By Noah Rothman
Friday, May 09, 2025
Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ben
Rhodes, tried to put a brave face on things. “We see this trip as really
bringing together a number of the President’s top priorities really for the
last seven and a half years,” he told reporters ahead of the president’s sojourn to a G-20
summit in China just weeks before the 2016 election. There was, however, no
salvaging the president’s vaunted “pivot to Asia.” That was a dead letter.
By September 2016, the twelve-country Trans-Pacific
Partnership, a free-trade bloc aimed at pressuring China to reform its trade
practices if it wanted access to Pacific Rim consumer markets, had become the
target of bipartisan demagoguery. It would soon be abandoned. The goal of
augmenting America’s blue-water Navy had floundered, as had the effort to shift
U.S. assets to the Pacific. Near the end, Obama’s political appointees were
fighting a public battle with the Pentagon over whether it would be provocative
and counterproductive even to transit maritime assets through the South China Sea — an indication of the degree
to which the 44th president’s brain trust believed the “pivot” should eschew
confrontation in favor of inking climate accords with Beijing.
Obama’s pivot failed. But, as CNN observed at the time, “It’s not for lack of effort.”
The outlet cast a rosy hue on the former president’s cultivation of
governmental and military relations with America’s frontline partners in East
Asia, but that was only one facet of Obama’s strategy. Another more prominent
feature of the pivot compelled the administration to draw down America’s
commitments to the Middle East and Europe — regions Obama’s inner circle held
in contempt. These were the hotspots of the past; hopeless, tribal relics to
which the United States maintained only vestigial obligations and from which
America must extricate itself if it was to realize its strategic goals.
Sound familiar? It should. Obama’s “pivot to Asia” failed
because it was predicated on the assumption that the United States must shed
its hegemonic role if it is to win the future. The very attempt to withdraw
from Western Asia and Eastern Europe ensured that those regions would become more
vexing to American policymakers, not less — scuttling Obama’s program of
retrenchment.
For Europe, the “pivot to Asia” consisted of hectoring
America’s friends and cozying up to its enemies. Obama earned for himself the
title of “most anti-British American president there has ever been.”
That may be a tendentious reading of American history, but Obama did his best
to earn the title. Despite the former president’s cultural affinities, he
treated the French and Germans with similar contempt. “Free riders,” he called them. He was eager to prevent
“Europeans and the Arab states from holding our coats while we did all the
fighting” — a doctrine that one Obama official infamously described as “leading
from behind.”
Obama sought to put the fear of God in America’s allies
via the Russian “Reset.” He entered office convinced that George W. Bush’s
cowboy-hat unilateralism was responsible for worsening relations with Moscow,
not Vladimir Putin’s permanent interests in Europe. Thus, he ditched a plan to
provide Poland and the Czech Republic with radar installations and interceptor
missiles. He withdrew brigade-size combat teams from Europe and presided over the
first occasion since World War II in which the United States maintained no operational combat tanks on the continent. The Kremlin
responded to these overtures with aggression, culminating in the first invasion
of Ukraine.
Obama executed a similar series of tactics in his effort
to cut the Middle East out of America’s strategic vision. By December 2011, he
had withdrawn every American soldier from Iraq, and he had empowered the
Iran-backed Shiite militias in the process with the hope that the mullahs would
somehow see to America’s interests. They did not, but Obama would not or could
not recognize it; he was too invested in a nuclear deal that would finalize
America’s divorce from the region.
The Arab Spring complicated the mission before it
scuttled it altogether. The implosion of the Syrian regime and the rise of ISIS
— a condition hastened by the Russian regime Obama had empowered and on which
he leaned to prevent him from having to make good on his self-set “red line”
for action against the Assad regime — forced Obama to reintroduce troops into
Iraq in 2014. Eventually, and despite Obama’s efforts to ignore the evidence of
his own eyes, the president deployed troops into eastern Syria, too.
Obama’s vision was for a smaller America — one that could
no longer fight a two-front war, one that no longer solely maintained the right
of free maritime navigation, and one on which its allies could no longer
depend. That vision was incompatible with a conception of America as the
preeminent power in the Western Pacific — elementary geopolitics would not
allow it. The lessons Obama learned the hard way should not be lost on the
so-called “restrainers” inside Donald Trump’s defense establishment.
This president, too, seems surrounded by defense planners possessed of unbound
self-confidence rivaled only by their disdain for the practitioners of
statecraft who came before them. They, too, would decouple America from its
European allies, shed U.S. obligations to keep the shipping lanes open, make
nice with Russia, and even exhume the Iran nuclear deal from the grave to which
Trump himself rightly consigned it. It is all, supposedly, in service of the
notion that the United States is too spent a force to manage its global
obligations. It has the wherewithal to confront only one adversary, and that’s
where it should devote its energies. As Obama learned, that is a self-defeating
strategy. The world will not cooperate.
Obama’s foreign policy suffered from a fatal conceptual
flaw. He treated America’s allies like problems to be solved while approaching
our adversaries as though they were assets to be unlocked. In Donald Trump’s
second term, a similar misapprehension plagues his foreign policy. This
president should heed Obama’s bitter experience and avoid his mistakes, even if
the “restrainers” in his midst are hell-bent on repeating them.
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