Pursuing Ambitious Global Goals, but Strategy is More
By David E. Sanger, NY Times, January 20, 2013
WASHINGTON--Not quite nine months into his presidency, Barack Obama woke to the news that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize--not for anything yet accomplished, but for the promise that he would end the Iraq war, win the "war of necessity" in Afghanistan, move toward the elimination of nuclear weapons, tackle climate change and engage America's adversaries.
Yet beyond Iraq, his first-term accomplishments from that list are sparse. In a fractured world, President Obama struggled to define a grand strategy for America's role, apart from preserving its pre-eminence while relying increasingly on a changing cast of partners.
As Mr. Obama begins his second term, aides and confidants say he is acutely aware that his ambitious agenda to restore America's influence and image in the world stalled almost as soon as the prize was awarded. But the president has indicated that he plans to return to his original agenda, though he has hinted it may be in a different, less overtly ambitious way.
Bitter experience--from getting the most modest arms control agreement through the Senate his first year, trying and failing to engage leaders in Iran and North Korea, discovering his lack of leverage over Egypt, Pakistan and Israel, and finding Afghanistan to be a costly waste of American lives and resources--is driving him to a strategy reminiscent of one of his Republican predecessors, President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
It is a strategy in which Mr. Obama will try to redirect world events subtly, rather than turning to big treaties, big military interventions and big aid packages.
"The appeal of the Eisenhower approach is that it had a big element of turning inward, of looking to rebuilding strength at home, of conserving American power," said one of Mr. Obama's senior national security advisers, who would not agree to be quoted by name. "But there's also the reality that some of the initiatives that seemed so hopeful four years ago--whether it's driving down the number of nuclear weapons or helping Afghanistan remake itself--look so much harder now."
Whether this approach can work is very much an open question. His early forays into covert action and lightning-quick strikes--like the fast war in Libya or the cyberwar against Iran--have set back adversaries, but the satisfactions of striking with a "light footprint" have usually been temporary at best.
His promises of transformative change are now viewed around the world with more suspicion. There was the student in Cairo who cornered a reporter a year ago and demanded to know why the prison at Guantánamo Bay was still open, and the European foreign minister who, at a diplomatic dinner in Washington, asked whether "the pivot to Asia is another phrase for ignoring the rest of the world."
Mr. Obama's questions during Situation Room sessions, some of his current and former aides say, seem to reflect a concern that his first term was spent putting out fires, rather than building lasting institutions.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Harry S. Truman solidified America's post-World War II role by helping create the United Nations, the international financial institutions and the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe; President John F. Kennedy emerged from the Cuban Missile Crisis with treaties limiting the spread of nuclear weapons; the first President George Bush lured new allies from the ruins of the Soviet Union.
By comparison, Mr. Obama's biggest accomplishments have been largely defensive: a full withdrawal from Iraq and devastating strikes against the core leadership of Al Qaeda. (When President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan visited the White House last week, he was presented a scorecard: of the "20 most wanted" Qaeda leaders when Mr. Obama was first inaugurated, 13 were dead, along with many of their successors.)
The president's national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, has argued in speeches since Mr. Obama's re-election that in the first term the president built a broader alliance against Iran than any of his predecessors; that is true, but so far it has not moved the Iranians to limit their nuclear drive.
The United States has variously offered to increase aid to Egypt or restrict it if the country heads off on an illiberal path. So far neither approach has given Mr. Obama leverage in influencing the new government led by the Muslim Brotherhood. A promising start in building an economic and political partnership with China has devolved into an argument over whether the United States is seeking to contain China's ambitions.
If there is a big strategic bet in Mr. Obama's second term, it may be that Asia is that place. The huge, unexpected burst in oil and gas production in the United States has bolstered Mr. Obama's conviction that the United States has an opportunity to extract itself from an overdependence on events in the Middle East. In Asia, he has found a region more welcoming to American influence, largely because a greater American presence--meaning more naval ships and more investment--can quietly counterbalance China's rising power.
Mr. Obama's focus on Asia has reinforced his interest in the Eisenhower era. After the Korean War, Americans simply wanted to bring the troops home and focus on growth. Eisenhower had publicly committed to both balancing the budget and containing growing threats around the world, while in secret he began a broad rethinking of American national security called Project Solarium.
Just as Mr. Obama has privately worried about being manipulated by generals who were trying to lengthen the American involvement in Afghanistan, Eisenhower left office warning of the "military-industrial complex" that he feared would dominate American decision making.
At the same time, those who work with Mr. Obama, and parse his questions in Situation Room debates over the ability of the United States to influence events in places like Syria or Mali or North Korea, say they sense in him a greater awareness than he had four years ago of the limits of American influence.
He asks more detailed questions about how sending 100 troops, or 10,000, might influence long-term outcomes. Paraphrasing the president, one aide said he is more likely to ask, "So if we put troops into Syria to stabilize the chemical weapons, what can they accomplish in a year that they couldn't accomplish in a week?"
That is a product of Mr. Obama's bitter experience in 2009, when he yielded to advice from the military to send a surge of tens of thousands of troops into Afghanistan. He regretted it almost instantly. The move to an "Afghan good enough" strategy followed, with minimal goals and a quicker withdrawal of troops. Ever since, he has been hesitant to use traditional power in traditional ways.
"He has got to find the happy medium between not committing us to a decade-long ground war and choosing not to do anything," said Anne-Marie Slaughter, who was the head of the State Department's policy planning operation for Mr. Obama's first two years in office and has urged him to intervene more strongly in humanitarian disasters.
Mr. Obama's caution has incurred a cost. To much of the world, his presidency thus far looks unlike what they expected. He promised "direct engagement" with longtime adversaries, including Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea and Venezuela. He is one for five: only the generals running Myanmar responded to his letters, economic incentives and offers of a new relationship.
And what of the grand initiatives?
A proposal for a very large reduction in deployed nuclear weapons has been in the hands of the White House for months, but the president has not acted on it. Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. promised a new push to win passage of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was defeated during the Clinton administration. They have never submitted it to the Senate.
"We were assured by President Obama when he was elected that the U.S. would ratify this C.T.B.T.," Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, said on Friday. "But somehow, it has not happened."
Given the composition of the Senate, it is not likely to happen in a second term, either. So Mr. Obama, his aides say, will have to find another way; like Eisenhower, he will have to redirect American policy quietly, from the Oval Office.
