Obama’s Second Term: Dead Already or Strategic Awareness? May 9, 2013—Huffington Post Is Barack Obama already a lame duck president?
proliferation; Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Change by David Orr; The Freedom Agenda by James Taub on US foreign policy and democracy promotion; and No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest and the Coming Global Turn by Charles Kupchan on exercising US power in an increasingly multipolar world.
I hope not. It wouldn’t be good for the country, and it would certainly disappoint my students who have written policy memos for his second term. I’ve just finished teaching a seminar at Occidental on American Grand Strategy (which a few of my friends critical of Obama view as an Oxymoron). I challenged the students to think beyond the obvious issues of the day—the crisis in Syria, gun control legislation, immigration reform, implementation of the health care law—and focus their critical thinking on other challenges which might be game changers in national or global policy.
I asked James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic, to brief students on the politics of presidential second terms, and to offer his analysis of the Obama White House. They then set out to “advise” Obama on how he might make significant political progress in the face of a hostile and recalcitrant Republican opposition and a divided Congress. The students understood that in coming to power in 2008 Obama had inherited two wars and a global financial meltdown from George Bush, and that the lingering effects of that inheritance are still keenly felt at home and abroad. It became clear to the students that while Presidents can make history, they don’t do so in circumstances of their own choosing. I asked them to push the envelope of the possible without being unrealistic or Pollyannish—to suggest ways in which Obama might use out of the box thinking and creative political framing to make significant change in his second four years.
We began the course by reading Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, a report prepared by the National Intelligence Council, and moved on to the strategic outlook provided by the Atlantic Council’s report, Envisioning 2030: US Strategy for a Post-Western World, and then to the Brookings Institution’s Presidential Briefing Book: Big Bets and Black Swans: Policy Recommendations for President Obama’s Second Term. I also assigned Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power by Zbigniew Brzezinski. The author of the Atlantic Council report, Banning Garrett from the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, spent an afternoon with the students to discuss global trends and how the Obama administration is responding.
Overall, they did a good job. One team looked at the nuclear issue and fraught US relations with Russia and came up with a proposal for Smart START—a strategy for reducing nonstrategic nuclear weapons and eliminating ‘hair trigger’ nuclear alerts. Given the recent thaw between Putin and Obama on terrorism because of the tragic events in
Next, I had them study big topics, reading: How The World Ends: The Road to Nuclear World War III by Ron Rosenbaum on nuclear !145