By Richard Fontaine
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
It was clear from the outset that Obama would preside
over national retrenchment. George W. Bush had waged a global war on terror and
campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, pursued years of confrontation with North
Korea and Iran, increased defense spending and foreign aid, and, with a
“forward strategy of freedom,” aimed to end tyranny around the world. The
traditional American goals of security, prosperity, and freedom would be advanced,
his administration generally held, through deep global engagement and the
vigorous and confident assertion of U.S. power.
Obama entered office believing that he could achieve the
same broad goals by doing less rather than more. In this he was with the
American people; as Senator John McCain’s foreign-policy adviser in 2008, I
could see the weariness among those who had, since 9/11, waged or funded the
country’s battles, who worried about future confrontations and global
unpopularity, and who sensed that the terrorist threat, because it was
diminishing, was not impelling the action it still required. The financial
crisis put the mood in stark relief, but it had built steadily throughout
Bush’s last years in office.
Obama offered not fundamentally different ends but
alternative means. America, he said, would be secure, prosperous, and free not
by fighting endless wars but by bringing wars to a close. It would best its
adversaries not by confronting them but through the extended hand of dialogue.
It would vanquish terrorism not by remaking societies in which extremism
thrives but by stepping up American efforts to attack the terrorists
themselves. And it would boost its economic fortunes not through the vigorous
projection of U.S. power abroad but by redirecting resources and energy toward
nation-building at home.
This recipe for restraint and retrenchment focused mostly
on limiting the exercise of America’s military power and avoiding steps that
might require its employment. It permitted ambitious, even grandiose,
diplomatic initiatives, ranging from resetting relations with Russia and the
Iran nuclear deal to a new beginning with the entire Islamic world. And it
rested on a particular ideological disposition. For Obama, the biggest
foreign-policy crises have arisen not from America’s failure to act when needed
but from intervening where it should have stayed aloof.
As Obama explained in 2013, “I am more mindful probably
than most of not only our incredible strengths and capabilities, but also our
limitations.” “Some of our most costly mistakes,” he added a year later, “came
not from our restraint but from our willingness to rush into military
adventures.” The lesson of recent history seemed clear enough: On balance, the
United States should do less in the world. The closest thing to an Obama
doctrine would dictate not a course of action but what to avoid — “Don’t do
stupid [stuff].” Rather than peace through strength, America could have
strength through peace.
Or peace of a sort. Obama sought to avoid not military
conflict per se but rather large-scale war of the Iraq variety, involving
ground troops and extended deployments. Despite having pledged to end wars, he
increased their number, carrying out military attacks in seven countries — more
than his predecessor. But his fear of the slippery slope to another Iraq led
his administration not only to wind down the wars but at times to telegraph its
lack of commitment to winning them.
In practice, the effects were often dire. Obama surged
troops to Afghanistan but set a deadline for their removal, allowing the
Taliban to bide its time and all parties to factor in American irresolution.
The complete withdrawal of forces from Iraq eliminated America’s hard-won
influence over the Maliki government, which over time hollowed out the Iraqi
security forces, followed Tehran’s political direction, and watched as its
misrule helped give life to ISIS. The abandonment of Libya — with no
stabilizing force to follow the toppling of its dictatorship — produced a civil
war, a terrorist sanctuary, and a vector for migrants hoping to reach Europe.
Failing to arm moderate Syrian rebels when it mattered most, or to enforce the
“red line” on chemical weapons, helped fuel a humanitarian catastrophe that has
given sanctuary to ISIS and destabilized the European Union. Obama did not
meaningfully arm Kiev after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and did not
respond to Russian attempts to distort U.S. democratic practice until well
after Election Day. For months, the Navy refrained from exercises to assert
freedom of navigation in the South China Sea as Beijing embarked on a major
land-reclamation and reinforcement effort. In the earnest attempt to avoid
Bush-like sins of commission, Obama engaged in his own sins of omission.
His administration often defended inaction by appealing
to the clock — what the 2015 National Security Strategy called “strategic
patience.” According to this view, Russia is a declining power whose economic
and demographic problems will increasingly limit its influence, and Moscow has
courted quagmire in Syria. ISIS is the JV team whose barbaric ideas will
eventually collapse under their own weight. China, with its unwelcome
assertiveness in the region, is actively isolating itself in Asia. In Iran, the
moderates will eventually triumph, and in Syria, Bashar al-Assad has lost
legitimacy and will eventually go. The arc of global history bends toward
justice — and toward order, security, and freedom as well, even if the United
States isn’t engaged in the hard work of bending it.
The counterfactuals cry out: How do we know things would
have turned out better had Obama made different choices? We can’t, but the
administration’s behavior is instructive. In many of these cases, after a
period of restraint it ended up engaging anyway — slowly, incrementally,
hesitantly, but with the aim of staving off disaster. Obama rescinded the
Afghan-withdrawal deadline, sent troops back into Iraq, armed Syrian rebels,
conducted belated freedom-of-navigation exercises in the South China Sea, and
imposed sanctions and expelled spies in response to Russia’s interference in
the American election.
***
The Obama administration did seize important
opportunities. Building closer ties with countries across Asia is the right
strategic impulse, and Obama had real achievements. He built on the
transformation of ties with India that began under Bush, strengthened alliances
with Korea and Japan, and won rotational access for U.S. troops in Australia
and the Philippines. The administration also engaged in the East Asia Summit,
ratified a treaty with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and
strengthened ties with Indonesia, Vietnam, and Singapore. It remains to be seen
how much the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s demise will undermine these
achievements, but certainly it will provide an opening to China to take a
position of regional economic leadership.
Elsewhere, too, the administration had key successes. Its
aggressive approach to al-Qaeda helped decimate its ranks. Its belated fight
against the Islamic State has gathered steam, and the efforts to bolster NATO
in Eastern Europe and boost maritime security in Southeast Asia have helped
reassure nervous partners. Reaffirming America’s commitment to defending Japan
and European allies signaled important resolve.
And yet the administration has been of two minds about
allies. Logic suggests that, in retaining the traditional objectives of
American foreign policy but seeking to do less in their pursuit, Obama expected
America’s partners to do more. Free-riding allies would have to step up and
spend more, take on additional military burdens, lead diplomatic initiatives,
and endure domestic political challenges to seal economic agreements.
Obama-era retrenchment, in the best-case scenario, would
have spurred other governments to take on their own responsibilities. More
frequently, however, vacuums emerged and were then filled in ways that damaged
American interests. ISIS and al-Qaeda found safe haven in Iraq, Syria, Libya,
and Yemen. Russia is more active in the Middle East today than it has been at
any point since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and it has initiated a program of
disruption and intimidation across Europe. China has stepped up its efforts to
solidify claims over most of the South China Sea and enhance its economic
influence over the region. Iran has become the primary external actor in Iraq,
Syria, and Lebanon.
A policy of retrenchment prioritizes international
efforts, both by importance and by odds of success. The administration’s
foreign-policy agenda was quite often perplexing, ranging from the obviously
important, such as fighting terrorism, addressing climate change, and pivoting
to Asia, to the idealistic, such as global nuclear disarmament, to the
admirable but impossibly unlikely. Obama’s administration devoted inordinate
time and energy to this last category, whether in attempting to secure an
Israeli–Palestinian peace accord when the odds of success were virtually nil or
in striking a cease-fire and Assad-transition deal with Moscow, which, in the
absence of American leverage, faced similarly poor chances. Opportunity costs
abounded.
Key allies in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, whose
appetite for American engagement rose with their sense of regional peril,
watched with concern as the administration and Congress combined to demonstrate
domestic political dysfunction, military incrementalism, hesitant economic
leadership, and haphazardly set foreign-policy priorities. Adversaries
attempted to take the opportunity to press their advantages. The world, and
Americans, wondered where all this was headed.
***
The immediate post–Cold War era was a period of uncontested
American primacy, with our country in search of a new global role and the
domestic political will to sustain it. After 9/11, the national focus turned to
fighting terrorism and wars in the greater Middle East. And as counterterrorism
has subsided as the organizing principle in U.S. foreign policy, new forces
have risen to take its place.
Their most pronounced features are global competition and
local fragmentation. The great powers are increasingly competing for regional
dominance and global influence. Ideology has reentered the arena, with liberal
democracy, populist autocracy, and radical Islamism among the available
alternatives. At the same time, longstanding features of the international
landscape are fragmenting, from the European Union to Middle Eastern borders,
from global trade liberalization even to American alliances with countries such
as the Philippines.
Much of this would have happened even if a different
administration had conducted American foreign policy for the past eight years.
In some areas, Obama improved matters. But in more, his restraint and
retrenchment fueled the competition and fragmentation that are today’s
hallmarks. For all his sunny optimism about the arc of history, the president
convinced Americans that the world is endlessly complicated, broken in key
places, and often inhospitable to U.S. engagement. Much more often than we’d
like, the conventional wisdom now goes, there just isn’t much the United States
can do about problems around the globe, and certainly not at an acceptable
cost.
And yet for all that, Obama’s foreign-policy failures
should not discredit the ideas of restraint and caution. Just as the Bush
administration’s stumbles in Iraq should not have tarnished the notion of
ambition in foreign policy — or of America’s standing up for freedom on behalf
of the oppressed, or of the need for military power as an instrument in foreign
policy — the incoming administration should not reject deliberation,
judiciousness, and a healthy skepticism about marshaling reasonable means to
achieve international goals.
Restraint is a virtue in foreign policy, at least
sometimes. Pushed too far, as Obama pushed it, and transformed into a rigid
ideology, it becomes a vice — just like ambition, or the use of military force,
or anything else in this life. But the underlying instinct is not intrinsically
wrong. It’s healthy, to a point. Where exactly that point lies is a matter of
human judgment, of politicians and policymakers attempting to locate the
national interest in an ever-changing world. On their ability to do this turn
America’s fortunes, and its future.
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