadership and strength, and toward the end of his presidency he sought more opportunities to articulate it. One of his most forceful presentations was his September 2015 speech to the United Nations, where he made the provocative comparison about the similarities between the notion of strength championed by leaders like Vladimir Putin and that espoused by many of his Republican critics.

Conceding that the US is not “immune” from such thinking (he was referring to the GOP candidates for president, who were taking macho boasting about strength to new heights), Obama explained to the world's leaders that “we see in our debates about America's role in the world a notion of strength that is defined by opposition to old enemies, perceived adversaries, a rising China, or a resurgent Russia; a revolutionary Iran, or an Islam that is incompatible with peace. We see an argument made that the only strength that matters for the United States is bellicose words and shows of military force; that cooperation and diplomacy will not work.”

As Obama made clear, such thinking was a recipe for failure—not just for the United States, but for the global order. “A politics and solidarity that depend on demonizing others, that draws on religious sectarianism or narrow tribalism or jingoism may at times look like strength in the moment, but over time its weakness will be exposed,” Obama said. Speaking to his critics directly, Obama warned that “history tells us that the dark forces unleashed by this type of politics surely makes all of us less secure. Our world has been there before.”

Obama also took issue with how the Washington wisdom defined “strength.” He believed that too often, strength is explained as bold action with military might, and acting in the name of being “tough.” While he fully believed that military power was essential to the nation's defense, it could neither be the only instrument of influence nor the only pillar of “strength.”

Obama believed the foreign policy establishment prized the illusion more than the reality; it was too focused on demonstrating credibility for its own sake, regardless of the consequences. As the writer Jonathan Schell observed more than forty years ago—during the Nixon era, when the craze to show “strength” and “resolve” created Watergate and Vietnam—“what counted was not the substance of America's strength or the actual state of its willingness but the image of strength and willingness.”
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This kind of thinking led to grave mistakes. After all, when the United States had prevailed, it was because it had been patient and persistent in defense of its values at home and abroad, because it had maintained strong alliances, because it had sustained a vibrant domestic economy and an innovative, open society, and because it had wielded smart and principled leadership.

That's why Obama believed the country needed to embrace a different narrative of what it means to be “strong,” shifting its foreign policy paradigm from the “long war” to the Long Game.

B
Y LEADING
“
BADLY
,” the America of the first decade of the twenty-first century had failed Teddy Roosevelt's test. The country emerged from the post-9/11 years wildly out of balance, both at home and abroad. Policies justified in the name of being strong had in fact left America weak.

US foreign policy had become defined by war, yet the American people had not been enlisted to do much of anything. Americans were asked to live normally, to act as though nothing had happened, to shop. It was an era in which it seemed perfectly fine to conduct a
war without sacrifice, funding a global military campaign on “supplemental” budgets—the federal government's equivalent of a credit card without a limit—without any attempt to pay for it with new revenue. As the journalist George Packer explained, this “revealed the unreality that lay beneath [Bush's] call to arms…never was the mismatch between the idea of war and the war itself more apparent.”
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Domestically, there was a similar disconnect between scale and sacrifice—where, for example, it seemed reasonable for an individual to earn a modest income but still be able to purchase a million-dollar home with no money down.

To borrow from the author Michael Lewis, this was the era of the “big short,” in which the country was swept up by the fantasy of economic strength defined by easy money and no sacrifice. Just as a handful of traders benefitted by betting against the deep flaws in America's financial system due to the housing mortgage crisis, countries like China benefitted by shorting America's global power due to its economic mismanagement at home and overreach in Iraq. “Troubled asset” became the euphemism that defined America's 2008 financial crisis; the same phrase describes the instruments of US influence abroad when Obama assumed office. And importantly, two of America's most influential establishments—financial and foreign policy—were culpable.

By nearly every measure, the US in 2008 was a declining power, dangerously close to strategic insolvency. It was engaged in two wars with unsustainable budgets and a military force stretched to the breaking point. Its standing in the world was greatly diminished, with its core allies in Europe feeling more distant and its partners in Asia feeling ignored. In the fever of fear after 9/11, the US had pursued policies—like torturing enemy captives and opening the prison at Guantanamo Bay—that had undermined its ideals. The global chessboard was changing—with the rise of powers like China and India—and the US always seemed a step behind. On too many issues where common action was required—such as climate change or nuclear
weapons proliferation—the US had taken positions that only served to isolate itself.

At home, the very core of American power was decaying. The US was in a deep financial hole, driven there by a similar mindset of instant gratification and little accountability, and the very survival of entire sectors of the US economy—like banking and the automobile industry—was in question. Millions of Americans had been thrown out of work or lost their homes (or both), US education was faltering, and health care costs were skyrocketing. In 2008, the stock market lost one-third of its value; by Obama's inauguration, the US economy was shedding 800,000 jobs a month.

During the Clinton and Bush 43 years, the question had been not whether American power was dominant but what it would do with its might. For Obama, the future of American power was very much in question, and the priority was to save the country from itself. To do so required bold moves in both domestic and foreign policy—forging a grand strategy that would be a wholesale makeover of American power.

Y
ET THE FOREIGN
policy debate Obama inherited only made this task harder. The black-and-white, “with-us-or-against-us” mentality that came to define conservatism during the Bush administration, combined with an angry and insular political Left, provided very little space for common ground or common sense. The incentives driving the debate had become increasingly partisan, rewarding those who pushed hardest toward the extremes or provided the most enticing click bait.

This represented a “foreign policy breakdown.” In a book written over thirty years ago,
Our Own Worst Enemy,
three respected analyst-practitioners—Leslie Gelb, Anthony Lake, and I.M. Destler—warned of such a moment, in which a politicized foreign policy debate, amplified by an increasingly ravenous media, would combine to make it nearly impossible to fashion an approach to the world that
is coherent, consistent, and necessary to meet the challenges of the future. Their argument is worth dusting off, because the hallmarks of this breakdown are glaringly apparent today. By the end of the Obama presidency, the situation is worse.

Consider the attributes of the breakdown they described: “Political play acting is better rewarded than hard work; political speech-making passes as serious policy making.” At the same time, foreign policy debates “give more weight to ideological ‘certainties' rather than to the ambiguities of reality.” Foreign policy elites “help drive policy into domestic politics and push debates toward the extremes.” And perhaps most harmful, “tolerance and trust, the essential ingredients of a healthy democratic system, are always sought for oneself but rarely given to others.”

This sounds very similar to Obama's own perspective on what has coarsened our politics and made the debate simplistic: “The spin, the amplification of conflict, the indiscriminate search for scandal and miscues—the cumulative impact of all this is to erode any agreed-upon standards for judging the truth,” he wrote in
The Audacity of Hope.
This is even more challenging as the public discourse becomes hypercharged, with nuanced commentary becoming like white noise.
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The result is a debate that undermines strategy, making it harder for leaders to design and sustain their policies, sabotaging American power and influence just when it is most required. Again, the words of Gelb, Lake, and Destler ring true. “At precisely the moment when we need to husband our strength and use it more efficiently; at a time when there is no choice but involvement in world affairs; in an era when others look to us for maturity and sophistication in dealing with international problems of growing complexity…at that moment we are taken less seriously.”
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It is for this reason Obama believes in the imperative of defying this breakdown. “[F]or me to satisfy the cable news hype-fest would lead to us making worse and worse decisions over time,” Obama
recently observed.
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When considering America's role in the world, he has sought to bring back a sense of proportion between ends and means; to uphold principle, but to usher a return to pragmatism. He believes that while the US cannot solve every problem on its own, it is uniquely able to bring countries together and set the agenda. Most importantly, Obama has wanted to correct what he saw as the collective irresponsibility of the political system—elites, media, politicians, activists, and donors—that he articulated in his 2007 DePaul speech.

Obama maintains deep optimism about America's global role as a force for good, and in the strength and wisdom of the American people. But he believes that too often, the political debate stands in the way. Such an atomized policy and media environment makes it more difficult to think strategically, let alone maintain the focus and discipline necessary to implement a strategy.