Friday, August 30, 2013,
the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s
reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively,
the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss
and stepped back from the consuming void—began with a thundering speech
given on Obama’s behalf by his secretary of state, John Kerry, in
Washington, D.C. The subject of Kerry’s uncharacteristically
Churchillian remarks, delivered in the Treaty Room at the State
Department, was the gassing of civilians by the president of Syria,
Bashar al-Assad.
Obama, in whose Cabinet Kerry serves faithfully, but
with some exasperation, is himself given to vaulting oratory, but not
usually of the martial sort associated with Churchill. Obama believes
that the Manichaeanism, and eloquently rendered bellicosity, commonly
associated with Churchill were justified by Hitler’s rise, and were at
times defensible in the struggle against the Soviet Union. But he also
thinks rhetoric should be weaponized sparingly, if at all, in today’s
more ambiguous and complicated international arena. The president
believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian
habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to
ruinous war in Iraq. Obama entered the White House bent on getting out
of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he
was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed
to be unwinnable. “If you were to say, for instance, that we’re going to
rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy
instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is
going to hold you to that promise,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy
national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me
not long ago.
But Kerry’s rousing remarks on that August day,
which had been drafted in part by Rhodes, were threaded with righteous
anger and bold promises, including the barely concealed threat of
imminent attack. Kerry, like Obama himself, was horrified by the sins
committed by the Syrian regime in its attempt to put down a two-year-old
rebellion. In the Damascus suburb of Ghouta nine days earlier, Assad’s
army had murdered more than 1,400 civilians with sarin gas. The strong
sentiment inside the Obama administration was that Assad had earned dire
punishment. In Situation Room meetings that followed the attack on
Ghouta, only the White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, cautioned
explicitly about the perils of intervention. John Kerry argued
vociferously for action.
Kerry counted President Obama among those leaders. A year earlier,
when the administration suspected that the Assad regime was
contemplating the use of chemical weapons, Obama had declared: “We have
been very clear to the Assad regime … that a red line for us is we start
seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being
utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”
Despite
this threat, Obama seemed to many critics to be coldly detached from
the suffering of innocent Syrians. Late in the summer of 2011, he had
called for Assad’s departure. “For the sake of the Syrian people,” Obama
said, “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” But Obama
initially did little to bring about Assad’s end.
He resisted
demands to act in part because he assumed, based on the analysis of U.S.
intelligence, that Assad would fall without his help. “He thought Assad
would go the way Mubarak went,” Dennis Ross, a former Middle East
adviser to Obama, told me, referring to the quick departure of Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak in early 2011, a moment that represented the
acme of the Arab Spring. But as Assad clung to power, Obama’s resistance
to direct intervention only grew. After several months of deliberation,
he authorized the CIA to train and fund Syrian rebels, but he also
shared the outlook of his former defense secretary, Robert Gates, who
had routinely asked in meetings, “Shouldn’t we finish up the two wars we
have before we look for another?”
The current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha
Power, who is the most dispositionally interventionist among Obama’s
senior advisers, had argued early for arming Syria’s rebels. Power, who
during this period served on the National Security Council staff, is the
author of a celebrated book excoriating a succession of U.S. presidents
for their failures to prevent genocide. The book, A Problem From Hell,
published in 2002, drew Obama to Power while he was in the U.S. Senate,
though the two were not an obvious ideological match. Power is a
partisan of the doctrine known as “responsibility to protect,” which
holds that sovereignty should not be considered inviolate when a country
is slaughtering its own citizens. She lobbied him to endorse this
doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace
Prize in 2009, but he declined. Obama generally does not believe a
president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to
prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct
security threat to the United States.
Power sometimes argued with Obama in front of other National Security
Council officials, to the point where he could no longer conceal his
frustration. “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he once
snapped.
Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told me). Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square. As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft.
Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told me). Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square. As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft.
At the outset of the Syrian uprising, in early 2011,
Power argued that the rebels, drawn from the ranks of ordinary citizens,
deserved America’s enthusiastic support. Others noted that the rebels
were farmers and doctors and carpenters, comparing these revolutionaries
to the men who won America’s war for independence.
Obama flipped this plea on its head. “When you have a
professional army,” he once told me, “that is well armed and sponsored
by two large states”—Iran and Russia—“who have huge stakes in this, and
they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started
out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a
civil conflict …” He paused. “The notion that we could have—in a clean
way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces—changed the equation on the
ground there was never true.” The message Obama telegraphed in speeches
and interviews was clear: He would not end up like the second President
Bush—a president who became tragically overextended in the Middle East,
whose decisions filled the wards of Walter Reed with grievously wounded
soldiers, who was helpless to stop the obliteration of his reputation,
even when he recalibrated his policies in his second term. Obama would
say privately that the first task of an American president in the
post-Bush international arena was “Don’t do stupid shit.”
Obama’s reticence frustrated Power and others on his national-security
team who had a preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she was
Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response
to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me
that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the
people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a
big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic
published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that
“great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’
is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,”
according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not
understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a
controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were
asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit
caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’ ” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed,
should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had
voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton
quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman
announced that the two would “hug it out” on Martha’s Vineyard when they
crossed paths there later.)
Syria, for Obama, represented a slope potentially as slippery as Iraq.
In his first term, he came to believe that only a handful of threats in
the Middle East conceivably warranted direct U.S. military intervention.
These included the threat posed by al‑Qaeda; threats to the continued
existence of Israel (“It would be a moral failing for me as president of
the United States” not to defend Israel, he once told me); and, not
unrelated to Israel’s security, the threat posed by a nuclear-armed
Iran. The danger to the United States posed by the Assad regime did not
rise to the level of these challenges.
Given Obama’s reticence about
intervention, the bright-red line he drew for Assad in the summer of
2012 was striking. Even his own advisers were surprised. “I didn’t know
it was coming,” his secretary of defense at the time, Leon Panetta, told
me. I was told that Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly warned Obama
against drawing a red line on chemical weapons, fearing that it would
one day have to be enforced.
Kerry, in his remarks on August 30, 2013, suggested that
Assad should be punished in part because the “credibility and the future
interests of the United States of America and our allies” were at
stake. “It is directly related to our credibility and whether countries
still believe the United States when it says something. They are
watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they
too can put the world at greater risk.”
Ninety minutes later, at
the White House, Obama reinforced Kerry’s message in a public statement:
“It’s important for us to recognize that when over 1,000 people are
killed, including hundreds of innocent children, through the use of a
weapon that 98 or 99 percent of humanity says should not be used even in
war, and there is no action, then we’re sending a signal that that
international norm doesn’t mean much. And that is a danger to our
national security.”
It appeared as though Obama had drawn the
conclusion that damage to American credibility in one region of the
world would bleed into others, and that U.S. deterrent credibility was
indeed at stake in Syria. Assad, it seemed, had succeeded in pushing the
president to a place he never thought he would have to go. Obama
generally believes that the Washington foreign-policy establishment,
which he secretly disdains, makes a fetish of “credibility”—particularly
the sort of credibility purchased with force. The preservation of
credibility, he says, led to Vietnam. Within the White House, Obama
would argue that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing
to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.”
American national-security
credibility, as it is conventionally understood in the Pentagon, the
State Department, and the cluster of think tanks headquartered within
walking distance of the White House, is an intangible yet potent
force—one that, when properly nurtured, keeps America’s friends feeling
secure and keeps the international order stable.
In White House
meetings that crucial week in August, Biden, who ordinarily shared
Obama’s worries about American overreach, argued passionately that “big
nations don’t bluff.” America’s closest allies in Europe and across the
Middle East believed Obama was threatening military action, and his own
advisers did as well. At a joint press conference with Obama at the
White House the previous May, David Cameron, the British prime minister,
had said, “Syria’s history is being written in the blood of her people,
and it is happening on our watch.” Cameron’s statement, one of his
advisers told me, was meant to encourage Obama toward more-decisive
action. “The prime minister was certainly under the impression that the
president would enforce the red line,” the adviser told me. The Saudi
ambassador in Washington at the time, Adel al-Jubeir, told friends, and
his superiors in Riyadh, that the president was finally ready to strike.
Obama “figured out how important this is,” Jubeir, who is now the Saudi
foreign minister, told one interlocutor. “He will definitely strike.”
Obama
had already ordered the Pentagon to develop target lists. Five Arleigh
Burke–class destroyers were in the Mediterranean, ready to fire cruise
missiles at regime targets. French President François Hollande, the most
enthusiastically pro-intervention among Europe’s leaders, was preparing
to strike as well. All week, White House officials had publicly built
the case that Assad had committed a crime against humanity. Kerry’s
speech would mark the culmination of this campaign.
But the
president had grown queasy. In the days after the gassing of Ghouta,
Obama would later tell me, he found himself recoiling from the idea of
an attack unsanctioned by international law or by Congress. The American
people seemed unenthusiastic about a Syria intervention; so too did one
of the few foreign leaders Obama respects, Angela Merkel, the German
chancellor. She told him that her country would not participate in a
Syria campaign. And in a stunning development, on Thursday, August 29,
the British Parliament denied David Cameron its blessing for an attack.
John Kerry later told me that when he heard that, “internally, I went, Oops.”
Obama was also unsettled by a
surprise visit early in the week from James Clapper, his director of
national intelligence, who interrupted the President’s Daily Brief, the
threat report Obama receives each morning from Clapper’s analysts, to
make clear that the intelligence on Syria’s use of sarin gas, while
robust, was not a “slam dunk.” He chose the term carefully. Clapper, the
chief of an intelligence community traumatized by its failures in the
run-up to the Iraq War, was not going to overpromise, in the manner of
the onetime CIA director George Tenet, who famously guaranteed George W.
Bush a “slam dunk” in Iraq.
While
the Pentagon and the White House’s national-security apparatuses were
still moving toward war (John Kerry told me he was expecting a strike
the day after his speech), the president had come to believe that he was
walking into a trap—one laid both by allies and by adversaries, and by
conventional expectations of what an American president is supposed to
do.
Many of his advisers did not grasp the depth of the
president’s misgivings; his Cabinet and his allies were certainly
unaware of them. But his doubts were growing. Late on Friday afternoon,
Obama determined that he was simply not prepared to authorize a strike.
He asked McDonough, his chief of staff, to take a walk with him on the
South Lawn of the White House. Obama did not choose McDonough randomly:
He is the Obama aide most averse to U.S. military intervention, and
someone who, in the words of one of his colleagues, “thinks in terms of
traps.” Obama, ordinarily a preternaturally confident man, was looking
for validation, and trying to devise ways to explain his change of
heart, both to his own aides and to the public. He and McDonough stayed
outside for an hour. Obama told him he was worried that Assad would
place civilians as “human shields” around obvious targets. He also
pointed out an underlying flaw in the proposed strike: U.S. missiles
would not be fired at chemical-weapons depots, for fear of sending
plumes of poison into the air. A strike would target military units that
had delivered these weapons, but not the weapons themselves.
Obama also shared with McDonough a
long-standing resentment: He was tired of watching Washington
unthinkingly drift toward war in Muslim countries. Four years earlier,
the president believed, the Pentagon had “jammed” him on a troop surge
for Afghanistan. Now, on Syria, he was beginning to feel jammed again.
When
the two men came back to the Oval Office, the president told his
national-security aides that he planned to stand down. There would be no
attack the next day; he wanted to refer the matter to Congress for a
vote. Aides in the room were shocked. Susan Rice, now Obama’s
national-security adviser, argued that the damage to America’s
credibility would be serious and lasting. Others had difficulty
fathoming how the president could reverse himself the day before a
planned strike. Obama, however, was completely calm. “If you’ve been
around him, you know when he’s ambivalent about something, when it’s a
51–49 decision,” Ben Rhodes told me. “But he was completely at ease.”
Not
long ago, I asked Obama to describe his thinking on that day. He listed
the practical worries that had preoccupied him. “We had UN inspectors
on the ground who were completing their work, and we could not risk
taking a shot while they were there. A second major factor was the
failure of Cameron to obtain the consent of his parliament.”
The
third, and most important, factor, he told me, was “our assessment that
while we could inflict some damage on Assad, we could not, through a
missile strike, eliminate the chemical weapons themselves, and what I
would then face was the prospect of Assad having survived the strike and
claiming he had successfully defied the United States, that the United
States had acted unlawfully in the absence of a UN mandate, and that
that would have potentially strengthened his hand rather than weakened
it.”
The fourth factor, he said, was of deeper philosophical
importance. “This falls in the category of something that I had been
brooding on for some time,” he said. “I had come into office with the
strong belief that the scope of executive power in national-security
issues is very broad, but not limitless.”
Obama knew his decision not to bomb
Syria would likely upset America’s allies. It did. The prime minister of
France, Manuel Valls, told me that his government was already worried
about the consequences of earlier inaction in Syria when word came of
the stand-down. “By not intervening early, we have created a monster,”
Valls told me. “We were absolutely certain that the U.S. administration
would say yes. Working with the Americans, we had already seen the
targets. It was a great surprise. If we had bombed as was planned, I
think things would be different today.” The crown prince of Abu Dhabi,
Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who was already upset with Obama for
“abandoning” Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt, fumed to
American visitors that the U.S. was led by an “untrustworthy” president.
The king of Jordan, Abdullah II—already dismayed by what he saw as
Obama’s illogical desire to distance the U.S. from its traditional Sunni
Arab allies and create a new alliance with Iran, Assad’s Shia
sponsor—complained privately, “I think I believe in American power more
than Obama does.” The Saudis, too, were infuriated. They had never
trusted Obama—he had, long before he became president, referred to them
as a “so-called ally” of the U.S. “Iran is the new great power of the
Middle East, and the U.S. is the old,” Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador in
Washington, told his superiors in Riyadh.
Obama’s decision caused
tremors across Washington as well. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the
two leading Republican hawks in the Senate, had met with Obama in the
White House earlier in the week and had been promised an attack. They
were angered by the about-face. Damage was done even inside the
administration. Neither Chuck Hagel, then the secretary of defense, nor
John Kerry was in the Oval Office when the president informed his team
of his thinking. Kerry would not learn about the change until later that
evening. “I just got fucked over,” he told a friend shortly after
talking to the president that night. (When I asked Kerry recently about
that tumultuous night, he said, “I didn’t stop to analyze it. I figured
the president had a reason to make a decision and, honestly, I
understood his notion.”)
The next few days were chaotic. The
president asked Congress to authorize the use of force—the irrepressible
Kerry served as chief lobbyist—and it quickly became apparent in the
White House that Congress had little interest in a strike. When I spoke
with Biden recently about the red-line decision, he made special note of
this fact. “It matters to have Congress with you, in terms of your
ability to sustain what you set out to do,” he said. Obama “didn’t go to
Congress to get himself off the hook. He had his doubts at that point,
but he knew that if he was going to do anything, he better damn well
have the public with him, or it would be a very short ride.” Congress’s
clear ambivalence convinced Biden that Obama was correct to fear the
slippery slope. “What happens when we get a plane shot down? Do we not
go in and rescue?,” Biden asked. “You need the support of the American
people.”
Amid the confusion, a deus ex machina appeared in the
form of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. At the G20 summit in St.
Petersburg, which was held the week after the Syria reversal, Obama
pulled Putin aside, he recalled to me, and told the Russian president
“that if he forced Assad to get rid of the chemical weapons, that that
would eliminate the need for us taking a military strike.” Within weeks,
Kerry, working with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, would
engineer the removal of most of Syria’s chemical-weapons arsenal—a
program whose existence Assad until then had refused to even
acknowledge.
The
arrangement won the president praise from, of all people, Benjamin
Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, with whom he has had a
consistently contentious relationship. The removal of Syria’s
chemical-weapons stockpiles represented “the one ray of light in a very
dark region,” Netanyahu told me not long after the deal was announced.
John Kerry today expresses no
patience for those who argue, as he himself once did, that Obama should
have bombed Assad-regime sites in order to buttress America’s deterrent
capability. “You’d still have the weapons there, and you’d probably be
fighting isil” for control of the weapons, he said, referring to the Islamic State, the terror group also known as isis.
“It just doesn’t make sense. But I can’t deny to you that this notion
about the red line being crossed and [Obama’s] not doing anything gained
a life of its own.”
Obama understands that the decision he made
to step back from air strikes, and to allow the violation of a red line
he himself had drawn to go unpunished, will be interrogated mercilessly
by historians. But today that decision is a source of deep satisfaction
for him.
“I’m very proud of this moment,” he told me. “The
overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our
national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that
my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake.
And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would
cost me politically. And the fact that I was able to pull back from the
immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in
America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect
to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made—and I believe
ultimately it was the right decision to make.”
This was the moment the president believes he finally broke with what he calls, derisively, the “Washington playbook.”
“Where
am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power,” he
said. “That is the source of the controversy. There’s a playbook in
Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that
comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook
prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be
militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the
playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad
decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you
get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are
good reasons why it does not apply.”
I have come to believe that, in
Obama’s mind, August 30, 2013, was his liberation day, the day he defied
not only the foreign-policy establishment and its cruise-missile
playbook, but also the demands of America’s frustrating,
high-maintenance allies in the Middle East—countries, he complains
privately to friends and advisers, that seek to exploit American
“muscle” for their own narrow and sectarian ends. By 2013, Obama’s
resentments were well developed. He resented military leaders who
believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would
simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign-policy
think-tank complex. A widely held sentiment inside the White House is
that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington
are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard
one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of
many of these think tanks, as “Arab-occupied territory.”
For some foreign-policy experts, even within his own administration,
Obama’s about-face on enforcing the red line was a dispiriting moment in
which he displayed irresolution and naïveté, and did lasting damage to
America’s standing in the world. “Once the commander in chief draws that
red line,” Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director and then as
secretary of defense in Obama’s first term, told me recently, “then I
think the credibility of the commander in chief and this nation is at
stake if he doesn’t enforce it.” Right after Obama’s reversal, Hillary
Clinton said privately, “If you say you’re going to strike, you have to
strike. There’s no choice.”
“Assad is effectively being rewarded
for the use of chemical weapons, rather than ‘punished’ as originally
planned.” Shadi Hamid, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, wrote for
The Atlantic at the time. “He has managed to remove the threat of U.S. military action while giving very little up in return.”
Even commentators who have been
broadly sympathetic to Obama’s policies saw this episode as calamitous.
Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, wrote recently that
Obama’s handling of this crisis—“first casually announcing a major
commitment, then dithering about living up to it, then frantically
tossing the ball to Congress for a decision—was a case study in
embarrassingly amateurish improvisation.”
Obama’s defenders,
however, argue that he did no damage to U.S. credibility, citing Assad’s
subsequent agreement to have his chemical weapons removed. “The threat
of force was credible enough for them to give up their chemical
weapons,” Tim Kaine, a Democratic senator from Virginia, told me. “We
threatened military action and they responded. That’s deterrent
credibility.”
History may record August 30, 2013, as the day Obama
prevented the U.S. from entering yet another disastrous Muslim civil
war, and the day he removed the threat of a chemical attack on Israel,
Turkey, or Jordan. Or it could be remembered as the day he let the
Middle East slip from America’s grasp, into the hands of Russia, Iran,
and isis.
I first spoke with obama
about foreign policy when he was a U.S. senator, in 2006. At the time, I
was familiar mainly with the text of a speech he had delivered four
years earlier, at a Chicago antiwar rally. It was an unusual speech for
an antiwar rally in that it was not antiwar; Obama, who was then an
Illinois state senator, argued only against one specific and, at the
time, still theoretical, war. “I suffer no illusions about Saddam
Hussein,” he said. “He is a brutal man. A ruthless man … But I also know
that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or
to his neighbors.” He added, “I know that an invasion of Iraq without a
clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan
the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than
best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of
al-Qaeda.”
This speech had made me curious about its author. I
wanted to learn how an Illinois state senator, a part-time law professor
who spent his days traveling between Chicago and Springfield, had come
to a more prescient understanding of the coming quagmire than the most
experienced foreign-policy thinkers of his party, including such figures
as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry, not to mention, of
course, most Republicans and many foreign-policy analysts and writers,
including me.
Since that first meeting in 2006,
I’ve interviewed Obama periodically, mainly on matters related to the
Middle East. But over the past few months, I’ve spent several hours
talking with him about the broadest themes of his “long game” foreign
policy, including the themes he is most eager to discuss—namely, the
ones that have nothing to do with the Middle East.
“isis
is not an existential threat to the United States,” he told me in one
of these conversations. “Climate change is a potential existential
threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.” Obama
explained that climate change worries him in particular because “it is a
political problem perfectly designed to repel government intervention.
It involves every single country, and it is a comparatively slow-moving
emergency, so there is always something seemingly more urgent on the
agenda.”
At the moment, of course, the most urgent of the
“seemingly more urgent” issues is Syria. But at any given moment,
Obama’s entire presidency could be upended by North Korean aggression,
or an assault by Russia on a member of nato, or an isis-planned
attack on U.S. soil. Few presidents have faced such diverse tests on
the international stage as Obama has, and the challenge for him, as for
all presidents, has been to distinguish the merely urgent from the truly
important, and to focus on the important.
My goal in our recent
conversations was to see the world through Obama’s eyes, and to
understand what he believes America’s role in the world should be. This
article is informed by our recent series of conversations, which took
place in the Oval Office; over lunch in his dining room; aboard Air Force One;
and in Kuala Lumpur during his most recent visit to Asia, in November.
It is also informed by my previous interviews with him and by his
speeches and prolific public ruminations, as well as by conversations
with his top foreign-policy and national-security advisers, foreign
leaders and their ambassadors in Washington, friends of the president
and others who have spoken with him about his policies and decisions,
and his adversaries and critics.
Over
the course of our conversations, I came to see Obama as a president who
has grown steadily more fatalistic about the constraints on America’s
ability to direct global events, even as he has, late in his presidency,
accumulated a set of potentially historic foreign-policy
achievements—controversial, provisional achievements, to be sure, but
achievements nonetheless: the opening to Cuba, the Paris climate-change
accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, and, of course,
the Iran nuclear deal. These he accomplished despite his growing sense
that larger forces—the riptide of tribal feeling in a world that should
have already shed its atavism; the resilience of small men who rule
large countries in ways contrary to their own best interests; the
persistence of fear as a governing human emotion—frequently conspire
against the best of America’s intentions. But he also has come to learn,
he told me, that very little is accomplished in international affairs
without U.S. leadership.
Obama talked me through this
apparent contradiction. “I want a president who has the sense that you
can’t fix everything,” he said. But on the other hand, “if we don’t set
the agenda, it doesn’t happen.” He explained what he meant. “The fact
is, there is not a summit I’ve attended since I’ve been president where
we are not setting the agenda, where we are not responsible for the key
results,” he said. “That’s true whether you’re talking about nuclear
security, whether you’re talking about saving the world financial
system, whether you’re talking about climate.”
One day, over lunch
in the Oval Office dining room, I asked the president how he thought
his foreign policy might be understood by historians. He started by
describing for me a four-box grid representing the main schools of
American foreign-policy thought. One box he called isolationism, which
he dismissed out of hand. “The world is ever-shrinking,” he said.
“Withdrawal is untenable.” The other boxes he labeled realism, liberal
interventionism, and internationalism. “I suppose you could call me a
realist in believing we can’t, at any given moment, relieve all the
world’s misery,” he said. “We have to choose where we can make a real
impact.” He also noted that he was quite obviously an internationalist,
devoted as he is to strengthening multilateral organizations and
international norms.
I told him my impression was that the various
traumas of the past seven years have, if anything, intensified his
commitment to realist-driven restraint. Had nearly two full terms in the
White House soured him on interventionism?
“For all of our warts,
the United States has clearly been a force for good in the world,” he
said. “If you compare us to previous superpowers, we act less on the
basis of naked self-interest, and have been interested in establishing
norms that benefit everyone. If it is possible to do good at a bearable
cost, to save lives, we will do it.”
If a crisis, or a
humanitarian catastrophe, does not meet his stringent standard for what
constitutes a direct national-security threat, Obama said, he doesn’t
believe that he should be forced into silence. He is not so much the
realist, he suggested, that he won’t pass judgment on other leaders.
Though he has so far ruled out the use of direct American power to
depose Assad, he was not wrong, he argued, to call on Assad to go.
“Oftentimes when you get critics of our Syria policy, one of the things
that they’ll point out is ‘You called for Assad to go, but you didn’t
force him to go. You did not invade.’ And the notion is that if you
weren’t going to overthrow the regime, you shouldn’t have said anything.
That’s a weird argument to me, the notion that if we use our moral
authority to say ‘This is a brutal regime, and this is not how a leader
should treat his people,’ once you do that, you are obliged to invade
the country and install a government you prefer.”
“I am very much the
internationalist,” Obama said in a later conversation. “And I am also an
idealist insofar as I believe that we should be promoting values, like
democracy and human rights and norms and values, because not only do
they serve our interests the more people adopt values that we share—in
the same way that, economically, if people adopt rule of law and
property rights and so forth, that is to our advantage—but because it
makes the world a better place. And I’m willing to say that in a very
corny way, and in a way that probably Brent Scowcroft would not say.
“Having
said that,” he continued, “I also believe that the world is a tough,
complicated, messy, mean place, and full of hardship and tragedy. And in
order to advance both our security interests and those ideals and
values that we care about, we’ve got to be hardheaded at the same time
as we’re bighearted, and pick and choose our spots, and recognize that
there are going to be times where the best that we can do is to shine a
spotlight on something that’s terrible, but not believe that we can
automatically solve it. There are going to be times where our security
interests conflict with our concerns about human rights. There are going
to be times where we can do something about innocent people being
killed, but there are going to be times where we can’t.”
If Obama ever questioned whether America really is the world’s one
indispensable nation, he no longer does so. But he is the rare president
who seems at times to resent indispensability, rather than embrace it.
“Free riders aggravate me,” he told me. Recently, Obama warned that
Great Britain would no longer be able to claim a “special relationship”
with the United States if it did not commit to spending at least 2
percent of its GDP on defense. “You have to pay your fair share,” Obama
told David Cameron, who subsequently met the 2 percent threshold.
Part
of his mission as president, Obama explained, is to spur other
countries to take action for themselves, rather than wait for the U.S.
to lead. The defense of the liberal international order against jihadist
terror, Russian adventurism, and Chinese bullying depends in part, he
believes, on the willingness of other nations to share the burden with
the U.S. This is why the controversy surrounding the assertion—made by
an anonymous administration official to The New Yorker during the
Libya crisis of 2011—that his policy consisted of “leading from behind”
perturbed him. “We don’t have to always be the ones who are up front,”
he told me. “Sometimes we’re going to get what we want precisely because
we are sharing in the agenda. The irony is that it was precisely in
order to prevent the Europeans and the Arab states from holding our
coats while we did all the fighting that we, by design, insisted” that
they lead during the mission to remove Muammar Qaddafi from power in
Libya. “It was part of the anti–free rider campaign.”
The
president also seems to believe that sharing leadership with other
countries is a way to check America’s more unruly impulses. “One of the
reasons I am so focused on taking action multilaterally where our direct
interests are not at stake is that multilateralism regulates hubris,”
he explained. He consistently invokes what he understands to be
America’s past failures overseas as a means of checking American
self-righteousness. “We have history,” he said. “We have history in
Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be
mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and
understand the source of other people’s suspicions.”
In
his efforts to off-load some of America’s foreign-policy
responsibilities to its allies, Obama appears to be a classic
retrenchment president in the manner of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard
Nixon. Retrenchment, in this context, is defined as “pulling back,
spending less, cutting risk, and shifting burdens to allies,” Stephen
Sestanovich, an expert on presidential foreign policy at the Council on
Foreign Relations, explained to me. “If John McCain had been elected in
2008, you would still have seen some degree of retrenchment,”
Sestanovich said. “It’s what the country wanted. If you come into office
in the middle of a war that is not going well, you’re convinced that
the American people have hired you to do less.” One difference between
Eisenhower and Nixon, on the one hand, and Obama, on the other,
Sestanovich said, is that Obama “appears to have had a personal,
ideological commitment to the idea that foreign policy had consumed too
much of the nation’s attention and resources.”
I asked Obama about
retrenchment. “Almost every great world power has succumbed” to
overextension, he said. “What I think is not smart is the idea that
every time there is a problem, we send in our military to impose order.
We just can’t do that.”
But once he decides that a particular
challenge represents a direct national-security threat, he has shown a
willingness to act unilaterally. This is one of the larger ironies of
the Obama presidency: He has relentlessly questioned the efficacy of
force, but he has also become the most successful terrorist-hunter in
the history of the presidency, one who will hand to his successor a set
of tools an accomplished assassin would envy. “He applies different
standards to direct threats to the U.S.,” Ben Rhodes says. “For
instance, despite his misgivings about Syria, he has not had a second
thought about drones.” Some critics argue he should have had a few
second thoughts about what they see as the overuse of drones. But John
Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, told me recently that he and the
president “have similar views. One of them is that sometimes you have to
take a life to save even more lives. We have a similar view of just-war
theory. The president requires near-certainty of no collateral damage.
But if he believes it is necessary to act, he doesn’t hesitate.”
Those
who speak with Obama about jihadist thought say that he possesses a
no-illusions understanding of the forces that drive apocalyptic violence
among radical Muslims, but he has been careful about articulating that
publicly, out of concern that he will exacerbate anti-Muslim xenophobia.
He has a tragic realist’s understanding of sin, cowardice, and
corruption, and a Hobbesian appreciation of how fear shapes human
behavior. And yet he consistently, and with apparent sincerity,
professes optimism that the world is bending toward justice. He is, in a
way, a Hobbesian optimist.
The contradictions do not end there.
Though he has a reputation for prudence, he has also been eager to
question some of the long-standing assumptions undergirding traditional
U.S. foreign-policy thinking. To a remarkable degree, he is willing to
question why America’s enemies are its enemies, or why some of its
friends are its friends. He overthrew half a century of bipartisan
consensus in order to reestablish ties with Cuba. He questioned why the
U.S. should avoid sending its forces into Pakistan to kill al-Qaeda
leaders, and he privately questions why Pakistan, which he believes is a
disastrously dysfunctional country, should be considered an ally of the
U.S. at all. According to Leon Panetta, he has questioned why the U.S.
should maintain Israel’s so-called qualitative military edge, which
grants it access to more sophisticated weapons systems than America’s
Arab allies receive; but he has also questioned, often harshly, the role
that America’s Sunni Arab allies play in fomenting anti-American
terrorism. He is clearly irritated that foreign-policy orthodoxy compels
him to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally. And of course he decided early
on, in the face of great criticism, that he wanted to reach out to
America’s most ardent Middle Eastern foe, Iran. The nuclear deal he
struck with Iran proves, if nothing else, that Obama is not risk-averse.
He has bet global security and his own legacy that one of the world’s
leading state sponsors of terrorism will adhere to an agreement to
curtail its nuclear program.
It
is assumed, at least among his critics, that Obama sought the Iran deal
because he has a vision of a historic American-Persian rapprochement.
But his desire for the nuclear agreement was born of pessimism as much
as it was of optimism. “The Iran deal was never primarily about trying
to open a new era of relations between the U.S. and Iran,” Susan Rice
told me. “It was far more pragmatic and minimalist. The aim was very
simply to make a dangerous country substantially less dangerous. No one
had any expectation that Iran would be a more benign actor.”
I once mentioned to obama a scene from The Godfather: Part III,
in which Michael Corleone complains angrily about his failure to escape
the grasp of organized crime. I told Obama that the Middle East is to
his presidency what the Mob is to Corleone, and I started to quote the
Al Pacino line: “Just when I thought I was out—”
“It pulls you back in,” Obama said, completing the thought.
The
story of Obama’s encounter with the Middle East follows an arc of
disenchantment. In his first extended spree of fame, as a presidential
candidate in 2008, Obama often spoke with hope about the region. In
Berlin that summer, in a speech to 200,000 adoring Germans, he said,
“This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the
Middle East.”
The next year, as president, he gave a speech in
Cairo meant to reset U.S. relations with the world’s Muslims. He spoke
about Muslims in his own family, and his childhood years in Indonesia,
and confessed America’s sins even as he criticized those in the Muslim
world who demonized the U.S. What drew the most attention, though, was
his promise to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was then
thought to be the central animating concern of Arab Muslims. His
sympathy for the Palestinians moved the audience, but complicated his
relations with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister—especially
because Obama had also decided to bypass Jerusalem on his first
presidential visit to the Middle East.
When I asked Obama recently
what he had hoped to accomplish with his Cairo reset speech, he said
that he had been trying—unsuccessfully, he acknowledged—to persuade
Muslims to more closely examine the roots of their unhappiness.
“My
argument was this: Let’s all stop pretending that the cause of the
Middle East’s problems is Israel,” he told me. “We want to work to help
achieve statehood and dignity for the Palestinians, but I was hoping
that my speech could trigger a discussion, could create space for
Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting—problems of
governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone
through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious
doctrines to modernity. My thought was, I would communicate that the
U.S. is not standing in the way of this progress, that we would help, in
whatever way possible, to advance the goals of a practical, successful
Arab agenda that provided a better life for ordinary people.”
Through the first flush of the Arab
Spring, in 2011, Obama continued to speak optimistically about the
Middle East’s future, coming as close as he ever would to embracing the
so-called freedom agenda of George W. Bush, which was characterized in
part by the belief that democratic values could be implanted in the
Middle East. He equated protesters in Tunisia and Tahrir Square with
Rosa Parks and the “patriots of Boston.”
“After decades of
accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue
the world as it should be,” he said in a speech at the time. “The United
States supports a set of universal rights. And these rights include
free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly, the freedom of religion,
equality for men and women under the rule of law, and the right to
choose your own leaders … Our support for these principles is not a
secondary interest.”
But over the next three years, as the
Arab Spring gave up its early promise, and brutality and dysfunction
overwhelmed the Middle East, the president grew disillusioned. Some of
his deepest disappointments concern Middle Eastern leaders themselves.
Benjamin Netanyahu is in his own category: Obama has long believed that
Netanyahu could bring about a two-state solution that would protect
Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority democracy, but is too fearful and
politically paralyzed to do so. Obama has also not had much patience for
Netanyahu and other Middle Eastern leaders who question his
understanding of the region. In one of Netanyahu’s meetings with the
president, the Israeli prime minister launched into something of a
lecture about the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives, and
Obama felt that Netanyahu was behaving in a condescending fashion, and
was also avoiding the subject at hand: peace negotiations. Finally, the
president interrupted the prime minister: “Bibi, you have to understand
something,” he said. “I’m the African American son of a single mother,
and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to
get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand
what you’re talking about, but I do.” Other leaders also frustrate him
immensely. Early on, Obama saw Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of
Turkey, as the sort of moderate Muslim leader who would bridge the
divide between East and West—but Obama now considers him a failure and
an authoritarian, one who refuses to use his enormous army to bring
stability to Syria. And on the sidelines of a nato
summit in Wales in 2014, Obama pulled aside King Abdullah II of Jordan.
Obama said he had heard that Abdullah had complained to friends in the
U.S. Congress about his leadership, and told the king that if he had
complaints, he should raise them directly. The king denied that he had
spoken ill of him.
In recent days, the president has taken to
joking privately, “All I need in the Middle East is a few smart
autocrats.” Obama has always had a fondness for pragmatic, emotionally
contained technocrats, telling aides, “If only everyone could be like
the Scandinavians, this would all be easy.”
The unraveling of the Arab Spring darkened the president’s view of what
the U.S. could achieve in the Middle East, and made him realize how much
the chaos there was distracting from other priorities. “The president
recognized during the course of the Arab Spring that the Middle East was
consuming us,” John Brennan, who served in Obama’s first term as his
chief counterterrorism adviser, told me recently.
But what sealed
Obama’s fatalistic view was the failure of his administration’s
intervention in Libya, in 2011. That intervention was meant to prevent
the country’s then-dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, from slaughtering the
people of Benghazi, as he was threatening to do. Obama did not want to
join the fight; he was counseled by Joe Biden and his first-term
secretary of defense Robert Gates, among others, to steer clear. But a
strong faction within the national-security team—Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, who was then the ambassador to the
United Nations, along with Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Antony
Blinken, who was then Biden’s national-security adviser—lobbied hard to
protect Benghazi, and prevailed. (Biden, who is acerbic about Clinton’s
foreign-policy judgment, has said privately, “Hillary just wants to be
Golda Meir.”) American bombs fell, the people of Benghazi were spared
from what may or may not have been a massacre, and Qaddafi was captured
and executed.
But Obama says today of the intervention, “It didn’t
work.” The U.S., he believes, planned the Libya operation carefully—and
yet the country is still a disaster.
Why, given what seems to be
the president’s natural reticence toward getting militarily ensnarled
where American national security is not directly at stake, did he accept
the recommendation of his more activist advisers to intervene?
“The
social order in Libya has broken down,” Obama said, explaining his
thinking at the time. “You have massive protests against Qaddafi. You’ve
got tribal divisions inside of Libya. Benghazi is a focal point for the
opposition regime. And Qaddafi is marching his army toward Benghazi,
and he has said, ‘We will kill them like rats.’
“Now, option one
would be to do nothing, and there were some in my administration who
said, as tragic as the Libyan situation may be, it’s not our problem.
The way I looked at it was that it would be our problem if, in fact,
complete chaos and civil war broke out in Libya. But this is not so at
the core of U.S. interests that it makes sense for us to unilaterally
strike against the Qaddafi regime. At that point, you’ve got Europe and a
number of Gulf countries who despise Qaddafi, or are concerned on a
humanitarian basis, who are calling for action. But what has been a
habit over the last several decades in these circumstances is people
pushing us to act but then showing an unwillingness to put any skin in
the game.”
“Free riders?,” I interjected.
“Free riders,” he
said, and continued. “So what I said at that point was, we should act as
part of an international coalition. But because this is not at the core
of our interests, we need to get a UN mandate; we need Europeans and
Gulf countries to be actively involved in the coalition; we will apply
the military capabilities that are unique to us, but we expect others to
carry their weight. And we worked with our defense teams to ensure that
we could execute a strategy without putting boots on the ground and
without a long-term military commitment in Libya.
“So we actually
executed this plan as well as I could have expected: We got a UN
mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1 billion—which, when it
comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale
civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a
prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that, Libya is a
mess.”
Mess is the president’s diplomatic term; privately, he calls Libya a “shit show,” in part because it’s subsequently become an isis
haven—one that he has already targeted with air strikes. It became a
shit show, Obama believes, for reasons that had less to do with American
incompetence than with the passivity of America’s allies and with the
obdurate power of tribalism.
“When I go back and I ask myself what
went wrong,” Obama said, “there’s room for criticism, because I had
more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in
the follow-up,” he said. He noted that Nicolas Sarkozy, the French
president, lost his job the following year. And he said that British
Prime Minister David Cameron soon stopped paying attention, becoming
“distracted by a range of other things.” Of France, he said, “Sarkozy
wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite
the fact that we had wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set
up the entire infrastructure” for the intervention. This sort of
bragging was fine, Obama said, because it allowed the U.S. to “purchase
France’s involvement in a way that made it less expensive for us and
less risky for us.” In other words, giving France extra credit in
exchange for less risk and cost to the United States was a useful
trade-off—except that “from the perspective of a lot of the folks in the
foreign-policy establishment, well, that was terrible. If we’re going
to do something, obviously we’ve got to be up front, and nobody else is
sharing in the spotlight.”
Obama also blamed internal Libyan
dynamics. “The degree of tribal division in Libya was greater than our
analysts had expected. And our ability to have any kind of structure
there that we could interact with and start training and start providing
resources broke down very quickly.”
Libya proved to him that the
Middle East was best avoided. “There is no way we should commit to
governing the Middle East and North Africa,” he recently told a former
colleague from the Senate. “That would be a basic, fundamental mistake.”
President Obama did not
come into office preoccupied by the Middle East. He is the first child
of the Pacific to become president—born in Hawaii, raised there and, for
four years, in Indonesia—and he is fixated on turning America’s
attention to Asia. For Obama, Asia represents the future. Africa and
Latin America, in his view, deserve far more U.S. attention than they
receive. Europe, about which he is unromantic, is a source of global
stability that requires, to his occasional annoyance, American
hand-holding. And the Middle East is a region to be avoided—one that,
thanks to America’s energy revolution, will soon be of negligible
relevance to the U.S. economy.
It is not oil but another of the
Middle East’s exports, terrorism, that shapes Obama’s understanding of
his responsibilities there. Early in 2014, Obama’s intelligence advisers
told him that isis was of marginal
importance. According to administration officials, General Lloyd Austin,
then the commander of Central Command, which oversees U.S. military
operations in the Middle East, told the White House that the Islamic
State was “a flash in the pan.” This analysis led Obama, in an interview
with The New Yorker, to describe the constellation of jihadist
groups in Iraq and Syria as terrorism’s “jayvee team.” (A spokesman for
Austin told me, “At no time has General Austin ever considered isil a ‘flash in the pan’ phenomenon.”)
But by late spring of 2014, after isis
took the northern-Iraq city of Mosul, he came to believe that U.S.
intelligence had failed to appreciate the severity of the threat and the
inadequacies of the Iraqi army, and his view shifted. After isis
beheaded three American civilians in Syria, it became obvious to Obama
that defeating the group was of more immediate urgency to the U.S. than
overthrowing Bashar al-Assad.
Advisers recall that Obama would cite a pivotal moment in The Dark Knight, the 2008 Batman movie, to help explain not only how he understood the role of isis,
but how he understood the larger ecosystem in which it grew. “There’s a
scene in the beginning in which the gang leaders of Gotham are
meeting,” the president would say. “These are men who had the city
divided up. They were thugs, but there was a kind of order. Everyone had
his turf. And then the Joker comes in and lights the whole city on
fire. isil is the Joker. It has the capacity to set the whole region on fire. That’s why we have to fight it.”
The
rise of the Islamic State deepened Obama’s conviction that the Middle
East could not be fixed—not on his watch, and not for a generation to
come.
On a rainy Wednesday in mid-November, President Obama appeared on a stage at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (apec)
summit in Manila with Jack Ma, the founder of the Chinese e-commerce
company Alibaba, and a 31-year-old Filipina inventor named Aisa Mijeno.
The ballroom was crowded with Asian CEOs, American business leaders, and
government officials from across the region. Obama, who was greeted
warmly, first delivered informal remarks from behind a podium, mainly
about the threat of climate change.
Obama made no mention of the subject preoccupying much of the rest of the world—the isis
attacks in Paris five days earlier, which had killed 130 people. Obama
had arrived in Manila the day before from a G20 summit held in Antalya,
Turkey. The Paris attacks had been a main topic of conversation in
Antalya, where Obama held a particularly contentious press conference on
the subject.
The traveling White House press corps was
unrelenting: “Isn’t it time for your strategy to change?” one reporter
asked. This was followed by “Could I ask you to address your critics who
say that your reluctance to enter another Middle East war, and your
preference of diplomacy over using the military, makes the United States
weaker and emboldens our enemies?” And then came this imperishable
question, from a CNN reporter: “If you’ll forgive the language—why can’t
we take out these bastards?” Which was followed by “Do you think you
really understand this enemy well enough to defeat them and to protect
the homeland?”
As the questions unspooled, Obama became progressively more irritated. He described his isis
strategy at length, but the only time he exhibited an emotion other
than disdain was when he addressed an emerging controversy about
America’s refugee policy. Republican governors and presidential
candidates had suddenly taken to demanding that the United States block
Syrian refugees from coming to America. Ted Cruz had proposed accepting
only Christian Syrians. Chris Christie had said that all refugees,
including “orphans under 5,” should be banned from entry until proper
vetting procedures had been put in place.
This rhetoric appeared
to frustrate Obama immensely. “When I hear folks say that, well, maybe
we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims; when I hear
political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for
which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted,” Obama
told the assembled reporters, “that’s not American. That’s not who we
are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”
Air Force One
departed Antalya and arrived 10 hours later in Manila. That’s when the
president’s advisers came to understand, in the words of one official,
that “everyone back home had lost their minds.” Susan Rice, trying to
comprehend the rising anxiety, searched her hotel television in vain for
CNN, finding only the BBC and Fox News. She toggled between the two,
looking for the mean, she told people on the trip.
Later, the
president would say that he had failed to fully appreciate the fear many
Americans were experiencing about the possibility of a Paris-style
attack in the U.S. Great distance, a frantic schedule, and the jet-lag
haze that envelops a globe-spanning presidential trip were working
against him. But he has never believed that terrorism poses a threat to
America commensurate with the fear it generates. Even during the period
in 2014 when isis was executing its
American captives in Syria, his emotions were in check. Valerie Jarrett,
Obama’s closest adviser, told him people were worried that the group
would soon take its beheading campaign to the U.S. “They’re not coming
here to chop our heads off,” he reassured her. Obama frequently reminds
his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns,
car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do. Several years ago, he
expressed to me his admiration for Israelis’ “resilience” in the face of
constant terrorism, and it is clear that he would like to see
resilience replace panic in American society. Nevertheless, his advisers
are fighting a constant rearguard action to keep Obama from placing
terrorism in what he considers its “proper” perspective, out of concern
that he will seem insensitive to the fears of the American people.
The frustration among Obama’s advisers
spills over into the Pentagon and the State Department. John Kerry, for
one, seems more alarmed about isis than
the president does. Recently, when I asked the secretary of state a
general question—is the Middle East still important to the U.S.?—he
answered by talking exclusively about isis.
“This is a threat to everybody in the world,” he said, a group “overtly
committed to destroying people in the West and in the Middle East.
Imagine what would happen if we don’t stand and fight them, if we don’t
lead a coalition—as we are doing, by the way. If we didn’t do that, you
could have allies and friends of ours fall. You could have a massive
migration into Europe that destroys Europe, leads to the pure
destruction of Europe, ends the European project, and everyone runs for
cover and you’ve got the 1930s all over again, with nationalism and
fascism and other things breaking out. Of course we have an interest in
this, a huge interest in this.”
When I noted to Kerry that the
president’s rhetoric doesn’t match his, he said, “President Obama sees
all of this, but he doesn’t gin it up into this kind of—he thinks we are
on track. He has escalated his efforts. But he’s not trying to create
hysteria … I think the president is always inclined to try to keep
things on an appropriate equilibrium. I respect that.”
Obama
modulates his discussion of terrorism for several reasons: He is, by
nature, Spockian. And he believes that a misplaced word, or a frightened
look, or an ill-considered hyperbolic claim, could tip the country into
panic. The sort of panic he worries about most is the type that would
manifest itself in anti-Muslim xenophobia or in a challenge to American
openness and to the constitutional order.
The president also gets
frustrated that terrorism keeps swamping his larger agenda, particularly
as it relates to rebalancing America’s global priorities. For years,
the “pivot to Asia” has been a paramount priority of his. America’s
economic future lies in Asia, he believes, and the challenge posed by
China’s rise requires constant attention. From his earliest days in
office, Obama has been focused on rebuilding the sometimes-threadbare
ties between the U.S. and its Asian treaty partners, and he is
perpetually on the hunt for opportunities to draw other Asian nations
into the U.S. orbit. His dramatic opening to Burma was one such
opportunity; Vietnam and the entire constellation of Southeast Asian
countries fearful of Chinese domination presented others.
In Manila, at apec,
Obama was determined to keep the conversation focused on this agenda,
and not on what he viewed as the containable challenge presented by isis.
Obama’s secretary of defense, Ashton Carter, told me not long ago that
Obama has maintained his focus on Asia even as Syria and other Middle
Eastern conflicts continue to flare. Obama believes, Carter said, that
Asia “is the part of the world of greatest consequence to the American
future, and that no president can take his eye off of this.” He added,
“He consistently asks, even in the midst of everything else that’s going
on, ‘Where are we in the Asia-Pacific rebalance? Where are we in terms
of resources?’ He’s been extremely consistent about that, even in times
of Middle East tension.”
After Obama finished his presentation on
climate change, he joined Ma and Mijeno, who had seated themselves on
nearby armchairs, where Obama was preparing to interview them in the
manner of a daytime talk-show host—an approach that seemed to induce a
momentary bout of status-inversion vertigo in an audience not accustomed
to such behavior in their own leaders. Obama began by asking Ma a
question about climate change. Ma, unsurprisingly, agreed with Obama
that it was a very important issue. Then Obama turned to Mijeno. A
laboratory operating in the hidden recesses of the West Wing could not
have fashioned a person more expertly designed to appeal to Obama’s
wonkish enthusiasms than Mijeno, a young engineer who, with her brother,
had invented a lamp that is somehow powered by salt water.
“Just
to be clear, Aisa, so with some salt water, the device that you’ve set
up can provide—am I right?—about eight hours of lighting?,” Obama asked.
“Eight hours of lighting,” she responded.
Obama: “And the lamp is $20—”
Mijeno: “Around $20.”
“I
think Aisa is a perfect example of what we’re seeing in a lot of
countries—young entrepreneurs coming up with leapfrog technologies, in
the same ways that in large portions of Asia and Africa, the old
landline phones never got set up,” Obama said, because those areas
jumped straight to mobile phones. Obama encouraged Jack Ma to fund her
work. “She’s won, by the way, a lot of prizes and gotten a lot of
attention, so this is not like one of those infomercials where you order
it, and you can’t make the thing work,” he said, to laughter.
The next day, aboard Air Force One
en route to Kuala Lumpur, I mentioned to Obama that he seemed genuinely
happy to be onstage with Ma and Mijeno, and then I pivoted away from
Asia, asking him if anything about the Middle East makes him happy.
“Right
now, I don’t think that anybody can be feeling good about the situation
in the Middle East,” he said. “You have countries that are failing to
provide prosperity and opportunity for their people. You’ve got a
violent, extremist ideology, or ideologies, that are turbocharged
through social media. You’ve got countries that have very few civic
traditions, so that as autocratic regimes start fraying, the only
organizing principles are sectarian.”
He went on, “Contrast that
with Southeast Asia, which still has huge problems—enormous poverty,
corruption—but is filled with striving, ambitious, energetic people who
are every single day scratching and clawing to build businesses and get
education and find jobs and build infrastructure. The contrast is pretty
stark.”
In Asia, as well as in Latin America and Africa, Obama
says, he sees young people yearning for self-improvement, modernity,
education, and material wealth.
“They are not thinking about how to kill Americans,” he says. “What they’re thinking about is How do I get a better education? How do I create something of value?”
He
then made an observation that I came to realize was representative of
his bleakest, most visceral understanding of the Middle East today—not
the sort of understanding that a White House still oriented around
themes of hope and change might choose to advertise. “If we’re not
talking to them,” he said, referring to young Asians and Africans and
Latin Americans, “because the only thing we’re doing is figuring out how
to destroy or cordon off or control the malicious, nihilistic, violent
parts of humanity, then we’re missing the boat.”
Obama’s critics
argue that he is ineffective in cordoning off the violent nihilists of
radical Islam because he doesn’t understand the threat. He does resist
refracting radical Islam through the “clash of civilizations” prism
popularized by the late political scientist Samuel Huntington. But this
is because, he and his advisers argue, he does not want to enlarge the
ranks of the enemy. “The goal is not to force a Huntington template onto
this conflict,” said John Brennan, the CIA director.
Both
François Hollande and David Cameron have spoken about the threat of
radical Islam in more Huntingtonesque terms, and I’ve heard that both
men wish Obama would use more-direct language in discussing the threat.
When I mentioned this to Obama he said, “Hollande and Cameron have used
phrases, like radical Islam, that we have not used on a regular
basis as our way of targeting terrorism. But I’ve never had a
conversation when they said, ‘Man, how come you’re not using this phrase
the way you hear Republicans say it?’ ” Obama says he has demanded that
Muslim leaders do more to eliminate the threat of violent
fundamentalism. “It is very clear what I mean,” he told me, “which is
that there is a violent, radical, fanatical, nihilistic interpretation
of Islam by a faction—a tiny faction—within the Muslim community that is
our enemy, and that has to be defeated.”
He then offered a
critique that sounded more in line with the rhetoric of Cameron and
Hollande. “There is also the need for Islam as a whole to challenge that
interpretation of Islam, to isolate it, and to undergo a vigorous
discussion within their community about how Islam works as part of a
peaceful, modern society,” he said. But he added, “I do not persuade
peaceful, tolerant Muslims to engage in that debate if I’m not sensitive
to their concern that they are being tagged with a broad brush.”
In private encounters with other
world leaders, Obama has argued that there will be no comprehensive
solution to Islamist terrorism until Islam reconciles itself to
modernity and undergoes some of the reforms that have changed
Christianity.
Though he has argued, controversially, that the
Middle East’s conflicts “date back millennia,” he also believes that the
intensified Muslim fury of recent years was encouraged by countries
considered friends of the U.S. In a meeting during apec
with Malcolm Turnbull, the new prime minister of Australia, Obama
described how he has watched Indonesia gradually move from a relaxed,
syncretistic Islam to a more fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation;
large numbers of Indonesian women, he observed, have now adopted the
hijab, the Muslim head covering.
Why, Turnbull asked, was this happening?
Because,
Obama answered, the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs have funneled money,
and large numbers of imams and teachers, into the country. In the 1990s,
the Saudis heavily funded Wahhabist madrassas, seminaries that teach
the fundamentalist version of Islam favored by the Saudi ruling family,
Obama told Turnbull. Today, Islam in Indonesia is much more Arab in
orientation than it was when he lived there, he said.
“Aren’t the Saudis your friends?,” Turnbull asked.
Obama smiled. “It’s complicated,” he said.
Obama’s
patience with Saudi Arabia has always been limited. In his first
foreign-policy commentary of note, that 2002 speech at the antiwar rally
in Chicago, he said, “You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to
make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East—the Saudis and the
Egyptians—stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and
tolerating corruption and inequality.” In the White House these days,
one occasionally hears Obama’s National Security Council officials
pointedly reminding visitors that the large majority of 9/11 hijackers
were not Iranian, but Saudi—and Obama himself rails against Saudi
Arabia’s state-sanctioned misogyny, arguing in private that “a country
cannot function in the modern world when it is repressing half of its
population.” In meetings with foreign leaders, Obama has said, “You can
gauge the success of a society by how it treats its women.”
His
frustration with the Saudis informs his analysis of Middle Eastern power
politics. At one point I observed to him that he is less likely than
previous presidents to axiomatically side with Saudi Arabia in its
dispute with its archrival, Iran. He didn’t disagree.
“Iran, since
1979, has been an enemy of the United States, and has engaged in
state-sponsored terrorism, is a genuine threat to Israel and many of our
allies, and engages in all kinds of destructive behavior,” the
president said. “And my view has never been that we should throw our
traditional allies”—the Saudis—“overboard in favor of Iran.”
But
he went on to say that the Saudis need to “share” the Middle East with
their Iranian foes. “The competition between the Saudis and the
Iranians—which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq
and Yemen—requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians
that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and
institute some sort of cold peace,” he said. “An approach that said to
our friends ‘You are right, Iran is the source of all problems, and we
will support you in dealing with Iran’ would essentially mean that as
these sectarian conflicts continue to rage and our Gulf partners, our
traditional friends, do not have the ability to put out the flames on
their own or decisively win on their own, and would mean that we have to
start coming in and using our military power to settle scores. And that
would be in the interest neither of the United States nor of the Middle
East.”
One of the most destructive forces in the Middle East,
Obama believes, is tribalism—a force no president can neutralize.
Tribalism, made manifest in the reversion to sect, creed, clan, and
village by the desperate citizens of failing states, is the source of
much of the Muslim Middle East’s problems, and it is another source of
his fatalism. Obama has deep respect for the destructive resilience of
tribalism—part of his memoir, Dreams From My Father, concerns the
way in which tribalism in post-colonial Kenya helped ruin his father’s
life—which goes some distance in explaining why he is so fastidious
about avoiding entanglements in tribal conflicts.
“It is literally
in my DNA to be suspicious of tribalism,” he told me. “I understand the
tribal impulse, and acknowledge the power of tribal division. I’ve been
navigating tribal divisions my whole life. In the end, it’s the source
of a lot of destructive acts.”
While flying to Kuala
Lumpur with the president, I recalled a passing reference he had once
made to me about the Hobbesian argument for strong government as an
antidote to the unforgiving state of nature. When Obama looks at swathes
of the Middle East, Hobbes’s “war of all against all” is what he sees.
“I have a recognition that us serving as the Leviathan clamps down and
tames some of these impulses,” Obama had said. So I tried to reopen this
conversation with an unfortunately prolix question about, among other
things, “the Hobbesian notion that people organize themselves into
collectives to stave off their supreme fear, which is death.”
Ben Rhodes and Joshua Earnest, the White House spokesman, who were seated on a couch to the side of Obama’s desk on Air Force One,
could barely suppress their amusement at my discursiveness. I paused
and said, “I bet if I asked that in a press conference my colleagues
would just throw me out of the room.”
“I would be really into it,” Obama said, “but everybody else would be rolling their eyes.”
Rhodes
interjected: “Why can’t we get the bastards?” That question, the one
put to the president by the CNN reporter at the press conference in
Turkey, had become a topic of sardonic conversation during the trip.
I turned to the president: “Well, yeah, and also, why can’t we get the bastards?”
He took the first question.
“Look,
I am not of the view that human beings are inherently evil,” he said.
“I believe that there’s more good than bad in humanity. And if you look
at the trajectory of history, I am optimistic.
“I believe that
overall, humanity has become less violent, more tolerant, healthier,
better fed, more empathetic, more able to manage difference. But it’s
hugely uneven. And what has been clear throughout the 20th and 21st
centuries is that the progress we make in social order and taming our
baser impulses and steadying our fears can be reversed very quickly.
Social order starts breaking down if people are under profound stress.
Then the default position is tribe—us/them, a hostility toward the
unfamiliar or the unknown.”
He continued, “Right now, across the
globe, you’re seeing places that are undergoing severe stress because of
globalization, because of the collision of cultures brought about by
the Internet and social media, because of scarcities—some of which will
be attributable to climate change over the next several decades—because
of population growth. And in those places, the Middle East being Exhibit
A, the default position for a lot of folks is to organize tightly in
the tribe and to push back or strike out against those who are
different.
“A group like isil is
the distillation of every worst impulse along these lines. The notion
that we are a small group that defines ourselves primarily by the degree
to which we can kill others who are not like us, and attempting to
impose a rigid orthodoxy that produces nothing, that celebrates nothing,
that really is contrary to every bit of human progress—it indicates the
degree to which that kind of mentality can still take root and gain
adherents in the 21st century.”
So your appreciation for
tribalism’s power makes you want to stay away?, I asked. “In other
words, when people say ‘Why don’t you just go get the bastards?,’ you
step back?”
“We have to determine the best tools to roll back
those kinds of attitudes,” he said. “There are going to be times where
either because it’s not a direct threat to us or because we just don’t
have the tools in our toolkit to have a huge impact that, tragically, we
have to refrain from jumping in with both feet.”
I asked Obama
whether he would have sent the Marines to Rwanda in 1994 to stop the
genocide as it was happening, had he been president at the time. “Given
the speed with which the killing took place, and how long it takes to
crank up the machinery of the U.S. government, I understand why we did
not act fast enough,” he said. “Now, we should learn from that. I
actually think that Rwanda is an interesting test case because it’s
possible—not guaranteed, but it’s possible—that this was a situation
where the quick application of force might have been enough.”
He
related this to Syria: “Ironically, it’s probably easier to make an
argument that a relatively small force inserted quickly with
international support would have resulted in averting genocide [more
successfully in Rwanda] than in Syria right now, where the degree to
which the various groups are armed and hardened fighters and are
supported by a whole host of external actors with a lot of resources
requires a much larger commitment of forces.”
Obama-administration officials argue that
he has a comprehensible approach to fighting terrorism: a drone air
force, Special Forces raids, a clandestine CIA-aided army of 10,000
rebels battling in Syria. So why does Obama stumble when explaining to
the American people that he, too, cares about terrorism? The Turkey
press conference, I told him, “was a moment for you as a politician to
say, ‘Yeah, I hate the bastards too, and by the way, I am taking
out the bastards.’ ” The easy thing to do would have been to reassure
Americans in visceral terms that he will kill the people who want to
kill them. Does he fear a knee-jerk reaction in the direction of another
Middle East invasion? Or is he just inalterably Spockian?
“Every
president has strengths and weaknesses,” he answered. “And there is no
doubt that there are times where I have not been attentive enough to
feelings and emotions and politics in communicating what we’re doing and
how we’re doing it.”
But for America to be successful in leading
the world, he continued, “I believe that we have to avoid being
simplistic. I think we have to build resilience and make sure that our
political debates are grounded in reality. It’s not that I don’t
appreciate the value of theater in political communications; it’s that
the habits we—the media, politicians—have gotten into, and how we talk
about these issues, are so detached so often from what we need to be
doing that for me to satisfy the cable news hype-fest would lead to us
making worse and worse decisions over time.”
As Air Force One began its
descent toward Kuala Lumpur, the president mentioned the successful
U.S.-led effort to stop the Ebola epidemic in West Africa as a positive
example of steady, nonhysterical management of a terrifying crisis.
“During
the couple of months in which everybody was sure Ebola was going to
destroy the Earth and there was 24/7 coverage of Ebola, if I had fed the
panic or in any way strayed from ‘Here are the facts, here’s what needs
to be done, here’s how we’re handling it, the likelihood of you getting
Ebola is very slim, and here’s what we need to do both domestically and
overseas to stamp out this epidemic,’ ” then “maybe people would have
said ‘Obama is taking this as seriously as he needs to be.’ ” But
feeding the panic by overreacting could have shut down travel to and
from three African countries that were already cripplingly poor, in ways
that might have destroyed their economies—which would likely have
meant, among other things, a recurrence of Ebola. He added, “It would
have also meant that we might have wasted a huge amount of resources in
our public-health systems that need to be devoted to flu vaccinations
and other things that actually kill people” in large numbers in America.
The
plane landed. The president, leaning back in his office chair with his
jacket off and his tie askew, did not seem to notice. Outside, on the
tarmac, I could see that what appeared to be a large portion of the
Malaysian Armed Forces had assembled to welcome him. As he continued
talking, I began to worry that the waiting soldiers and dignitaries
would get hot. “I think we’re in Malaysia,” I said. “It seems to be
outside this plane.”
He conceded that this was true, but seemed to
be in no rush, so I pressed him about his public reaction to terrorism:
If he showed more emotion, wouldn’t that calm people down rather than
rile them up?
“I have friends who have kids in Paris right now,”
he said. “And you and I and a whole bunch of people who are writing
about what happened in Paris have strolled along the same streets where
people were gunned down. And it’s right to feel fearful. And it’s
important for us not to ever get complacent. There’s a difference
between resilience and complacency.” He went on to describe another
difference—between making considered decisions and making rash,
emotional ones. “What it means, actually, is that you care so much that
you want to get it right and you’re not going 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.”
With
that, Obama stood up and said, “Okay, gotta go.” He headed out of his
office and down the stairs, to the red carpet and the honor guard and
the cluster of Malaysian officials waiting to greet him, and then to his
armored limousine, flown to Kuala Lumpur ahead of him. (Early in his
first term, still unaccustomed to the massive military operation it
takes to move a president from one place to another, he noted ruefully
to aides, “I have the world’s largest carbon footprint.”)
The
president’s first stop was another event designed to highlight his turn
to Asia, this one a town-hall meeting with students and entrepreneurs
participating in the administration’s Young Southeast Asian Leaders
Initiative. Obama entered the lecture hall at Taylor’s University to
huge applause. He made some opening remarks, then charmed his audience
in an extended Q&A session.
But those of us watching from the
press section became distracted by news coming across our phones about a
new jihadist attack, this one in Mali. Obama, busily mesmerizing
adoring Asian entrepreneurs, had no idea. Only when he got into his
limousine with Susan Rice did he get the news.
Later that evening, I visited the
president in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in downtown Kuala
Lumpur. The streets around the hotel had been sealed. Armored vehicles
ringed the building; the lobby was filled with swat
teams. I took the elevator to a floor crowded with Secret Service
agents, who pointed me to a staircase; the elevator to Obama’s floor was
disabled for security reasons. Up two flights, to a hallway with more
agents. A moment’s wait, and then Obama opened the door. His two-story
suite was outlandish: Tara-like drapes, overstuffed couches. It was
enormous and lonely and claustrophobic all at once.
“It’s like the Hearst Castle,” I observed.
“Well, it’s a long way from the Hampton Inn in Des Moines,” Obama said.
ESPN was playing in the background.
When
we sat down, I pointed out to the president a central challenge of his
pivot to Asia. Earlier in the day, at the moment he was trying to
inspire a group of gifted and eager hijab-wearing Indonesian
entrepreneurs and Burmese innovators, attention was diverted by the
latest Islamist terror attack.
A writer at heart, he had a
suggestion: “It’s probably a pretty easy way to start the story,” he
said, referring to this article.
Possibly, I said, but it’s kind of a cheap trick.
“It’s cheap, but it works,” Obama said. “We’re talking to these kids, and then there’s this attack going on.”
The
split-screen quality of the day prompted a conversation about two
recent meetings he’d held, one that generated major international
controversy and headlines, and one that did not. The one that drew so
much attention, I suggested, would ultimately be judged less
consequential. This was the Gulf summit in May of 2015 at Camp David,
meant to mollify a crowd of visiting sheikhs and princes who feared the
impending Iran deal. The other meeting took place two months later, in
the Oval Office, between Obama and the general secretary of the
Vietnamese Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong. This meeting took place
only because John Kerry had pushed the White House to violate protocol,
since the general secretary was not a head of state. But the goals
trumped decorum: Obama wanted to lobby the Vietnamese on the
Trans-Pacific Partnership—his negotiators soon extracted a promise from
the Vietnamese that they would legalize independent labor unions—and he
wanted to deepen cooperation on strategic issues. Administration
officials have repeatedly hinted to me that Vietnam may one day soon
host a permanent U.S. military presence, to check the ambitions of the
country it now fears most, China. The U.S. Navy’s return to Cam Ranh Bay
would count as one of the more improbable developments in recent
American history. “We just moved the Vietnamese Communist Party to
recognize labor rights in a way that we could never do by bullying them
or scaring them,” Obama told me, calling this a key victory in his
campaign to replace stick-waving with diplomatic persuasion.
I
noted that the 200 or so young Southeast Asians in the room earlier that
day—including citizens of Communist-ruled countries—seemed to love
America. “They do,” Obama said. “In Vietnam right now, America polls at
80 percent.”
The
resurgent popularity of America throughout Southeast Asia means that
“we can do really big, important stuff—which, by the way, then has
ramifications across the board,” he said, “because when Malaysia joins
the anti-isil campaign, that helps us
leverage resources and credibility in our fight against terrorism. When
we have strong relations with Indonesia, that helps us when we are going
to Paris and trying to negotiate a climate treaty, where the temptation
of a Russia or some of these other countries may be to skew the deal in
a way that is unhelpful.”
Obama then cited America’s increased
influence in Latin America—increased, he said, in part by his removal of
a region-wide stumbling block when he reestablished ties with Cuba—as
proof that his deliberate, nonthreatening, diplomacy-centered approach
to foreign relations is working. The alba
movement, a group of Latin American governments oriented around
anti-Americanism, has significantly weakened during his time as
president. “When I came into office, at the first Summit of the Americas
that I attended, Hugo Chávez”—the late anti-American Venezuelan
dictator—“was still the dominant figure in the conversation,” he said.
“We made a very strategic decision early on, which was, rather than blow
him up as this 10-foot giant adversary, to right-size the problem and
say, ‘We don’t like what’s going on in Venezuela, but it’s not a threat
to the United States.’ ”
Obama said that to achieve this
rebalancing, the U.S. had to absorb the diatribes and insults of
superannuated Castro manqués. “When I saw Chávez, I shook his hand and
he handed me a Marxist critique of the U.S.–Latin America relationship,”
Obama recalled. “And I had to sit there and listen to Ortega”—Daniel
Ortega, the radical leftist president of Nicaragua—“make an hour-long
rant against the United States. But us being there, not taking all that
stuff seriously—because it really wasn’t a threat to us”—helped
neutralize the region’s anti-Americanism.
The president’s
unwillingness to counter the baiting by American adversaries can feel
emotionally unsatisfying, I said, and I told him that every so often,
I’d like to see him give Vladimir Putin the finger. It’s atavistic, I
said, understanding my audience.
“It is,” the president responded coolly. “This is what they’re looking for.”
He
described a relationship with Putin that doesn’t quite conform to
common perceptions. I had been under the impression that Obama viewed
Putin as nasty, brutish, and short. But, Obama told me, Putin is not
particularly nasty.
“The truth is, actually, Putin, in all
of our meetings, is scrupulously polite, very frank. Our meetings are
very businesslike. He never keeps me waiting two hours like he does a
bunch of these other folks.” Obama said that Putin believes his
relationship with the U.S. is more important than Americans tend to
think. “He’s constantly interested in being seen as our peer and as
working with us, because he’s not completely stupid. He understands that
Russia’s overall position in the world is significantly diminished. And
the fact that he invades Crimea or is trying to prop up Assad doesn’t
suddenly make him a player. You don’t see him in any of these meetings
out here helping to shape the agenda. For that matter, there’s not a G20
meeting where the Russians set the agenda around any of the issues that
are important.”
Russia’s invasion of Crimea
in early 2014, and its decision to use force to buttress the rule of
its client Bashar al-Assad, have been cited by Obama’s critics as proof
that the post-red-line world no longer fears America.
So when I
talked with the president in the Oval Office in late January, I again
raised this question of deterrent credibility. “The argument is made,” I
said, “that Vladimir Putin watched you in Syria and thought, He’s too logical, he’s too rational, he’s too into retrenchment. I’m going to push him a little bit further in Ukraine.”
Obama
didn’t much like my line of inquiry. “Look, this theory is so easily
disposed of that I’m always puzzled by how people make the argument. I
don’t think anybody thought that George W. Bush was overly rational or
cautious in his use of military force. And as I recall, because
apparently nobody in this town does, Putin went into Georgia on Bush’s
watch, right smack dab in the middle of us having over 100,000 troops
deployed in Iraq.” Obama was referring to Putin’s 2008 invasion of
Georgia, a former Soviet republic, which was undertaken for many of the
same reasons Putin later invaded Ukraine—to keep an ex–Soviet republic
in Russia’s sphere of influence.
“Putin acted in Ukraine in
response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp. And
he improvised in a way to hang on to his control there,” he said. “He’s
done the exact same thing in Syria, at enormous cost to the well-being
of his own country. And the notion that somehow Russia is in a stronger
position now, in Syria or in Ukraine, than they were before they invaded
Ukraine or before he had to deploy military forces to Syria is to
fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in foreign affairs or in
the world generally. Real power means you can get what you want without
having to exert violence. Russia was much more powerful when Ukraine
looked like an independent country but was a kleptocracy that he could
pull the strings on.”
Obama’s theory here is simple:
Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia
will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.
“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” he said.
I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.
“It’s
realistic,” he said. “But this is an example of where we have to be
very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to
go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be
some ambiguity.” He then offered up a critique he had heard directed
against him, in order to knock it down. “I think that the best argument
you can make on the side of those who are critics of my foreign policy
is that the president doesn’t exploit ambiguity enough. He doesn’t maybe
react in ways that might cause people to think, Wow, this guy might be a little crazy.”
“The
‘crazy Nixon’ approach,” I said: Confuse and frighten your enemies by
making them think you’re capable of committing irrational acts.
“But
let’s examine the Nixon theory,” he said. “So we dropped more ordnance
on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II, and yet,
ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left
behind was chaos, slaughter, and authoritarian governments that finally,
over time, have emerged from that hell. When I go to visit those
countries, I’m going to be trying to figure out how we can, today, help
them remove bombs that are still blowing off the legs of little kids. In
what way did that strategy promote our interests?”
But what if
Putin were threatening to move against, say, Moldova—another vulnerable
post-Soviet state? Wouldn’t it be helpful for Putin to believe that
Obama might get angry and irrational about that?
“There is no evidence in modern
American foreign policy that that’s how people respond. People respond
based on what their imperatives are, and if it’s really important to
somebody, and it’s not that important to us, they know that, and we know
that,” he said. “There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be
very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what
is not. Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we
would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine,
they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea that talking
tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that
particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of
Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the
last 50 years.”
Obama went on to say that the belief in the
possibilities of projected toughness is rooted in “mythologies” about
Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy.
“If you think about, let’s say,
the Iran hostage crisis, there is a narrative that has been promoted
today by some of the Republican candidates that the day Reagan was
elected, because he looked tough, the Iranians decided, ‘We better turn
over these hostages,’ ” he said. “In fact what had happened was that
there was a long negotiation with the Iranians and because they so
disliked Carter—even though the negotiations had been completed—they
held those hostages until the day Reagan got elected. Reagan’s posture,
his rhetoric, etc., had nothing to do with their release. When you think
of the military actions that Reagan took, you have Grenada—which is
hard to argue helped our ability to shape world events, although it was
good politics for him back home. You have the Iran-Contra affair, in
which we supported right-wing paramilitaries and did nothing to enhance
our image in Central America, and it wasn’t successful at all.” He
reminded me that Reagan’s great foe, Daniel Ortega, is today the
unrepentant president of Nicaragua.
Obama also cited Reagan’s
decision to almost immediately pull U.S. forces from Lebanon after 241
servicemen were killed in a Hezbollah attack in 1983. “Apparently all
these things really helped us gain credibility with the Russians and the
Chinese,” because “that’s the narrative that is told,” he said
sarcastically. “Now, I actually think that Ronald Reagan had a great
success in foreign policy, which was to recognize the opportunity that
Gorbachev presented and to engage in extensive diplomacy—which was
roundly criticized by some of the same people who now use Ronald Reagan
to promote the notion that we should go around bombing people.”
In a conversation at
the end of January, I asked the president to describe for me the
threats he worries about most as he prepares, in the coming months, to
hand off power to his successor.
“As I survey the next 20 years,
climate change worries me profoundly because of the effects that it has
on all the other problems that we face,” he said. “If you start seeing
more severe drought; more significant famine; more displacement from the
Indian subcontinent and coastal regions in Africa and Asia; the
continuing problems of scarcity, refugees, poverty, disease—this makes
every other problem we’ve got worse. That’s above and beyond just the
existential issues of a planet that starts getting into a bad feedback
loop.”
Terrorism, he said, is also a long-term problem “when combined with the problem of failed states.”
What
country does he consider the greatest challenge to America in the
coming decades? “In terms of traditional great-state relations, I do
believe that the relationship between the United States and China is
going to be the most critical,” he said. “If we get that right and China
continues on a peaceful rise, then we have a partner that is growing in
capability and sharing with us the burdens and responsibilities of
maintaining an international order. If China fails; if it is not able to
maintain a trajectory that satisfies its population and has to resort
to nationalism as an organizing principle; if it feels so overwhelmed
that it never takes on the responsibilities of a country its size in
maintaining the international order; if it views the world only in terms
of regional spheres of influence—then not only do we see the potential
for conflict with China, but we will find ourselves having more
difficulty dealing with these other challenges that are going to come.”
Many
people, I noted, want the president to be more forceful in confronting
China, especially in the South China Sea. Hillary Clinton, for one, has
been heard to say in private settings, “I don’t want my grandchildren to
live in a world dominated by the Chinese.”
“I’ve been very
explicit in saying that we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened
China than a successful, rising China,” Obama said. “I think we have to
be firm where China’s actions are undermining international interests,
and if you look at how we’ve operated in the South China Sea, we have
been able to mobilize most of Asia to isolate China in ways that have
surprised China, frankly, and have very much served our interest in
strengthening our alliances.”
A weak, flailing Russia constitutes a
threat as well, though not quite a top-tier threat. “Unlike China, they
have demographic problems, economic structural problems, that would
require not only vision but a generation to overcome,” Obama said. “The
path that Putin is taking is not going to help them overcome those
challenges. But in that environment, the temptation to project military
force to show greatness is strong, and that’s what Putin’s inclination
is. So I don’t underestimate the dangers there.”
Obama returned to a
point he had made repeatedly to me, one that he hopes the country, and
the next president, absorbs: “You know, the notion that diplomacy and
technocrats and bureaucrats somehow are helping to keep America safe and
secure, most people think, Eh, that’s nonsense. But it’s true.
And by the way, it’s the element of American power that the rest of the
world appreciates unambiguously. When we deploy troops, there’s always a
sense on the part of other countries that, even where necessary,
sovereignty is being violated.”
Over the past year,
John Kerry has visited the White House regularly to ask Obama to
violate Syria’s sovereignty. On several occasions, Kerry has asked Obama
to launch missiles at specific regime targets, under cover of night, to
“send a message” to the regime. The goal, Kerry has said, is not to
overthrow Assad but to encourage him, and Iran and Russia, to negotiate
peace. When the Assad alliance has had the upper hand on the
battlefield, as it has these past several months, it has shown no
inclination to take seriously Kerry’s entreaties to negotiate in good
faith. A few cruise missiles, Kerry has argued, might concentrate the
attention of Assad and his backers. “Kerry’s looking like a chump with
the Russians, because he has no leverage,” a senior administration
official told me.
The U.S. wouldn’t have to claim credit for the
attacks, Kerry has told Obama—but Assad would surely know the missiles’
return address.
Obama has steadfastly resisted Kerry’s requests,
and seems to have grown impatient with his lobbying. Recently, when
Kerry handed Obama a written outline of new steps to bring more pressure
to bear on Assad, Obama said, “Oh, another proposal?” Administration
officials have told me that Vice President Biden, too, has become
frustrated with Kerry’s demands for action. He has said privately to the
secretary of state, “John, remember Vietnam? Remember how that
started?” At a National Security Council meeting held at the Pentagon in
December, Obama announced that no one except the secretary of defense
should bring him proposals for military action. Pentagon officials
understood Obama’s announcement to be a brushback pitch directed at
Kerry.
One
day in January, in Kerry’s office at the State Department, I expressed
the obvious: He has more of a bias toward action than the president
does.
“I do, probably,” Kerry acknowledged. “Look, the final say
on these things is in his hands … I’d say that I think we’ve had a very
symbiotic, synergistic, whatever you call it, relationship, which works
very effectively. Because I’ll come in with the bias toward ‘Let’s try
to do this, let’s try to do that, let’s get this done.’ ”
Obama’s
caution on Syria has vexed those in the administration who have seen
opportunities, at different moments over the past four years, to tilt
the battlefield against Assad. Some thought that Putin’s decision to
fight on behalf of Assad would prompt Obama to intensify American
efforts to help anti-regime rebels. But Obama, at least as of this
writing, would not be moved, in part because he believed that it was not
his business to stop Russia from making what he thought was a terrible
mistake. “They are overextended. They’re bleeding,” he told me. “And
their economy has contracted for three years in a row, drastically.”
In
recent National Security Council meetings, Obama’s strategy was
occasionally referred to as the “Tom Sawyer approach.” Obama’s view was
that if Putin wanted to expend his regime’s resources by painting the
fence in Syria, the U.S. should let him. By late winter, though, when it
appeared that Russia was making advances in its campaign to solidify
Assad’s rule, the White House began discussing ways to deepen support
for the rebels, though the president’s ambivalence about more-extensive
engagement remained. In conversations I had with National Security
Council officials over the past couple of months, I sensed a foreboding
that an event—another San Bernardino–style attack, for instance—would
compel the United States to take new and direct action in Syria. For
Obama, this would be a nightmare.
If there had been no Iraq, no
Afghanistan, and no Libya, Obama told me, he might be more apt to take
risks in Syria. “A president does not make decisions in a vacuum. He
does not have a blank slate. Any president who was thoughtful, I
believe, would recognize that after over a decade of war, with
obligations that are still to this day requiring great amounts of
resources and attention in Afghanistan, with the experience of Iraq,
with the strains that it’s placed on our military—any thoughtful
president would hesitate about making a renewed commitment in the exact
same region of the world with some of the exact same dynamics and the
same probability of an unsatisfactory outcome.”
Are you too cautious?, I asked.
“No,”
he said. “Do I think that had we not invaded Iraq and were we not still
involved in sending billions of dollars and a number of military
trainers and advisers into Afghanistan, would I potentially have thought
about taking on some additional risk to help try to shape the Syria
situation? I don’t know.”
What has struck me is that, even as his
secretary of state warns about a dire, Syria-fueled European apocalypse,
Obama has not recategorized the country’s civil war as a top-tier
security threat.
Obama’s hesitation to join the battle for Syria
is held out as proof by his critics that he is too naive; his decision
in 2013 not to fire missiles is proof, they argue, that he is a bluffer.
This
critique frustrates the president. “Nobody remembers bin Laden
anymore,” he says. “Nobody talks about me ordering 30,000 more troops
into Afghanistan.” The red-line crisis, he said, “is the point of the
inverted pyramid upon which all other theories rest.”
One
afternoon in late January, as I was leaving the Oval Office, I mentioned
to Obama a moment from an interview in 2012 when he told me that he
would not allow Iran to gain possession of a nuclear weapon. “You said,
‘I’m the president of the United States, I don’t bluff.’ ”
He said, “I don’t.”
Shortly
after that interview four years ago, Ehud Barak, who was then the
defense minister of Israel, asked me whether I thought Obama’s no-bluff
promise was itself a bluff. I answered that I found it difficult to
imagine that the leader of the United States would bluff about something
so consequential. But Barak’s question had stayed with me. So as I
stood in the doorway with the president, I asked: “Was it a bluff?” I
told him that few people now believe he actually would have attacked
Iran to keep it from getting a nuclear weapon.
“That’s interesting,” he said, noncommittally.
I started to talk: “Do you—”
He
interrupted. “I actually would have,” he said, meaning that he would
have struck Iran’s nuclear facilities. “If I saw them break out.”
He
added, “Now, the argument that can’t be resolved, because it’s entirely
situational, was what constitutes them getting” the bomb. “This was the
argument I was having with Bibi Netanyahu.” Netanyahu wanted Obama to
prevent Iran from being capable of building a bomb, not merely from
possessing a bomb.
“You were right to believe it,” the president
said. And then he made his key point. “This was in the category of an
American interest.”
I was reminded then of something Derek
Chollet, a former National Security Council official, told me: “Obama is
a gambler, not a bluffer.”
The
president has placed some huge bets. Last May, as he was trying to move
the Iran nuclear deal through Congress, I told him that the agreement
was making me nervous. His response was telling. “Look, 20 years from
now, I’m still going to be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear
weapon, it’s my name on this,” he said. “I think it’s fair to say that
in addition to our profound national-security interests, I have a
personal interest in locking this down.”
In the matter of the
Syrian regime and its Iranian and Russian sponsors, Obama has bet, and
seems prepared to continue betting, that the price of direct U.S. action
would be higher than the price of inaction. And he is sanguine enough
to live with the perilous ambiguities of his decisions. Though in his
Nobel Peace Prize speech in 2009, Obama said, “Inaction tears at our
conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later,” today the
opinions of humanitarian interventionists do not seem to move him, at
least not publicly. He undoubtedly knows that a next-generation Samantha
Power will write critically of his unwillingness to do more to prevent
the continuing slaughter in Syria. (For that matter, Samantha Power will
also be the subject of criticism from the next Samantha Power.) As he
comes to the end of his presidency, Obama believes he has done his
country a large favor by keeping it out of the maelstrom—and he
believes, I suspect, that historians will one day judge him wise for
having done so.
Inside the West Wing, officials say that Obama, as
a president who inherited a financial crisis and two active wars from
his predecessor, is keen to leave “a clean barn” to whoever succeeds
him. This is why the fight against isis, a
group he considers to be a direct, though not existential, threat to
the U.S., is his most urgent priority for the remainder of his
presidency; killing the so-called caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, is one of the top goals of the American national-security
apparatus in Obama’s last year.
Of course, isis
was midwifed into existence, in part, by the Assad regime. Yet by
Obama’s stringent standards, Assad’s continued rule for the moment still
doesn’t rise to the level of direct challenge to America’s national
security.
This is what is so controversial about the president’s
approach, and what will be controversial for years to come—the standard
he has used to define what, exactly, constitutes a direct threat.
Obama
has come to a number of dovetailing conclusions about the world, and
about America’s role in it. The first is that the Middle East is no
longer terribly important to American interests. The second is that even
if the Middle East were surpassingly important, there would still be
little an American president could do to make it a better place. The
third is that the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems
that manifest themselves most drastically in the Middle East inevitably
leads to warfare, to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and to the eventual
hemorrhaging of U.S. credibility and power. The fourth is that the world
cannot afford to see the diminishment of U.S. power. Just as the
leaders of several American allies have found Obama’s leadership
inadequate to the tasks before him, he himself has found world
leadership wanting: global partners who often lack the vision and the
will to spend political capital in pursuit of broad, progressive goals,
and adversaries who are not, in his mind, as rational as he is. Obama
believes that history has sides, and that America’s adversaries—and some
of its putative allies—have situated themselves on the wrong one, a
place where tribalism, fundamentalism, sectarianism, and militarism
still flourish. What they don’t understand is that history is bending in
his direction.
“The central argument is that by keeping America
from immersing itself in the crises of the Middle East, the
foreign-policy establishment believes that the president is
precipitating our decline,” Ben Rhodes told me. “But the president
himself takes the opposite view, which is that overextension in the
Middle East will ultimately harm our economy, harm our ability to look
for other opportunities and to deal with other challenges, and, most
important, endanger the lives of American service members for reasons
that are not in the direct American national-security interest.”
If
you are a supporter of the president, his strategy makes eminent sense:
Double down in those parts of the world where success is plausible, and
limit America’s exposure to the rest. His critics believe, however,
that problems like those presented by the Middle East don’t solve
themselves—that, without American intervention, they metastasize.
At
the moment, Syria, where history appears to be bending toward greater
chaos, poses the most direct challenge to the president’s worldview.
George
W. Bush was also a gambler, not a bluffer. He will be remembered
harshly for the things he did in the Middle East. Barack Obama is
gambling that he will be judged well for the things he didn’t do.
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