Engaging the World: On Barack Obama's Presidency

FACES CONSTANCY AND CHANGE IN

OF

Constancy and

UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY

POWER FROM TRUMAN TO OBAMA

SEYOM BROWN T H I R D E D I T IO N

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ENGAGING THE WORLD To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

—Barack Obama

AKING OFFICE ON JANUARY 20, 2009, President Barack Hussein Obama inherited a slew of international political crises that intruded upon the incoming administration’s frantic efforts to deal with a domestic and international economic crisis more serious than anything experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The international political challenges handed off to him by President Bush included: the unfinished and still precarious military and political stabilization of Iraq; a scary recrudescence of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan; brink of war tensions between India and Pakistan; escalating violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians; the defiance by Iran and North Korea of international community demands that they dismantle nuclear facilities that could fuel nuclear weapons programs; Russia’s continuing occupation and political absorption of the two Georgian provinces that it had invaded during the summer’s mutual provocation by Tbilisi and Moscow; the genocidal slaughter in the Darfur region of the Sudan; drug-related violence in Mexico, and U.S. immigration policies—to mention some of the situations most covered by the media. Then too there were the secret intelligence reports the White House was receiving daily on new terrorist plots, many of them apparently masterminded by Osama bin Laden from an al-Qaeda

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command center somewhere in Pakistan. Not much room for fashioning anything like an “Obama Doctrine.”

During the previous summer and fall, as his campaign for the presidency went into high gear, Obama gave few indications of how the “change” he insistently called for would be expressed in U.S. foreign policy in any fundamental way, other than promising to work more with allies and through multilateral institutions, in contrast to Bush’s alleged unilateralism, and pledging to vigorously pursue arms control and disarmament agreements with the goal of eventually achieving a world free of nuclear weapons.1 The closer he got to the electoral finish line, however, the less he featured the common humanity/one world concepts prominent earlier in his campaign.

The principal difference on foreign policy Obama could establish between himself and his main rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and then his opponent in the general election, Senator John McCain, was over whether and when he would negotiate with declared enemies of the United States—particularly with Iran or North Korea or with extremist movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Taliban. Adapting President Kennedy’s orientation—never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate—Obama opined it was better to engage your opponents than to isolate them, even if only to confront them with the clearest picture of your own vital interests and priorities.

Such diplomacy would not mean abandoning the country’s commitment to human rights. He was not adopting the amoral realpolitik philosophy that how governments treat the people in their jurisdictions should be of no concern to outsiders. Rather, as the new president put it in the mostquoted phrase from his inaugural address: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”2 Indeed, the emphasis on a diplomacy of engagement with the country’s adversaries, not just its allies, was for the first weeks of the new administration just about the only grand-strategy concept the president and his newly assembled foreign policy team were able to articulate to sustain an image of change. And in actuality, the Bush administration in its last year and a half, reflecting the pragmatic realism of Robert Gates, Donald Rumsfeld’s successor as secretary of defense, had itself moved considerably in this direction—to the chagrin of Vice President Dick Cheney and the coterie of neoconservatives at the sub-cabinet level, many of whom resigned well before the November election.

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There were reaffirmations from the top levels of the incoming administration of plans to substantially withdraw U.S. combat forces from Iraq in the summer of 2009 and to increase U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan even before the completion of a sixty-day review of Afghanistan policy ordered by the new president. But these actions too were carryovers from decisions made in the last few months of the Bush administration and hardly reflected a fundamental change in grand strategy.

Some of the inherited problems did appear to demand bold departures from the way they had been handled by the departing administration.

There were new and alarming reports about the pace of global warming and the need to act urgently to avoid its very costly and irreversible consequences. Obama’s campaign speeches had been full of promises to exercise determined leadership domestically and internationally to forge a vigorous response to the threat. He had also promised that from day one of his presidency he would act to reverse the infringement of civil liberties and legal due process the previous administration had instituted in the name of fighting the war on terror.

In the realm of domestic economics, the collapse of credit markets and major financial institutions pushed the new administration to rapidly and massively intervene in the economy to prevent the 2008–2009 recession from spiraling into a full-blown depression. But in the realm of foreign policy and national security policy, President Obama’s “first hundred days” (pundits kept invoking the analogy of FDR’s period of emergency responses in early 1933 to the ongoing depression) featured less drama and more cautious scripting. His retention of Secretary of Defense Gates was emblematic of this approach, as was his appointment of General James Jones (formerly supreme allied commander Europe) to be his national security advisor. Hillary Clinton at State would be a strong and visible presence but on the basis of her record on the Senate Armed Services Committee, a no-nonsense realist. Susan Rice, often described as Obama’s top foreign policy adviser during the election campaign and very much a Wilsonian liberal, was deployed to New York as ambassador to the United Nations where, despite her formal status as a member of Obama’s cabinet, she would be more of a policy implementer than formulator. It soon became obvious to insiders, however, that Obama’s closest advisers on foreign policy, more often than not, were the younger second-tier officials Obama brought to the National Security Council—Mark Lippert, Denis McDonough, Benjamin Rhodes, and Samantha Power—with whom he had felt most comfortable during his election campaign.3

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Seven weeks into the new administration, David Axelrod, the president’s senior White House adviser, explained the absence of a definable Obama Doctrine: “He’s not an ideologue. . . . He’s a pragmatist. He’s someone who’s interested in ideas that will work. Some may have their roots in one doctrine, some may have their roots in another. But he’s not concerned with that. He’s less concerned with how he’s described than [with] what he can accomplish.”4 The White House appeared content for the time being to let the terms “pragmatist,” “realist,” “pragmatic realist” carry the burden of distinguishing the Obama foreign policy from the neoconservative ideological thrust of Bush’s foreign policy. On issue after issue—the tension between counterterrorism policies and civil liberties, Russian muscle flexing toward Georgia and Ukraine, Chinese human rights violations, Iranian and North Korean flouting of UN resolutions concerning their nuclear programs, escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, genocidal killings in Darfur, piracy off the Somalian coast, and of course, the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan—the claim of pragmatism provided the rationale for proceeding step by step, fashioning compromises, and effecting trade-offs among often competing national interest imperatives.

The nickname “no-drama Obama,” which had surfaced during the election campaign to characterize the disciplined cooperation among his staff and advisers, now appeared to be a description of the substance of his foreign policy as well as the process. But perhaps displeased by the characterizations of his actions in the international arena as nothing other than a cool and cautious pragmatism, lacking any compelling “vision,” the president in late spring and early summer of 2009 moved to seize the high ground. In a set of soaring speeches delivered abroad, he embedded the strategy of engagement in expressions of deep empathy for the trials and tribulations of others—Muslims, Russians, Africans—and clarion calls for a transformative enhancement of multilateral approaches and institutions for dealing with humanity’s common problems.

This, the idealistic face of Obama’s basic policy of engagement, with adversaries as well as allies, was one of openness and inclusiveness— working toward a world community in which disputes are resolved on the basis of bargaining and adjudication and moral suasion rather than through violent encounters. The policy’s realistic face, however— cognizant of the prevalence of ideological and religious fanaticism and interethnic hostility, of uncompromising aggressiveness in territorial conflicts, of belligerent governments whipping up nationalistic support

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for war—would convey a readiness to rely on sticks as well as carrots in the conduct of U.S. diplomacy.

These were not new worldviews for Obama, only dawning on him now from the perspective of the presidency. Back in 2007, New York Times columnist David Brooks, having been impressed by similar realistic statements in Obama’s writings, asked the senator if he had ever read Reinhold Niebuhr. “I love him.” Obama responded. “He’s one of my favorite philosophers.” And he went on to endorse what he said was Niebuhr’s “compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate such things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away [from reading Niebuhr] . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing that they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”5 Niebuhr could have been on his mind again in the fall of 2009 during those agonizing days of deciding among competing strategies for prosecuting the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. In the midst of these deliberations he had to compose the address he would give on December 10 in Oslo accepting the Nobel Peace Prize—a prize that he conceded, in response to many critics, was premature in that his work for peace was still aspirational and as yet without substantial accomplishment. Moreover, he was about to order a major intensification of the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. “Perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize,” he granted to the gathering in Norway, “is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. . . . And so I come here . . . filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.” He asked the assemblage and the worldwide television audience to acknowledge “ the hard truth,” which he went on to describe in Niebuhrian terms: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago. “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem. It merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is

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nothing weak—nothing passive—nothing naïve—in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

But Obama would not leave it at that. Like Niebuhr, he insisted that “We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of depravation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.”6

A “NEW BEGINNING” WITH ISLAM Addressing a predominantly Muslim audience at Cairo University on June 4, 2009, President Obama had called for “a new beginning, based on mutual respect, a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other,” and the belief that “the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.”

When a financial system weakens in one country, prosperity is hurt everywhere. When a new flu infects one human being, all are at risk. When one nation pursues a nuclear weapon, the risk of nuclear attack rises for all nations. When violent extremists operate in one stretch of mountain, peoples are endangered across the ocean. When innocents in Bosnia and Darfur are slaughtered, that is a stain on our collective conscience. That is what it means to share this world in the 21st century. That is the responsibility we have to one another as human beings.

And this is a difficult responsibility to embrace. For human history has often been a record of nations and tribes—and, yes, religions, subjugating one another in pursuit of their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably