An Ominous Cliché

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 28, 2024

 

Bad news, America. According to the Pentagon, the total absence of any U.S. carrier groups in the Pacific for the first time in nine years amid hot conflicts in Europe and the Middle East is no big deal. Why? Because the “bottom line,” Pentagon press secretary Major General Pat Ryder assured reporters, “is we can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

 

Few clichés have earned the dubious reputation this one has acquired for itself over the years. Indeed, this was one of the favorite phrases wielded by Barack Obama and his allies to silence the former president’s critics. When deployed, it was meant to assuage justified concerns that one set of circumstances had not taken priority over another but without the slightest effort to explain how.

 

“When you’re President of the United States, you’ve got to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time,” Obama’s deputy press secretary, Bill Burton, told reporters in early 2010. His intention was to persuade journalists (who didn’t need much persuasion) that the Obama team could maintain its focus on the economy and handle national security in the wake of the attempted Christmas Day attack in 2009, in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded an aircraft armed with an explosive device that mercifully malfunctioned as it approached its U.S. target.

 

More often than not, though, Obama’s skeptics were proven prescient. The proliferation of threats abroad and the commensurate increase in Islamist-inspired terrorist incidents at home in the Obama era suggests critics were right to worry about the administration’s priorities.

 

“We ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time,” fumed former Democratic congressman James Moran over the Obama administration’s approach to bilateral relations with Russia. The remark was prompted by the discovery that a Russian arms manufacturer was purchasing weapons platforms from the Afghan government and selling them to the Syrian regime amid accusations that Bashar al-Assad was guilty of mass murder. “It doesn’t seem to be asking too much to have a coordinated policy here,” Moran observed.

 

But there was none. The Obama administration’s “walk” amounted to lending legitimacy to Russia’s diplomatic intervention on the Assad regime’s behalf, if only to absolve the president of having to make good on his self-set “red line” for action in Syria. The policy was exposed as a debacle when Russia intervened militarily in Syria in 2015 despite the presence in the theater of NATO assets — a dangerous situation predated only months earlier by Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine. The “chew gum” part never materialized.

 

“Washington has to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time,” said onetime Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs in 2013. He’d been asked if the president could see his ambitious second-term agenda passed and avoid antagonizing congressional budget hawks to the point that it risked a fiscal crisis. But Obama couldn’t. There would be no new assault-weapons ban, no federal “universal pre-kindergarten” program, and no increase to the federal minimum wage. There wouldbe a deal that kept the government’s lights on, but that did not put a stop to what Gibbs derided as “government-by-mini-crisis.” Those crises didn’t exactly redound to the GOP’s benefit, but they did consume Obama’s agenda. The president could not “walk and chew gum” with the grace he and his allies insisted he possessed.

 

As for America’s carrier task forces in the Pacific, the USS George Washington is expected to be introduced into the region later this year. But Ryder’s assurances that America’s force posture in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf have no bearing on its readiness in the Pacific rings hollow. Life is full of trade-offs. Sometimes, that means prioritizing either walking or gum-chewing.