9

BARACK OBAMA AND THE PRAGMATIC RENEWAL

With all respect to James and Dewey, it takes more than a common sense instinct … to deal with the age of guided missiles [and] the age of revolution in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

—WALT ROSTOW

In the fall of 2002, John Mearsheimer, a well-known professor of international relations at the University of Chicago, pulled out of an antiwar rally scheduled to take place in Chicago’s Federal Plaza. To replace him, the organizers invited a young state senator named Barack Obama, who was scholarly, a fluent speaker, Chicago based, and available. Though the event was billed as an “antiwar rally,” suggesting a dovish unity of purpose, the ambitious Obama sensed an opportunity to present his foreign-policy views to a national audience. It was a potential breakthrough moment in his fledgling political career, though it was also fraught with danger. High-profile Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry had supported the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks, including the president’s move toward war against Iraq. Opposing the mainstream of his party and a popular incumbent wartime president was not the safest course for a politician with national aspirations to take.

Obama spoke after the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the nation’s best-known African American political figure and a stalwart of the left of the Democratic Party. Here was a chance to lambast Bush’s rush to war and present an alternative paradigm of what a black Democratic politician might sound like. Reverend Jackson’s rhetorical prowess certainly made him a hard act to follow. “This is a rally to stop a war from occurring,” Jackson declared. He invited his audience to look into the sky and count to ten. When the time elapsed, and the crowd lowered their gaze, Jackson explained: “I just diverted your attention away from the rally. That’s what George Bush is doing. The sky is not falling and we’re not threatened by Saddam Hussein.”1

Yet while Jackson’s antiwar views were theatrically rendered, they were also predictable. On the eve of a major welcome-home parade in 1991, Jackson had characterized the first Gulf War as a costly failure waged by “public school children and foreign technology,” the latter a quaintly protectionist reference to the Japanese computer components used in American munitions. “It’s right to love the troops,” Jackson said. “But the moral way is to love the troops when they are no longer troops.”2 In the tradition of Charles Beard, Jackson viewed war as a distraction from the essential job of correcting the grievous societal problems that scarred the United States. Americans came first, Jackson reasoned.

Barack Obama viewed America and the world differently, as his first sentence made clear: “Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.” Indeed, Obama devoted the next eight sentences of his speech to explaining precisely why some wars were necessary. “The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history,” Obama said, “and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could … drive the scourge of slavery from our soil.” His grandfather (a white Kansan) “signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army … He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil … After September 11…,” Obama continued, “I supported this administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again.”

What made the proposed war with Iraq so ill conceived, in Obama’s view, was its passionate “ideological” nature and its disregard of the apparent facts of the matter: “that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors … and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.” For Obama, launching a war against Saddam Hussein was “a dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics … What I am opposed to,” he said, “is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”3 It was a good line, but the applause that met Obama’s speech was less effusive than the acclaim that met Jackson’s more “passionate” address.

It is interesting to compare the attributes Obama extolled—reason and principle—to those he impugned: passion, ideology, and politics. It was a speech that reveled in cold, hard thinking informed by reason and evidence, that decried the consequences of following theories and ideologies unshackled from historical precedent. He name-checked Paul Wolfowitz for a reason. Obama abhorred the grandiose utopianism that he and his allies embodied, preferring policies that test and probe, reaping incremental progress, rather than those that seek to unveil or validate universal truths. The world is uncertain and constantly evolving. Framing policies informed by modesty and provisionality is the best way to avoid needless conflict driven by skewed threat perception and grand, unattainable ambitions.

This intellectual method has a name: pragmatism—a word often misinterpreted to solely mean excessive compromise in pursuit of any given goal. In his classic book Pragmatism, William James observed that “at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method … The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”4 The Harvard-based intellectual historian James Kloppenberg argues persuasively that Obama’s worldview and diplomatic method are informed by Jamesian pragmatism, writing admiringly that it is “a philosophy for skeptics, a philosophy for those committed to democratic debate and the critical assessment of the results of political decisions, not for true believers convinced they know the right course of action in advance of inquiry and experimentation. Pragmatism stands for openmindedness and ongoing debate.”5 The aftermath of the Second Iraq War rendered otiose grand Wilsonian thinking about America’s ability to bend nations, regions, and indeed history to its will. The rise to power of Barack Obama, and America’s diminished geopolitical circumstances, vitalized America’s principal contribution to world philosophy as a guide to foreign policy.

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Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 5, 1961, in Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama Sr., was Kenyan, and his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was from Kansas. But they shared many traits, including a restless yearning for varied intellectual and geographical experience. The couple had met in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii in 1960 and had married just a few months before their son’s birth. This exotic mixed parentage would have caused a stir had Barack been born in, say, Wichita. But as the biographer David Maraniss notes, during the week of Obama’s birth in Honolulu’s Kapi’olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital, the other newborns were named Arakawa, Caberto, Kamealoha, Chun, Wong, Camara, Walker, Kawazoe, and Simpson.6 To be mixed race, or Hapa, in Hawaii was unexceptional—a scenario that remained constant through Obama’s peripatetic childhood. His parents divorced in 1964, following Barack Sr.’s departure for graduate school at Harvard, and Ann met and married an Indonesian graduate student named Lolo Soetoro in 1965. The family relocated to Indonesia in 1967, and from the age of six to ten Barack lived in Jakarta—joined by a half sister, Maya Soetoro—and attended Indonesian-language schools. The world’s most populous nation was similar to Hawaii in its ethnic heterogeneity. It was only when Barack finished his schooling in Indonesia and Hawaii and attended college in California and later New York City that he truly began experiencing racial discrimination, his hand forced by the dismal realities of the mainland.

To provide her son with educational stability while she pursued a travel-heavy career as a research anthropologist, Ann enrolled Obama at the elite Punahou School in Hawaii, one of the best-performing schools in the United States. Barack—or Barry, as he was then known—was academically accomplished, although he also devoted a fair amount of time to playing basketball and smoking marijuana. After graduating from Punahou in 1979, Obama moved to Pasadena, California, and enrolled at Occidental College (or “Oxy”), a highly regarded liberal arts college, where he worked harder and played less basketball, having failed to make the team. Obama’s college friend Phil Boerner recalled the range of topics that he and Barry discussed:

 … the CIA, El Salvador … whatever news was in the L.A. Times, Jimi Hendrix, Euro-communism, socialism … Marcuse’s “An Essay on Liberation,” Voltaire’s Candide, how to bring change in the world, the right wing’s control of the media, totalitarianism, Alexander Haig, poetry, James Joyce, Kafka, the Enlightenment, enlightened despotism of the eighteenth century … Frederick II, Richard C. Allen, the Soviet Union, gigantic traffic jams in L.A., arts of the avant-garde … the rise of apathy in America.7

If Boerner’s recollections are accurate, then Obama’s conversational tastes showed admirable range and heft.

After two years at a gilded college in the privileged environs of southern California—not dissimilar to Punahou in a cultural and climatic sense—Obama decided to transfer to Columbia University. His move to New York City was motivated by many factors, one of which was simply to find “a bigger pond to swim in.”8 But there was more to it than that. Oxy was small and parochial, inhabiting something of a bubble in a part of Los Angeles that was already detached from the everyday. And its total student body of sixteen hundred included only seventy-five African Americans, “and you could count the black faculty members on two fingers,” a classmate recalled. “I was concerned with urban issues,” Obama said, “and I wanted to be around more black folks in big cities.”9 He moved from Pasadena to Morningside Heights with his friend Phil Boerner and shared an apartment at 142 West 109th Street. Obama walked the city as often as he could, drinking in New York’s myriad cultural attractions: a Sunday service at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where he “was lifted by the gospel choir’s sweet, sorrowful song,” a conference on political ideology at Cooper Union, African cultural fairs in Brooklyn, a speech delivered by Jesse Jackson in Harlem. Obama went off the radar during his time at Columbia—few professors remembered him well—flying low to the ground of the world’s greatest city.

In a manner reminiscent of Kennan at Princeton, Obama recalled in 2011 that during his two years at Columbia he was “deep inside my own head … in a way that in retrospect I don’t think was really healthy.” In a letter to his girlfriend Alexandra McNear in the fall of 1982, Obama confessed “large dollops of envy” for his Pakistani friends heading toward a career in business and his Hawaiian friends who were “moving toward the mainstream.” Obama’s mixed racial heritage, the absence of a stable family home, and financial insecurity placed strains on him. “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me,” he wrote to McNear, “in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me … The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and all the] classes; make them mine, me theirs.”10 Obama read, walked, observed, listened, wrote. His sensibilities were literary; notions of self, identity, and alienation were constants in his tangled thoughts. As he recalls in his memoir Dreams from My Father, “I spent a year walking from one end of Manhattan to the other. Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter.”11

Obama’s reading habits corresponded with this inquisitive, identity-seeking voice. Like all students at Columbia, Obama studied Literature Humanities (or Lit-Hum), a great books course that required students to read up to five hundred pages of philosophy a week—from Plato, Locke, and Hume to Camus, Sartre, and Marcuse. A fellow student recalled that he “was really involved in the discussions … It was a fairly serious discussion about philosophy.” Obama took a course with Edward Said but never warmed to the professor or the literary theory he taught. Boerner recalled that he and Obama would “rather read Shakespeare’s plays than the criticism. Said was more interested in the literary theory, which didn’t appeal to Barack or me.” Obama later described Said as “a flake,” a jibe that placed him in interesting company.12 Allan Bloom, for example, would have enthusiastically agreed.

But Obama also read texts that would not have figured in Bloom’s literary canon: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Richard Wright’s Native Son, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks, the poetry of Langston Hughes, Malcolm X’s autobiography. In Dreams from My Father, Obama recalls the impact each made on him:

In every page of every book, in Bigger Thomas and invisible men, I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even [Du Bois’s] learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power … Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.13

After Obama concluded his studies at Columbia—he majored in political science but never warmed to that subject—he spent two unfulfilling years working in the business world. In 1985, he decided to emulate Malcolm X and embarked on a journey of “self-creation.” He relocated to Chicago to take a job as a “community organizer” in its deprived African American neighborhoods for a salary of $10,000 a year.

Obama’s move to community organizing in the same city that had awoken Charles Beard’s social conscience a century before was inspired by his progressive politics and Harold Washington’s election as that city’s first black mayor, which dealt a death blow to “machine” politics in the highly segregated city. He worked on the city’s poverty-scarred South Side, where he helped establish a job-training program, a tutoring system to help underprivileged children get to college, and an organization dedicated to protecting tenants’ rights in Altgeld Gardens, one of America’s first public-housing projects.

The work was unrelenting, the challenges overwhelming, the disappointments legion, and the salary a pittance. But through community organizing Obama found a home, a more fully realized identity, and a church that helped with both: Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Washington Heights. In 1988, however, Obama decided to move on to the next stage of his career, focusing on law and politics, the metaforces that created, taunted, and neglected places like Chicago’s South Side. Obama was accepted into Harvard Law School and moved to Cambridge in the fall to commence his studies. But there was little doubt that Chicago had become his city, an anchor for the remarkable journey that followed.

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Obama was an outstanding student at Harvard Law School, where he attracted the attention of the faculty’s professoriate. He was a quick study, of course, and his ability to comprehend difficult concepts, and penetrate abstruse legalese, placed him at a distinct competitive advantage across a high-achieving cohort. But what struck his teachers and contemporaries as exceptional was his skill in navigating different legal perspectives—usually deeply felt—and finding a path through the thicket that did not fundamentally alienate the protagonists. With the support of both liberals and conservatives, Obama was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review, becoming the first African American to hold the position. Stilling passions, defusing rancor with humor, finding points of agreement, no matter how faint—all these skills permitted Obama to assume this position of leadership with the journal, and his editorship coincided with the journal publishing articles from multiple legal and philosophical perspectives. It was an era of genuine intellectual pluralism that united conservatives like Richard A. Posner and liberals like Laurence Tribe in admiration. Indeed, Tribe was sufficiently impressed by Obama’s rationality, work ethic, and intelligence to hire him as a research assistant for a project with the forbidding subtitle “What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics.”14 Like Walter Lippmann, Obama was a star turn in Harvard Yard. Great things were expected of him and he would not disappoint.

After graduating from Harvard, Obama returned home to the Windy City, where he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, whose faculty was nearly as high profile as Harvard’s—Richard A. Posner, Cass Sunstein, and Geoffrey R. Stone all became colleagues. In 1993, he joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a small law firm specializing in neighborhood economic development and civil rights, the issues that had consumed him as a community organizer. His legal and academic careers were soon to coexist with one in politics. Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996 for the 13th District, which spanned the South Side and included Hyde Park, the vibrant, multicultural neighborhood surrounding the University of Chicago that he and his wife, Michelle, also an Ivy League–educated lawyer from a modest background, called home. He was reelected in 1998 but then suffered a significant blow when he ran in the primaries against incumbent Bobby Rush in Illinois’s 1st Congressional District and lost by a margin of nearly two to one. In 2004, Obama drew the appropriate lessons from this humbling and outpaced an open field to win the Democratic nomination for election to the U.S. Senate. In the general election, he crushed his Republican opponent, Paul Wolfowitz’s contemporary at Cornell, Alan Keyes, by a margin of 70 percent to 30 percent.

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John Kerry lost the presidential election of 2004 after an ugly campaign in which GOP strategists built an unassailable lead on national security by tarring their opponent, a decorated Vietnam veteran, as unpatriotic. But Barack Obama was one of 2004’s winners. Kerry had campaigned with Obama in April and had been hugely impressed by his skill and potential. Kerry’s national finance chairman, Louis Susman, whispered to Kerry, “This guy is going to be on a national ticket someday.” Kerry agreed but was less patient: “He should be one of the faces of our party now, not years from now.” So Kerry invited Obama to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July. It was a remarkable vote of confidence in a junior senator of just two years’ standing.

Kerry’s choice turned out to be inspired. The speech met with acclaim in the hall and across the nation. Obama’s simple recounting of his family tree was riveting enough. But it was his ability to transcend that bitter election—to stake a claim as the grown-up in the room—that was especially impressive. The emotional climax of the speech extolled the merits of unity and decried the corrosive effects of negativity and the false dichotomies of the culture wars:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there is the United States of America … We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq … In the end, that’s what the election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?15

The convention hall rattled to a crescendo of applause. There were tears, whooping, stomping feet—all achieved without orchestration. Reflecting on Obama’s remarkable performance the following day, Hillary Clinton was bowled over: “I thought that was one of the most electrifying moments that I can remember at any Convention.”16 Four years later, confronting Obama as a political adversary, Clinton would come to rue Obama’s remarkable life story, rhetorical facility, and transcendent appeal. He embodied America’s virtues and promise, its complex composition and the vibrancy it engendered. Running against Obama must have felt like running against fate.

A few weeks before announcing his presidential candidacy in 2006, Obama delivered an important speech on foreign policy. He announced his intention as commander in chief to follow a “strategy no longer driven by ideology and politics but one that is based on a realistic assessment of the sobering facts on the ground and our interests in the region. This kind of realism has been missing since the very conception of this war, and it is what led me to publicly oppose it in 2002.”17 Hillary Clinton, the overwhelming favorite to secure the Democratic nomination, had one principal line of attack against Obama’s prospective foreign policies: he was inexperienced and hence might imperil national security. Obama had a devastating response: the “experienced” Clinton had voted in the Senate to authorize the Second Iraq War.

With similar lack of success, Clinton tried different lines of attack, chiding Obama for talking up the threat posed by instability on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and for announcing that the United States should reserve the right to strike there unilaterally against al-Qaeda if the need arose. Obama’s response was cool and robust: “I find it amusing that those who helped to authorize and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation are now criticizing me for making sure that we are on the right battlefield and not the wrong battlefield in the war against terrorism.” In the fall of 2007, Obama developed this line of reasoning, assailing “Washington group think,” “the foreign policy elite,” and “conventional thinking in Washington.”18 Obama could present a solid case that his foreign-policy judgment was sounder than Clinton’s, based on the farsightedness displayed in his 2002 speech in Chicago. It rocked Clinton on her heels every time Obama pointed this out.

Obama eventually beat Clinton to the nomination, assisted in no small part by his early opposition to the Iraq War. In the general election, Obama faced John McCain, a four-term senator from Arizona. With good reason, perhaps, McCain believed that he could succeed with the “inexperience” jab where Clinton had tried and failed. So when Obama declared, “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets [in Pakistan] and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” McCain chided him for this naïve bluster: an affront to Pakistani pride and an illegal threat to its sovereignty.19

White House press secretary Tony Snow made it similarly clear that President Bush had and would continue to respect Pakistan’s borders and that Senator Obama was engaging in reckless politicking. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had once rejected a proposed commando raid into Pakistan for the destabilizing effect it would have on Islamabad and for the damage it would wreak on bilateral relations. Weighing in with a rare admiring editorial, titled “Barack Obama, Neocon,” The Wall Street Journal admitted, “Anyone who wants to run to the right of Rummy on counterterrorism can’t be all bad.”20 John McCain observed on the campaign trail that he would “follow Osama Bin Laden to the gates of hell.” Obama might have replied that McCain would not actually pass through those gates, however, because there was a risk that hell might be destabilized—and better the devil you know.21

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Obama’s foreign-policy views coalesced throughout election year, although they never hardened into an “ideology.” He read popular books on foreign affairs by Fareed Zakaria and Thomas L. Friedman and met frequently with Democratic Party éminences grises like Tony Lake and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser praised Obama: “I thought he had a really incisive grasp of what the twenty-first century is all about and how America has to relate to it. He was reacting in a way that I very much shared, and we had a meeting of minds—namely, that George Bush put the United States on a suicidal course.” A meeting of minds, maybe, but Obama’s worldview was suppler than the reflexive anti-Soviet one Brzezinski displayed throughout the 1970s. He drew inspiration from a variety of sources that spanned the political and ideological divide. “The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush’s father,” Obama observed at a campaign event in Pennsylvania, “of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan.”22

But Obama’s self-identification as a realist does not capture the totality of his worldview—as his qualified admiration for Reagan suggests. The Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr exerted a significant influence on his thinking about foreign policy, and there was nothing narrowly realist about the complex architecture of thought expressed in works like The Irony of American History and The Children of Light and Children of Darkness. In a 2007 interview with the New York Times journalist David Brooks, Obama identified Niebuhr as a major inspiration: “[He] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”23

Niebuhr was sympathetic to the realist tradition, but his devout Christianity tempered the amorality engendered by its purest application. Obama, also a devout Christian, shared these sentiments on religious, moral, and tactical grounds.

As Andrew Preston observes in Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: “Without religion, Niebuhr argued, realism would invariably lead the nation astray because it would lack a moral compass and thus lack moral purpose, but without realism, religion could also be damaging because of its tendency to veer off into destructive idealistic crusades.”24 This was a thinker who stood on his own terms. Obama read and came to admire Niebuhr while teaching at the University of Chicago Law School. Niebuhr’s critique of John Dewey—for failing to comprehend that self-interest drove humanity more than any other single force, and for being led by his worthy pacific tendencies to ignore the reality that the existence of evil meant some wars had to be fought to complete victory—struck a resonant chord with Obama.25 This amalgam of realism and contingent idealism defies neat categorization, but pragmatism is the category that comes closest. In March 2008, Obama’s national security advisory team recommended that “pragmatism over ideology” serve as his foreign-policy tagline. As Jo Becker and Scott Shane wrote in The New York Times, “It was counsel that only reinforced the president’s instincts.”26

Throughout 2008, Obama provided details on how “pragmatism over ideology” might translate into practice. After defeating Hillary Clinton in the primaries, Obama traveled to Iraq to meet General David Petraeus. The architect of the “surge” recognized that Obama would withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq promptly if he was elected. So he pressed him for more resources while American forces remained in situ. “Look, if I were in your shoes, General,” Obama replied, “I would be asking for everything you’re asking for and more … But you have to understand that, from where I sit now as a senator, and from where I might sit if I’m elected president, we have ultimately different responsibilities.”27 Petraeus was not blindsided by this response. During the campaign, Obama had clearly stated that “by refusing to end the war in Iraq President Bush is giving the terrorists what they really want … a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”28 He proposed to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq within sixteen months of his election. But Petraeus did confide to an associate that he was surprised that Obama had talked more like a centrist than a liberal. Perhaps this was a reference to the fact that Obama had publicly indicated his desire to send more troops to Afghanistan, which he believed the Bush administration had misguidedly neglected in favor of its “ideological” war in Iraq. This reprioritization displayed Obama’s tendency to frame foreign policy on a case-by-case basis. There were more dangerous Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan than in Iraq, and policy should reflect this reality.

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Obama’s pragmatism, then, meant the absence of doctrine and dogma. It was a modest foreign-policy vision that suited the temper of the times, framed by a financial crisis that threatened to wreak as much havoc as the Great Depression. On September 1, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. A combination of excessive exposure to the subprime mortgage market and egregious corporate malfeasance had gutted this venerable investment bank, founded in 1850. The Dow Jones fell off a cliff—experiencing a one-thousand-point drop, its worst in history—and world markets soon followed. House prices plummeted as credit withered on the previously abundant vine. The crux of the general election turned sharply in a direction that favored Obama. John McCain’s forte was foreign policy, not economics, as was clear from his responses to questions on the financial crisis. His responses (and mien) ran the gamut from illogical to baffled to prickly. Obama was much more coherent on the subject, exhibiting greater authority than the man his senior by a quarter of a century. The economic crisis won Obama the election. But it also ensured that his fiscal inheritance was as toxic as Lehman Brothers’ assets.

The election wasn’t all about the economic crisis, however. There were foreign-policy question marks about McCain that similarly played to Obama’s advantage. Sarah Palin, for example. In a desperate effort to invigorate the GOP base, McCain chose the governor of Alaska as his running mate. Her selection helped invigorate both parties’ bases and alienated those in the middle. Palin’s grasp of foreign policy turned out to be uncertain, a significant problem given that McCain was the oldest man ever to run for the presidency. To confer some gravitas on Palin, McCain’s campaign arranged for her to meet with Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai, Iraq’s president Jalal Talabani, and Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili over the course of two days in late September. Henry Kissinger was also drafted to provide Palin with what The New York Times described as a “broad overview of international affairs, focusing particularly on Russia, China and the Middle East.”29 The evidence suggests that this was not quite a meeting of minds. A few days later, over the course of a calamitous series of interviews with the journalist Katie Couric, Palin described the view that the United States should proceed to direct negotiations with Iran and Syria—which Kissinger supported—as “naïve.” When fielding a question on U.S.-Russian relations, Palin claimed authority through proximity, observing, “You can actually see Russia, from land, here in Alaska.”

The unfolding spectacle was too much for some moderate Republicans to take. Colin Powell might have endorsed Obama regardless of McCain’s choice of running mate, but Sarah Palin made Powell’s decision to vote against his party easier:

Frankly, it was in the period leading up to the conventions, and then the decisions that came out of the conventions, and then just sort of watching the responses of the two individuals on the economic crisis. It gave me an opportunity to evaluate their judgment, to evaluate their way of approaching a problem, to evaluate the steadiness of their actions. And it was at that point that I realized that, to my mind, anyway, that Senator Obama has demonstrated the kind of calm, patient, intellectual, steady approach to problem-solving that I think we need in this country.30

Powell was not alone among independents and moderate Republicans in holding these views. That Obama had successfully wrested the center ground of American politics from the Republican Party was made clear on Election Day. Barack Obama defeated John McCain by a margin of 365 to 173 in the electoral college, turning blue traditionally GOP-leaning states such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado.

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After winning the election handsomely, Obama was inundated with advice from well-wishers. The Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro hopefully ventured that “containment is back,” building on his 2008 book that called for the United States to “contain” al-Qaeda through better intelligence and defter diplomacy, rather than legitimize it, and indeed radicalize more Muslims, through invading secular countries like Iraq. Alan Brinkley, professor of American History at Columbia, recommended George Kennan’s Memoirs when asked to identify one book that Obama should read before entering the Oval Office.31 Realists located Obama in their own tradition, prophesying a sharp turn from the pseudo-idealistic excess of the Bush years.

Wilsonian-inclined scholars also tried to bring Obama around to their way of thinking. In 2004, two political scientists had formally established the Princeton Project on National Security: Anne-Marie Slaughter—whom Obama would appoint chair of policy planning at the State Department—and G. John Ikenberry. Its bold intention was to emulate George Kennan and draft “the collective X article” for the twenty-first century. But it did so by drawing inspiration from Wilson, not Kennan. Titled “Forging a World of Liberty under Law: U.S. National Security in the Twenty-First Century,” the final report emphasized the merits of liberal internationalism, repudiated the Bush administration’s unilateralism, and recommended that multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and NATO be transformed into more effective decision-making forums. Multilateralism was the Princeton Project’s principal thread, but idealism and a devotion to humanitarian goals also drove the report. The intention was to rescue Wilsonianism from the tarnishing embrace of Obama’s predecessor. For some participants, the final report was also an opportunity to turn in an extended job application.32

In time, Obama would prove himself to be his own man—neither narrowly realist nor identifiably Wilsonian. His staffing decisions certainly reflected this duality. The president appointed Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state, a masterstroke that united his party, allowed for a major (Bill) Clinton contribution to Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, and placed an energetic, thoughtful, and experienced politician—a truly significant figure—in an office that had too often been peripheral.

Obama appointed General James Jones as his national security adviser, a man similarly hard-nosed, results-oriented, and possessed of no fixed grand strategic convictions. In the Pentagon, meanwhile, Obama retained Robert Gates from the Bush administration as secretary of defense. Cut from the same cloth as Obama and Jones, Gates’s views on most issues tracked closely to those of the president. “I’m not sure if he considers this an insult or a compliment,” Obama said of his defense secretary, “but he and I actually think a lot alike, in broad terms.”33

There were Wilsonians in his administration too. Susan Rice was appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Anne-Marie Slaughter followed Kennan, Nitze, and Wolfowitz in serving as chair of policy planning; and Samantha Power, author of the influential A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, was appointed to an advisory position in the White House—she would have placed higher had she not described Hillary Clinton as a “monster” during the primaries. Each had proselytized on the need for the United States to move more quickly toward humanitarian interventions when evil is being perpetrated, and each believed that American foreign policy was nothing if it did not stand for Wilsonian values. But when assessing Obama’s advisory team as a whole, it is the absence of ideology that stands out.

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At the outset, though, Obama’s energies were devoted to the chilling impact of the world financial crisis, not to geostrategic self-identification. In the first three months of 2009, the U.S. economy contracted by 6.1 percent, following a steep 6.3 percent drop the previous quarter. From its high-water mark of 14,198 in 2007, the Dow Jones had plummeted to 7,949 at the time of Obama’s inauguration before hitting its low point of 6,443 in March. Lehman Brothers’ demise was just the beginning, as the malaise moved from banks to manufacturing colossi. Chrysler and General Motors both declared bankruptcy in the president’s first hundred days. The financier George Soros was not engaging in hyperbole when he described the scenario as an “economic Pearl Harbor.”34 Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and adviser to his presidential campaign, briefed Obama on the major external threats that faced the nation. As Riedel outlined a grave scenario in which Pakistani nuclear weapons found their way to Islamist militants, the president interceded: “That’s scary. But in the meeting I just had before this one, the Treasury people told me that virtually every bank in the United States could fail before the end of the month. Now, that’s really scary.”35

Which is not to say that Obama’s foreign-policy inheritance was roseate in comparison. There were 161,000 American troops stationed in Iraq and 38,000 in Afghanistan. North Korea had tested a nuclear device and Iran appeared intent on acquiring a similar capability. China was becoming increasingly strident on the world stage; Russia, shored up economically by its bounty of natural gas, was at odds with Washington on various issues; relations with many European nations had become icily formal; goodness knows what al-Qaeda and its affiliates were hatching in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border areas; Osama bin Laden remained at large. As Obama confided to a close adviser, “I’m inheriting a world that could blow up any minute in half a dozen ways, and I will have some powerful but limited and perhaps even dubious tools to keep it from happening.”36

When Obama did delve into foreign policy in those early days, it was mainly to repudiate the “dubious tools” his predecessor had employed. On January 22, just two days into his first term, the president signed an executive order banning torture (or “enhanced interrogation”) and ordered that the prison at Guantánamo Bay be shuttered within a year and its inhabitants moved into the U.S. criminal justice system. The president stopped using the term “global war on terror” and made clear that he viewed his primary role as commander in chief—safeguarding the United States—in very different terms from Bush.

Yet Obama did not dispose entirely of his predecessor’s tool kit. Guantánamo Bay remains open today. Moving its inhabitants into the American criminal justice system, or sending them back whence they came, has become an almost Sisyphean prospect. The CIA’s program of rendition—the apprehension and extrajudicial transfer of a suspect from one country to another—remained in place. The “extraordinary” part of rendition, where the suspect is tortured by an illiberal regime at the end of the journey, was prohibited on paper. But it is impossible to verify with certainty whether this practice has ended. Attorney General Eric Holder’s insistence on “assurances from the receiving country” that the suspect would not be tortured is not necessarily watertight, because details on how these assurances are verified are not yet in the public domain. Human Rights Watch hailed Holder’s announcement as a clear move in the right direction—the organization paid testament to “some of the most transparent rules against abuse of any democratic country”—but expressed regret that ambiguity remained on implementation and oversight.37

Obama said little about foreign policy in his inaugural address, observing that “we are ready to lead once more” and that “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals”—the first a reference to Bush’s knack for losing allies and alienating neutrals, the second a pointed reference to Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, and extraordinary rendition. But he had certainly said a lot about foreign policy on the campaign trail, and during the first few months he made good on some of these promises. In mid-February, the president dispatched seventeen thousand additional troops to Afghanistan, a 50 percent increase on the thirty-eight thousand already in post. Two weeks later, he announced that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Iraq by December 2011. Obama was winding down the war of choice and ramping up the war of necessity.

For his stated desire to engage with America’s enemies, Obama had caught flak during the campaign. But the criticism did not deter him from pursuing this path as president. To coincide with Nowruz, the Persian New Year, Obama sent a videotaped message to Iran in March stating, “My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us.” As part of a wider attempt to rehabilitate America’s tattered image in the Middle East, and win the confidence of the president of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, Obama also insisted to Israel’s president, Benjamin Netanyahu, that settlement construction in the occupied territories must immediately cease.38 The president publicly stated his expectation that Palestinian statehood would be achieved by 2011, and said that hard concessions would be required from both sides. (Obama’s confidence was wildly misplaced.) He gave his first foreign interview as president to the Arab television network Al Arabiya. During an early overseas tour that took in the major capitals of the Muslim world, Jakarta, Ankara, Riyadh, and Cairo, Obama declined (pointedly, according to his critics) to visit Jerusalem.

The defining moment of Obama’s early engagement strategy was a landmark address at Cairo University in June. The administration had spent months crafting the speech, testament to the importance it attached to repairing America’s image in the Middle East. In front of a crowd of three thousand, a black American president with the middle name Hussein began his speech with the words Assalamu alaykum, a traditional Muslim greeting that translates as “Peace be upon you.” It was clear that Obama possessed points of connectivity to the non-Western world that were unavailable to his predecessors. He discussed his paternal lineage, described his roots in a “Kenyan family that included generations of Muslims,” and spoke of the awe inspired by his “hearing the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.”39

It was a frank performance that celebrated his cosmopolitanism and his nation’s pluralism. It drew a line under the monism of the Bush administration: “I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.”

This was a critical moment in the speech, the point at which Obama’s virtues and Bush’s failings were starkly contrasted to the anticipated acclaim of the crowd. But the expected applause line did not materialize (although Hosni Mubarak was undoubtedly cheering on the inside). Human Rights Watch’s Tom Malinowski, who had informally advised Obama’s campaign, put his finger on the problem: “I don’t think he was aware that the audience both despised George W. Bush and desperately wanted Bush’s help in their cause.”40

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal two years later, Paul Wolfowitz identified as significant the moment when Obama’s modesty and preference for incremental change fell flat in a nation (and region) desperate to free itself from autocrats like Mubarak. It was the word “democracy”—not Obama repudiating his predecessor’s operationalization of the concept—that had stirred applause. Wolfowitz re-created what must have been going through the president’s mind at the end of that segment: “There’s something not quite right here. I’m about to say it’s controversial, and … they’ve applauded the mere mention of the topic.”41 But the significance of the moment became clear only subsequently. Obama’s critics immediately after the speech were less nuanced and incisive. Frank Gaffney, an aide to Richard Perle through the 1970s and 1980s, observed that Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but may actually be one himself.”42

Obama’s reluctance to hitch U.S. foreign policy to an unpredictable wagon like democratization was displayed clearly in the months that followed. A week after Obama’s speech in Cairo, Iranians went to the polls to cast their votes for one of two primary alternatives: the hard-line incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Ahmadinejad won the contest, gathering a suspiciously high proportion of all votes cast: 63 percent. Mousavi’s supporters took to the streets of Tehran—where Mousavi’s popularity was highest—to protest the fraud that had clearly been perpetrated. Hundreds of thousands assembled in pursuit of a green revolution—the color of Mousavi’s campaign, which was embraced subsequently by all who sought Ahmadinejad’s removal—but the government moved swiftly to strangle the movement in its infancy.

The demonstrations were the largest seen in Iran since 1979, but the United States refused to get involved. Obama condemned the brutality of the government’s response, in which scores of protestors were killed, observing that the “United States and the international community had been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings and imprisonments of the past few days.” But the chastening aspect of the president’s intervention ended there. “The United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Obama added reassuringly, “and is not interfering with Iran’s internal affairs.”43 His caution was conditioned by two factors that were comprehensible in the context of that time. First, Obama was keen to engage Iran on its nuclear weapons program and did not want to derail the possibility of direct talks that could lead to meaningful progress. Second, history suggested that American intervention in support of the protesters might undermine the independence of that very movement, allowing them to be portrayed by Ahmadinejad and his lackeys as unpatriotic stooges of the United States.

Again, Paul Wolfowitz took strong exception to Obama’s position, decrying his logic as devoid of values and, indeed, strategic merit:

On Iran, it was just terrible. To me the analogy is in 1981, when martial law was declared in Poland … Reagan saw it as an opportunity to drive a wedge into this opening, and he and the Pope went at it … You had a similar opportunity in Iran in June of 2009 … What did we do? We sat on our hands. Why? [Because Obama] entertained this hope that we could negotiate with the regime, and therefore we didn’t want to antagonize them … Which, by the way, isn’t even a smart way to negotiate. It suggests such an eagerness to negotiate that the other guy knows he has you.44

Wolfowitz did not state precisely what the president should have done instead. Another U.S. intervention in the Middle East might have midwifed a permanent democratic revolution in Iran. Or it might have drawn the United States into a civil war as bitter and intractable as the one in Iraq. Or it might have raised and then dashed the expectations of ordinary Iranians—alienating everyone. What we do know is that Obama’s inaction looked weak and unprincipled and Wolfowitz’s critique was easy to make but difficult to own. Henry Kissinger strongly backed Obama: “I think the president has handled this well. Anything that the United States says that puts us totally behind one of the contenders, behind Mousavi, would be a handicap for that person. And I think it’s the proper position to take that the people of Iran have to make that decision.”45

*   *   *

In 1895, the Swedish chemist and armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel established a peace prize in his will, to be awarded annually to individuals who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Some believe that Nobel added peace to chemistry, physics, medicine, and literature as penance for the dynamite that his factories had brought to the world. Whatever its rationale, the Nobel Peace Prize became one of the most significant accolades in world affairs. Previous American recipients include Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Elihu Root in 1912, Woodrow Wilson in 1919, Frank B. Kellogg in 1929, Jane Addams in 1931, Cordell Hull in 1945, Emily Balch in 1946, George Marshall in 1953, and Henry Kissinger in 1973. The Nobel Committee awarded prizes to each in homage to previous efforts and achievements—whether apparent or real, durable or ephemeral—in making the world more peaceable. But in 2009, the committee decided to reward promise rather than achievement. In recognition of “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” and for having “created a new climate in international politics,” Barack Hussein Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.46

Obama’s political opponents had some fun with the announcement, mocking the committee’s ulterior motive—this was clearly a swipe at Bush, not a reward for Obama—and the president’s slight achievements. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, was not alone in expressing disbelief: “The real question Americans are asking is, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished.’”47 It was a prize that Obama might have done without.

“To be honest,” Obama said upon learning the news, “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize.” But it was also impossible for him to decline such an honor. And besides, the award assisted certain of his aspirations, particularly in regard to the restoration of America’s reputation. “I also know … that throughout history,” Obama added, “the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes.”48 The acceptance speech itself was a wonderful opportunity for the president to build momentum, to explain to a world audience what he wanted to achieve.

Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech developed some of the themes present in his “antiwar” speech of October 2002. In Chicago he had to distinguish his opposition from that of Jesse Jackson. In Oslo he had to pay homage to Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi while dismissing the nonviolence they practiced as inapplicable to someone holding his office. Obama had to dim the crowd’s ardor by asserting that while peace is the ultimate aspiration of humankind, meting out violence against “evil”—the precise word he used—is often necessary:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified … I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.

Obama spoke directly to the tension in America “between those who describe themselves as realists or idealists—a tension that suggests a stark choice between the narrow pursuit of interests or an endless campaign to impose our values around the world.” The president maintained that there was fluidity across that boundary, that the pure application of either made for bad foreign policy. “I reject these choices,” said Obama, and he celebrated those individuals in recent history who had transcended the dogmas conventionally ascribed to them—alienating many traditional supporters along the way—in pursuit of larger goals:

In light of the Cultural Revolution’s horrors, Nixon’s meeting with Mao appeared inexcusable—and yet it surely helped set China on a path where millions of its citizens have been lifted from poverty and connected to open societies. Pope John Paul’s engagement with Poland created space not just for the Catholic Church, but for labor leaders like Lech Walesa. Ronald Reagan’s efforts on arms control and embrace of perestroika not only improved relations with the Soviet Union, but empowered dissidents throughout Eastern Europe. There’s no simple formula here. But we must try as best we can to balance isolation and engagement, pressure and incentives, so that human rights and dignity are advanced over time.49

“There’s no simple formula here” was the most revealing line in the speech. It signaled that the Obama Doctrine was the absence of one.

*   *   *

In the weeks after Obama’s election victory in the fall of 2008, Doug Lute, a three-star general, briefed the transition team on Afghanistan. A tall and imposing man, Lute did not pull his punches. As Tom Donilon, who became Obama’s deputy national security adviser, recalled, the very first PowerPoint slide stated an uncomfortable truth: “It said we do not have a strategy in Afghanistan that you can articulate or achieve. We had been at war for eight years, and no one could explain the strategy.” For Donilon and others, this was a startling revelation. What had the Bush administration been doing these past six years? What precisely was America trying to achieve in Afghanistan beyond the eradication of al-Qaeda training camps (which had been achieved by 2002)? As David Sanger asks in Confront and Conceal, Was it “a full-blown democracy with the rule of law and respect for human rights? A divided country in which every warlord runs his own piece of turf? A state-in-name-only that survived on revenue from opium, minerals, and foreign aid? Something else?”50 No one in the Bush administration appeared to have figured this out. It fell to the Obama administration either to provide an answer or head for the exit.

Members of the administration had different answers to these questions. Vice President Joe Biden believed that the conflict between the Taliban and the corrupt Karzai government was unresolvable—he began with the requirement for a swift American withdrawal and worked from there. President Hamid Karzai was an Ngo Dinh Diem–type figure who lacked popular legitimacy and whose government would fall quickly without U.S. support. Biden feared that Afghanistan could become Obama’s Vietnam, leading to a lingering foreign-policy death by a thousand cuts. Instead he recommended a strategy of “counterterrorism plus,” requiring the withdrawal of conventional U.S. ground troops and the increased use of Special Forces–spotted drone and cruise missile strikes. America’s focus should solely be on those individuals who seek to do the nation harm; anything more was fantastical. Biden was worried by those who did not care to remember their history. Susan Rice’s observation that Vietnam “is not the frame of reference for every decision—or any decision, for that matter. I’m sick and tired of reprising all of the traumas and the battles and the psychoses of the 1960s” was a source of concern to Biden and other like-minded colleagues.51 George Santayana’s observation that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” seemed apposite in the circumstances.

Hillary Clinton rejected the Vietnam analogy as misleading—embedding gains rather than cutting and running was her goal. Her preference was for a policy of “sustained counterinsurgency,” transferring General Petraeus’s successful surge in Iraq to Afghanistan. She and Petraeus believed the United States could actually win over the Afghan people by protecting them, through pressuring Karzai to reform and delegitimizing the Taliban by displaying the competence and durability of an alternative. If Clinton had a time scale in mind, however, it was undoubtedly shorter than the two generations that Petraeus had identified as a possibility in private discussions: “You have to recognize … that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It’s a little bit like Iraq, actually … This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”52 Her perspective was close to that of Petraeus but perhaps not that close. A key motive behind Clinton’s preference for sustained counterinsurgency was her desire to render permanent the progressive gains that had permitted some 2.4 million Afghan girls to attend school for the first time since the communist era.

President Obama was placed in a quandary. There was no obvious median point between stay and go. The ranking commander in the field, General Stanley McChrystal, made the president’s decision all the trickier in September when he requested forty thousand additional troops, noting that not doing so “will likely result in failure” in Afghanistan—namely, the collapse of the Karzai government and victory for the Taliban. More cheerily, McChrystal observed that while “the situation is serious, success is still achievable.” All General McChrystal needed was what he wanted and all the time in the world to use it.53 To older, more cautious hands, there was a distinct echo of General Westmoreland in March 1968.

But during the campaign, Obama had identified Afghanistan as the central theater in the ongoing fight against Islamist terrorism. It was well-nigh impossible for him to decline McChrystal’s request without looking shabbily opportunistic. And besides, Obama’s views on Afghanistan’s importance were sincerely held. Bush had taken his eye off the ball; Afghanistan was the war of necessity. Yet the president did not want to be bounced into a decision by a pair of generals acutely aware of their political power. Colin Powell, with whom Obama met frequently during his first term, furnished some sound advice on this subject:

Mr. President, don’t get pushed by the left to do nothing. Don’t get pushed by the right to do everything. You take your time and you figure it out … If you decide to send more troops or that’s what you feel is necessary, make sure you have a good understanding of what those troops are going to be doing and some assurance that the additional troops will be successful. You can’t guarantee success in a very complex theater like Afghanistan and increasingly with the Pakistan problem next door.54

Powell had served in Vietnam, had strategized the first Iraq War, and had better cause than most to lament the origins and course of the second. He was a man who commanded Obama’s respect. This made it doubly pleasing that Powell’s advice amounted to a triangulation of sorts—it was a call to ignore both the left and the right and follow his own instincts. Maybe there was a plausible middle point between Stanley McChrystal and Joe Biden.

*   *   *

On December 1, 2009, at West Point, Obama announced his policy decision on Afghanistan and spoke broadly about America’s role in world affairs, which the president believed had to become more modest. He would send thirty thousand additional troops to Afghanistan but on a strictly time-limited basis: they would begin leaving in the summer of 2011. Obama made clear that he would not accept “a nation building project of up to a decade” while at the same time rejecting the Vietnam comparisons that had been drawn frequently by the press—and indeed by members of his administration. The Vietnam analogy “was a false reading of history,” Obama said. “Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan.” On America’s place in the world, Obama noted that since “the days of Franklin Roosevelt, and the service and sacrifice of our grandparents and great-grandparents, our country has borne a special burden in global affairs … We have not always been thanked for these efforts, and we have at times made mistakes. But more than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades.” But times were changing and the nation had to refocus its energy on self-improvement: “That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended—because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”55

This Beardian flourish was one of the few aspects of the speech cheered by the left of his party. The right, meanwhile, excoriated Obama for setting a deadline for withdrawal—surely the Taliban would now simply wait America out—and for not furnishing all the troops that McChrystal requested. There was certainly something in the speech to annoy everyone, a quality that Obama shared with Henry Kissinger. But it was a typical Obama performance in its methodical nature, its precision, restraint, and apparent reasonableness. It was surge and withdrawal at the same time, a final roll of the dice before he pulled the troops home—come what may.

But there was also sufficient material there to stoke the concern of America’s allies. One European journalist observed, “For the first time, I can envision the United States returning to isolationism.”56 It is no challenge to surmise why Obama’s preference for rebalancing toward the domestic sphere caused this reaction. The president had approvingly quoted Eisenhower’s farewell address on national security—“Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs”—before adding ominously, “Over the past several years, we have lost that balance. We’ve failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy.” The president did his best to bathe the speech in optimistic rhetoric and references to the American fundamentals: “freedom,” “justice,” “hope,” “opportunity,” which taken together form “the moral source of America’s authority.”57 But the core message was jaded, its deliverer battle-worn.

*   *   *

The year 2010 was the deadliest of the conflict—499 American troops were killed in Afghanistan. The McChrystal surge was not replicating the Petraeus one in Iraq in terms of impact. How could it? The antagonists, political context, and terrain were so different. Obama began to worry that he had made a mistake in escalating the war, even on this time-limited basis. “You know,” warned Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state during the Clinton administration, in the summer of 2010, “he could lose the presidency on this one.”58 On the decision to order a surge in Afghanistan, New York Times journalist David Sanger observed that Obama “regretted it almost instantly.”59

In the summer of 2010, Obama was forced to put General McChrystal to the sword—for reasons quite unrelated to battlefield tactics. Rolling Stone had run an article titled “The Runaway General” in which McChrystal and his advisers were quoted deriding President Obama and Vice President Biden. After McChrystal’s first meeting with the president, one aide noted that Obama “clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.” Biden was lampooned—“Biden? Did you say: Bite Me?”—and his hostility to counterinsurgency doctrine was rubbished. (Obama had earlier reprimanded McChrystal for stating that Biden’s retrenchment would create “Chaos-istan.”) More generally, according to McChrystal, Obama was unsure of himself when surrounded by military brass: “uncomfortable and intimidated.” The impression the article conveyed was that President Barack Obama was weak-minded and effete, compared, at least, to that hard-headed, nunchuck-carrying leader of men: Stan “the Man” McChrystal.60

It is hard to believe that McChrystal did not realize by the end of the interview that the article might spell the end of his military career. No president could ignore that level of insubordination—a perspective that carried broad bipartisan support. Obama fired McChrystal the day after the article appeared, following a tense meeting at the White House. Afterward, Obama said, “I welcome debate, but I won’t tolerate division,” adding that it was essential that individual soldiers and officers—no matter what their rank—observe “a strict adherence to the military chain of command and respect for civilian control over that chain of command.”61 The president said that McChrystal’s departure would not alter his strategic priorities in Afghanistan, appointing the like-minded David Petraeus to take his place. Others were not so sure, sensing a gradual disillusionment with the course the president had launched at West Point. Reflecting on the Rolling Stone article, Bruce Riedel observed, “The description that it portrays of how our commander in the field is operating, and how some of the people around him are behaving, will definitely undermine support for the war.”62

By late 2010 there were one hundred thousand troops in Afghanistan, a significant increase over the thirty-eight thousand stationed there when Obama assumed the presidency. Throughout 2011, however, Obama moved sharply toward de-escalation in pursuit of a final withdrawal. Riedel’s prediction had been right. On June 22, the president returned to West Point to make another major speech on Afghanistan. Over the course of the address, Obama did precisely what George Ball and others had urged LBJ to do in 1965 and 1966. He declared victory and announced his intention to get out: “When I announced this surge at West Point, we set clear objectives: to refocus on al Qaeda, to reverse the Taliban’s momentum, and train Afghan security forces to defend their own country. I also made it clear that our commitment would not be open-ended, and that we would begin to draw down our forces this July. Tonight, I can tell you that we are fulfilling that commitment.”

Obama’s address also signaled a sharp break with the counterinsurgency doctrine propounded by McChrystal and Petraeus—at least in its Afghan incarnation—making clear that it was time for the Afghan people to step up and take control of their destiny. Addressing the camera directly, Obama said, “We won’t try to make Afghanistan a perfect place. We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely.” He reiterated a theme that he had first introduced, to the vexation of some, during his speech announcing the surge eighteen months previously. “Over the last decade,” Obama said in conclusion, “we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times. Now we must invest in America’s greatest resource—our people … America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home … Let us responsibly end these wars, and reclaim the American Dream that is at the center of our story.”63 In making his decision to wind down the war, Obama directly rebuffed David Petraeus. A year later, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (who replaced Robert Gates) announced that America’s combat mission in Afghanistan would end at the close of 2013. Obama had drawn a line under his predecessor’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had shown himself more than capable of reversing course when events on the ground counsel such a course. He appeared to agree with John Maynard Keynes’s question to a dogmatic critic: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Obama’s critics called him a hypocrite; hawkish Republicans attacked his lack of spine. To his admirers the president was refreshingly flexible.

*   *   *

Over the course of his presidency, George W. Bush had ordered forty drone strikes: targeted assassinations of high-value targets using unmanned drones carrying Hellfire missiles, operated at a remove of thousands of miles by CIA “pilots” in Langley, Virginia.64 Barack Obama’s presidency witnessed a step change in the number of strikes—more than four hundred at the time of writing—a widening of the program’s geographical remit, and a willingness to kill radicalized American citizens if the need arose and the opportunity presented itself. The CIA-led drone program was extended beyond Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq to include the targeted killing of alleged terrorists (or aspirants) in Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. In September 2011 in Yemen, a Reaper drone, operated by the CIA, killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a firebrand Islamist cleric, al-Qaeda operative, and American citizen—along with three other Americans “not specifically targeted.”65

Obama could not resist the temptation to celebrate a program that diminished and terrorized al-Qaeda without putting American boots on the ground. In one speech he observed, “We have had more success in eliminating al-Qaeda leaders in recent months than in recent years.”66 Drone strikes were the reason Obama shifted from supporting counterinsurgency in 2009 to rejecting it two years later. One foreign-policy adviser to Obama described the appeal of drone strikes succinctly: “precision, economy, and deniability.”67 Drone strikes also took no prisoners. And the last thing America needed was more of those in Guantánamo Bay.

These were advantages, but Obama’s increased propensity to launch drone strikes also posed large ethical questions. This was a policy of high-tech assassination, after all, that flouted the sovereignty of other nations. The Bush administration elevated preventive defense to the status of official policy—invading states on the basis of potential threats. Obama rejected this strategy on the metalevel but was evidently comfortable applying it to the micro. Eliminating individuals on the basis of their prospective threat to a state sounds like a plotline from George Orwell’s 1984 or Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Minority Report.” And because the United States was the first nation in the world to weaponize drones, Obama was setting a precedent that other nations will eventually follow. David Sanger asks the right question in Confront and Conceal: “What is the difference—legally and morally—between a sticky bomb the Israelis place on the side of an Iranian scientist’s car and a Hellfire missile the United States launches at a car in Yemen from thirty thousand feet in the air? How is one an ‘assassination’—condemned by the United States—and the other an ‘insurgent strike’?”68

Even though the drone program officially did not exist—the “deniability” element of its appeal—Obama realized that he needed an intellectually plausible and convincing answer to searching questions such as Sanger’s. The president certainly had a well-credentialed individual in-house to carry out this task. Harold Koh, the State Department’s top lawyer, had clerked for Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe v. Wade, was a former dean of Yale Law School, and was well regarded among liberal Democrats and touted by many as a future appointee to the Supreme Court. Koh had his work cut out for him. It is difficult to conceive of a more challenging or important legal commission.

In a speech delivered in March 2010 at the annual conference of the American Society of International Law, Koh provided a carefully worded defense of the legality of drone strikes (without ever using the word “drone”). At the outset, Koh stated that he viewed his duty as to serve as the “conscience” of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies, to ensure that the nation was “following universal standards, not double standards.” Yet it was clear from his research, Koh stated, that “U.S. targeting practices, including legal operations conducted with unmanned aerial vehicles, comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war.” How did Koh justify this assertion? Primarily through claiming that al-Qaeda had “not abandoned its intent to attack the United States, and indeed continues to attack us.” In those circumstances the targeting of an individual possessed of such desires represents what the Obama administration defines as a “lawful extrajudicial killing”—one that is “consistent with its inherent right to self-defense” under international law. An “unlawful extrajudicial killing” takes place when the United States does not provide sufficient proof that a target is possessed of those same inclinations. Koh’s case is logical in many respects. But it is also entirely predicated on trusting the government to make such determinations thoroughly, transparently, and without prejudice.

On the issue of breaching other nations’ sovereignty, Koh presented a neat formulation. The United States may target individuals only in a country that has permitted them to do so; such as was the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (or at least until May 2011). But the United States also reserved the right to act unilaterally where a nation in question is “unwilling or unable to suppress the threat”—a definition that would include anarchic nations with porous borders like Somalia and Yemen. Koh also made a final point that he believed critics of the drone program would do well to ponder: all war involves making mistakes that kill, but unmanned drones—which can hover above a target for hours on end—make fewer mistakes than even the most advanced bombers. As one operator told Koh, “I used to drop bombs from a flying airplane. I could not see the faces of the people … I am much, much more aware of the human concerns in these situations.”69

Drone strikes have been at the heart of President Obama’s counterterrorism strategy. Their success at eliminating major al-Qaeda figures explains why Defense Secretary Leon Panetta could state boldly in the summer of 2011 that the United States was “within reach” of winning the war against Islamist terrorism. But the policy has also created significant antipathy across the world. Do drone strikes eliminate high-value al-Qaeda targets? Absolutely. But it is impossible to gauge how many others have been radicalized by America’s drone program. These invisible assassins inspire fear and dread. But it is impossible to secure the United States from attack with recourse to these tactics alone. And the Obama administration’s silence did not help. Silence is understandably equated with sin.

In May 2013 at the National Defense University, Obama broke his vow of omertà. He delivered what an admiring New York Times editorial described as “the most important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks, a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America.” The basic message was: mission nearly accomplished. “Our systemic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” Obama said. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” In the course of a speech of remarkable candor, the president admitted for the first time that he had ordered the killing of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in a strike that also killed three other people, including al-Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son. The president provided strong evidence suggesting Awlaki was organizing terrorist attacks. Obama also stated his intention to transfer the drone program from the CIA to the Department of Defense and indicated his desire to discuss with Congress “options for increased oversight,” which might include a “special court to evaluate and authorize lethal action” or “an independent oversight board in the executive branch.” Crucially, Obama added that the only circumstance in which he would order a drone strike would be where there was a “continuing and imminent threat to Americans”—a tighter definition than existed previously.70

Less than a week after Obama’s speech, Pakistan announced that a U.S. drone strike had killed Wali ur-Rehman, the deputy leader of the Pakistan Taliban. The strike illustrated the merits and demerits of the program in microcosm. It is alleged that Rehman, who had a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head, orchestrated attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan and helped plan a suicide bombing that killed seven CIA agents at Camp Chapman in 2009 (later dramatized in the movie Zero Dark Thirty). As the deputy leader of the Pakistan Taliban, Rehman helped organize multiple suicide attacks in Pakistan that had killed thousands. The Pakistani government certainly did not mourn his passing.71 The U.S. government, of course, was pleased to have eliminated such a high-value target.

Yet the strike also infuriated the Pakistani government, a bystander to events, whose Foreign Ministry condemned the strike and where a consensus is emerging that American drone activity above its territory needs to be halted. The U.S. government refused to confirm that a strike had actually taken place, undermining Obama’s claims regarding transparency. Indeed, the speech was still being cheered as the missile eviscerated its target. From President Obama’s perspective, the tactical advantages far outweighed the reputational damage. It was bold, in many respects, to order a strike so soon after a speech that was hailed as a progressive landmark. But the strike laid bare the ethical quandaries that will face all future presidents in possession of this omniscience-encouraging technology. Imperiled nations that possess lethally effective weapons tend to use them.

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At the beginning of 2009, the CIA briefed Obama on the agency’s efforts to locate Osama bin Laden. Off-the-record observers of that meeting have indicated that the president was underwhelmed. He instructed his incoming CIA director, Leon Panetta, to make locating bin Laden the number-one priority. The additional resources that accompanied the reprioritization reaped dividends in the summer of 2010 when the agency made a significant breakthrough. They had been tracking an al-Qaeda courier named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who had led them to a fortified compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. The compound had some features that struck analysts as suspicious.

The three-story main building was custom built with large canopies to protect its inhabitants from satellite photography. High walls crowned with razor wire surrounded the compound. No phone lines were connected to the property. Many in the agency were convinced that the main building was home to Osama bin Laden. A false vaccination program was established in an attempt to secure DNA evidence from the compound’s inhabitants, but to no avail. It ultimately fell to President Obama to choose one of three options: launch an air strike, dispatch ground forces, or wait longer to find corroborating evidence. A final complicating issue was whether to consult with Pakistan or decline to share this information, since their intelligence agency (ISI) leaked like a sieve.72

Obama’s advisers were far from unanimous on how to proceed. Vice President Biden recalled that Obama “went around the table with all the senior people, including the chiefs of staff, and he said, ‘I have to make a decision. What is your opinion?’” Few wanted to make a clear recommendation, fearing the consequences—far graver, hypothetically, than those stemming from the 1993 Black Hawk Down debacle in Somalia—if the decision turned bad. “Every single person in that room hedged their bet except Leon Panetta,” Biden said. “Leon said go. Everyone else said, forty-nine, fifty-one.”73 As a salutary parallel, Robert Gates reminded them of Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated decision to send U.S. helicopters to Iran to rescue American hostages. The term “shit show” began doing the rounds as a catchall descriptor of the potential consequences of a botched U.S. attempt to kill or capture bin Laden in Pakistan.74

Weighing these issues, Obama ultimately made a decision that was both bold and stemmed logically from previous remarks on the issue of bin Laden and Pakistani sovereignty. The president rejected his cabinet’s caution and ordered implementation of the riskiest option. On the evening of May 1, 2011, two Black Hawk helicopters departed Jalalabad airfield in eastern Afghanistan and set out for Abbottobad. In addition to the pilots, the helicopters carried twenty-three Navy SEALs, an Urdu-English translator, and a Belgian Malinois dog to track anyone leaving or arriving on the scene. The SEALs penetrated the compound, killed bin Laden, stripped the property of hard drives and papers, and transported their bounty back to Afghanistan. In addition to bin Laden, the SEALs killed three men and one woman within the compound, including one of bin Laden’s sons. All the Americans were unharmed. Bin Laden’s body was identified and transported to the USS Carl Vinson, where his corpse was cleaned and wrapped, which was in accordance with Muslim custom, then dropped into the North Arabian Sea, which wasn’t. At 3:00 a.m. on May 2, two hours after the architect of 9/11 was shot and killed, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen informed his Pakistani counterpart that a military operation had been carried out in his country and that bin Laden was now dead. Relations between the two nations have never fully recovered. Islamabad viewed the raid as a flagrant betrayal of trust.

The dilemma that confronted Obama over how to react to bin Laden’s apparent discovery did not lend itself to triangulation. The president quickly surmised that the choice was between going all in with ground forces—eliminating the uncertainty that would accompany a missile strike—or not going in at all. Keeping Pakistan out of the loop evidently caused Obama little angst. He was simply acting in accordance with what he had said during the campaign, and for which he had received significant flak from both Hillary Clinton and John McCain. It was an incisive decision that stemmed logically from previous remarks.

Paul Wolfowitz was impressed by Obama’s decision. He hailed it as a “gutsy call” and implied that it ran against the grain of the president’s default leadership style: “Obama has just made the toughest decision of his presidency, arguably. It wasn’t a simple decision … He was in a position where he’d have to take responsibility for it if it went badly. It’s gone well. I hope he’s learned some of the virtues of boldness.”75

The praise and the underhanded criticism were both genuine. But Wolfowitz rather misreads his subject. Barack Obama is utterly ruthless and decisive when it comes to eliminating enemies when it does not require the deployment of significant military resources and where an exit plan is obvious. The president applies the Powell Doctrine to individual human enemies, who are dispatched with overwhelming force. It is on the larger matters of war and peace among nation-states that he practices caution.

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In December 2010, a twenty-six-year-old vegetable vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi doused himself in gasoline and set himself alight in front of the governor’s office in Sidi Bouzid, a rural town in Tunisia scarred by endemic corruption. Bouazizi couldn’t afford to pay the bribes required to get a permit to sell his vegetables. He died a month later from his burns and became a martyr and a catalyst to the cause of democratic reform across the Middle East. No one could have anticipated the consequences that stemmed from his desperate act.

Just the month previous, more than two hundred classified U.S. diplomatic cables had been published on the WikiLeaks website. Many were reprinted in high-circulation international newspapers such as The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and The Washington Post. Over time, some 250,000 leaked State Department documents were released into the public domain. Bouazizi’s self-immolation had followed a series of embarrassing disclosures about the regime led by Tunisia’s president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. It was Robert Godec, the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia, who unwittingly revealed details of the Ben Ali family’s opulent lifestyle that firmly suggested they were detached from reality. Godec wrote that “it is the excesses of President Ben Ali’s family that inspire outrage among Tunisians,” noting that these included Pasha, a pet tiger owned by Ben Ali’s daughter, and the family’s insistence on flying in yogurt and ice cream from the French Riviera. These WikiLeaks revelations were repackaged by Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian activist for social justice, and placed on the website TuniLeaks, which experienced high traffic. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton observed, “I’m not sure the vegetable vendor killing himself all by itself would have been enough. I think the openness of the social media, I think WikiLeaks, in great detail, describing the lavishness of the Ben Ali family and cronies was a big douse of gasoline on the smoldering fire.”76 It is a fire that burns to this day. And the Obama administration remains undecided about whether to fan or ignore it.

On January 14, Tunisian demonstrations acquired sufficient intensity to force Ben Ali and his indulged wife and progeny to flee for Saudi Arabia, a safe haven for oppressors. He became the first Arab leader in the modern era to be bounced from office by street-level popular antipathy. President Obama welcomed his departure, calling for elections that “reflect the true will and aspirations” of the long-suffering Tunisian people. It was a remarkable moment. The combination of WikiLeaks, Twitter, Facebook, and cable television had unleashed a protest of remarkable force and intensity that resonated throughout the region. Moments after Ben Ali stepped down, one tweet would prove particularly farsighted: “Today, Ben Ali. Tomorrow Hosni Mubarak.”77

The Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had been a steadfast ally of the United States for thirty years. The American ambassador to Egypt, Margaret Sobey, provided an astute appraisal of Mubarak in 2009, publicized by WikiLeaks: “He is a tried and true realist, innately cautious and conservative, and has little time for idealistic goals.” She added that he was not impressed by Obama’s predecessor: “Mubarak viewed President Bush as naïve, controlled by subordinates and totally unprepared for dealing with post-Saddam Iraq, especially the rise of Iran’s regional influence.”78 A sharp analyst of America’s geostrategic foibles, Mubarak also sat in gilded isolation atop a tinderbox. Inspired by events in Tunisia, tens of thousands of Egyptians began to congregate in towns and cities across the nation—Cairo’s Tahrir Square was the movement’s focal point—to protest policy brutality, endemic corruption, economic malaise, and the absence of democratic accountability. It was clear to seasoned observers that Mubarak would not be able to ride out this storm, particularly while the army was ambivalent about his fate. But he was certainly going to give it a try.

It fell to Joe Biden to provide the administration’s initial response to events in Egypt. On January 27, 2011, on PBS’s NewsHour, Jim Lehrer asked the vice president if Mubarak should stand down in the face of these nationwide protests. Biden replied with an unequivocal no, adding that the long-standing Egyptian president had been a “very responsible” ally in a volatile region—a statement that was essentially true. As Mubarak ratcheted up the brutality of the government response—tear gas and live ammunition were used in a failed attempt to subdue and break up the crowds—Hillary Clinton changed tack a few days later and called for “an orderly transition” in Egypt. But she did not specify when she thought Mubarak ought to depart. By February 1, the reality of hundreds of thousands of protestors in Tahrir Square began to force the issue. Obama had to make a clearer decision: support a long-standing secular ally or embrace the protesters and the uncertainty that would follow Mubarak’s departure. A significant concern was the prominence that the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood would likely assume in this new era.

The president felt he did not have much of a choice in the end. The revolution in Egypt was outside of American hands, its momentum near unstoppable. During a painful telephone conversation the following day, Obama advised Mubarak to step down immediately. The president was not convinced by Mubarak’s assertion that the protesters would disperse given time: “With all due respect, we have a different analysis. We don’t believe the protests are going to die down.”79 Mubarak continued to reject Obama’s analysis, observing that he didn’t understand Egyptian politics and that failure to support him would destabilize the region. Obama’s reply was firm: “Mr. President, I always respect my elders. You’ve been in politics for a very long time. But there are moments in history when just because things have been the same in the past doesn’t mean they’ll be the same way in the future.”80

Obama’s abandonment of Mubarak vexed many nations and individuals. Saudi Arabia was disappointed, as it set a dismaying precedent for similarly repressive regimes and it greatly strengthened Iran vis-à-vis its neighbors. Israel was nonplussed because Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt had been a friend in an unfriendly region. The potential rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood was regarded with great trepidation in Tel Aviv. With Mubarak gone, Israel would likely have to add another enemy to an already long list.

For many of the same reasons, Henry Kissinger was alarmed by Mubarak’s departure. Like Anwar Sadat, Mubarak had provided “an element of moderation in the region.” There was so much uncertainty as to what would come next that celebrations were both premature and unwise. “We shouldn’t delude ourselves that a moment of exultation is a foreign policy,” Kissinger warned. The prospect of an Islamist-led coalition assuming power was chilling and momentous, “a fundamental change to the kind of world that we have known since the end of World War Two.” Nonetheless, Kissinger realized that Obama had been dealt a poor hand and played it reasonably well. There was little that Washington could have done to save Mubarak, and supporting a military crackdown was unthinkable. Obama could not run the risk of placing the United States on the wrong side of history. “I think that the American government has behaved skillfully and thoughtfully during this immediate period,” Kissinger observed, although he would have preferred that the Egyptian people had opted for evolution rather than revolution.81

Paul Wolfowitz claimed a degree of vindication for the Bush administration’s democracy-promoting agenda. When asked whether the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt—part of a wider process of popular reform across the Middle East that had become known as the Arab Spring—could be connected to the Bush administration’s toppling of Saddam Hussein, Wolfowitz replied cautiously, “It’s a fascinating question, and one should probably simply … say it’s in the category of the unknowable.” When pressed for elaboration, Wolfowitz duly obliged: “I think Iraq took so long and was so bloody and is still so uncertain that it would be hard to say that it has inspired people … [But] the last thing he’d [Saddam] want to see is democratic revolutions anywhere … [Because Saddam would likely be] actively supporting [fellow dictators,] we very likely would not be seeing what’s happening … The absence of Saddam is a huge weight off the Arab World.”

It was a thoughtful answer to an unknowable question. But Wolfowitz’s critique of Obama’s handling of Mubarak’s departure was not so nuanced: “Egypt we just bungled completely. I mean, our position was always three days behind whatever was actually going on.” Wolfowitz faulted Obama’s caution toward the wave of reform rolling across the region. He called for the president to display more certainty in committing to the cause of democratization:

When you have freedom sweeping the Arab world, and you have people willing to risk their lives not as suicide bombers to kill innocent people, but to save lives and to gain freedom, the United States, first of all, should recognize generally speaking which side of the issue we’re on … There are all kinds of ways it can end badly, but that would seem to me to be even more reason to be deeply engaged—to find people who want it to end the right way and to support those people, rather than holding back.

Wolfowitz believed that America’s response to the Arab Spring could be reduced to a monotheory: embrace “the freedom sweeping the Arab world” and identify and support the “people who want it to end the right way.”82 Wolfowitz thought that forming a strategy toward the Arab Spring was simpler than it appeared—just as he had with Iraq.

Obama’s policies toward Libya followed the gist of Wolfowitz’s advice. Five days after Mubarak was forced from office in Egypt, protestors in Libya took to the streets—and to social media—demanding the release of the writer and political activist Jamal al-Hajji, who had called for Libya to afford greater rights to its citizens. As Muammar Gaddafi—whom Reagan had described as “this mad dog of the Middle East”—unleashed his security forces, the demonstrators proliferated in cause and number. It was not just al-Hajji they wanted freed, it was everyone—their goal was the toppling of Gaddafi’s repressive regime. Within days, Libya slipped into full-scale civil war as the rebellion cohered and its forces began advancing on Tripoli. During a bellicose speech in late February, Gaddafi indicated that his security forces would hunt opponents “house by house.” His son Saif indicated that there would be “rivers of blood” if the uprisings continued: “We will take up arms, we will fight to the last bullet … fight until the last man, the last woman … the last bullet [to] destroy seditious elements.”83 Gaddafi chose a different path than Ben Ali and Mubarak, one that ended in a darker place.

Obama’s advisers were deeply divided over how to proceed. Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates believed that a U.S. military intervention in Libya—or indeed anywhere in the world beyond Europe and Latin America—was utter folly. In a widely reported speech at West Point on February 25, Gates said, “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” During congressional testimony, Gates could not contain his contempt for the blasé way some of his colleagues were talking about instituting a no-fly zone: “Let’s just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defenses. That’s the way you do a no-fly zone.”84 Joe Biden agreed with Gates. Hillary Clinton was ambivalent on how to proceed.

The primary advocate for military intervention to assist the rebellion and oust Gaddafi was Samantha Power. But Obama was also under external pressure to do something—or at least help other nations do something. British prime minister David Cameron and French president Nicolas Sarkozy were both pushing strongly for American support to institute a no-fly zone—France and Britain possessed the will if not the resources to intervene alone. But the usual suspects were not all in agreement. In a remark that ran contrary to her reputation as an advocate of humanitarian intervention, but conformed with her reputation as a blunt talker, Susan Rice informed Gérard Araud, her French counterpart at the United Nations, “You are not going to drag us into your shitty war.”85 Yet there was one organization that did possess sufficient clout to persuade the United States to join the fray. On March 12, the Arab League—with twenty-two Middle Eastern and African member states—came out in favor of a no-fly zone, calling for the UN to provide the rebellion in Libya with “urgent help.”86

Enough was enough. During an NSC meeting on how to proceed on Libya, Obama was decisive. “If we don’t act, if we put brakes on this thing,” the president said, “it will have consequences for U.S. credibility and leadership, consequences for the Arab Spring, and consequences for the international community.” Permitting Gaddafi to destroy the rebellion in Benghazi, its principal point of origin, was “just not who we are.” Instead of imposing a no-fly zone, however, Obama instructed Susan Rice to secure from the United Nations a resolution stipulating that “all necessary measures” may be used to protect and assist the rebellion.87 This went further than Cameron and Sarkozy had requested and “called a spade a spade,” to use Robert Gates’s formulation, making clear that under no circumstances would the United States and its allies allow Gaddafi to prevail. UN Security Council resolution 1973 was passed quickly, with Russia and China abstaining. President Obama was delighted: “This is precisely how the international community should work, as more nations bear both the responsibility and the cost of enforcing international law.”88

Obama attracted criticism at the time for his slowness in making a decision to support the rebels in Benghazi and for his preference for multilateralism. It was surely an embarrassment that Britain, France, and the Arab League were out in front. Kori Schake, who had positions on the NSC and in the State Department in the George W. Bush administration, observed, “Stepping back and letting others do the work certainly isn’t a bold or brave moment for American foreign policy.”89 Following her two-year stint on the Policy Planning Staff, Anne-Marie Slaughter returned to Princeton in February 2011, unimpressed by what she had observed. “On issues like whether to intervene in Libya there’s really not a compromise and a consensus,” she said. “You can’t be a little bit realist and a little bit democratic when deciding whether or not to stop a massacre.”90

Critiques like these tend to underestimate how complicated the situation in Libya was and is. There were clearly positives. When Obama deemed circumstances propitious, he made a clear decision and followed through to conclusion. (He also failed to seek congressional approval for his action, which stirred considerable anger across the political divide.) Throughout March, the U.S. Air Force and NATO forces destroyed Gaddafi’s air defenses, a pivotal act that protected the rebellion. At the end of March, Britain and France took control of the air campaign, though technical deficiencies required them to be propped up now and again. At the loss of no American lives and at a cost of $1.1 billion—a small sum as these things go—the United States helped remove a noxious dictator in the Middle East. It was a military action, furthermore, that won the imprimatur of the Arab League and the United Nations.91

At the time it appeared as if the military intervention in Libya was everything the Second Iraq War was not: successful, swift, and legitimate. But there exists a strong possibility that “victory” there may also be Pyrrhic. On September 11, 2012, heavily armed militias attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, killing Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others. Embarrassment that the attack had been launched from the “friendliest” part of new Libya was one possible reason the Obama administration initially presented it as impromptu and provoked by an incendiary anti-Islamic video rather than a carefully planned operation. The instability and violence in Libya has got much worse since then, as militias—comprising many hundreds of different groups, including secessionists and Islamists—struggle for control. At the moment of writing, the nation is effectively lawless.

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The election of 2012 pitted Barack Obama against Mitt Romney, a centrist Republican forced to behave like an ultraconservative to secure his party’s nomination. It was the GOP candidate’s misfortune to run against an incumbent who—through a step change in the frequency, audacity, and lethality of drone attacks—was able to argue persuasively that he had waged war on al-Qaeda more effectively than his predecessor (and at a lower human and financial cost). The locating and killing of Osama bin Laden, meanwhile, was a priceless electoral advantage, armoring Obama against Republican attacks on his lack of fortitude. How could Romney communicate a greater desire to confront America’s enemies without sounding like Barry Goldwater in 1964?

The Republican candidate was rarely less convincing than when seeking to outhawk Obama on facing down Iran, Russia—“without question our number one geopolitical foe” (a designation that appears less hyperbolic now than it did then)—and China.92 Romney’s bluster was just that. There were in fact fewer differences between the candidates than either was willing to concede. In October 2011, Romney delivered a speech at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, that was widely reported for its bellicosity on Iran. During the speech, however, he also made an important cautionary point: “Our next President will face many difficult and complex foreign policy decisions. Few will be black and white.”93 Obama could hardly dispute the wisdom of this remark. He voices a variation on the same theme regularly.

That there were few substantive differences between the candidates on foreign policy owed everything to the temper of the times. George W. Bush was an electoral pariah, his costly and adventurous foreign policies now were unpopular with the majority of Americans. A CNN poll in the summer of 2012 found that 54 percent of Americans viewed Bush unfavorably—the same proportion that viewed Jimmy Carter favorably.94 For understandable reasons, Romney had to explain just how different he was from the previous Republican president. This meant he had to struggle to find substantive grounds on which to differentiate his own approach from Obama’s.

On Iran, for example, during the final presidential debate Romney attacked Obama for allowing Tehran to move “four years closer” to acquiring a nuclear weapon. But when pressed to state precisely what he would do differently, Romney had little to say beyond generalities about toughening the existing sanction regime.95 How could he? After trying to engage Iran and receiving nothing by way of a constructive response, President Obama had imposed suffocating sanctions and kept all military options firmly on the table. As David Sanger wrote in The New York Times, “The economic sanctions Mr. Obama has imposed have been far more crippling to the Iranian economy than anything President Bush did.”96

That Romney failed to establish any clear differences with the president showed how much America’s foreign-policy options were being narrowed by its economic distress. He never followed through on his vague criticism of Obama’s approach toward Syria. A Republican presidential aspirant talking up another military engagement in the Middle East was not manna from electoral heaven. Foreign policy played a peripheral role in the election of 2012. There was no edge to the exchanges on any issue beyond the Obama administration’s alleged obfuscation regarding the attack in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Stevens. Obama and Romney could find little to argue about. This scenario worked out fine for the incumbent. Handsomely assisted by Mitt Romney’s varied political failings—including a series of remarks at a fund-raiser in which the presidential aspirant dismissed 47 percent of the American people as “dependent” on government handouts and stated that “my job is not to worry about those people”—Obama comfortably secured reelection.

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Barack Obama has sharply reduced America’s military commitments during one of the nation’s most painful economic contractions. But this is no mere temporary lull in the nation’s global activism. Moderation and retrenchment is the present and the future. In December 2011, Obama withdrew the last remaining American troops from Iraq. A month later, he unveiled a new statement of intent, the Defense Strategic Guidance, which explicitly repudiated the democracy-enlarging Wilsonian logic presented in the Bush administration’s NSS 2002. Obama announced that the standing army would be cut from 570,000 to 490,000. The existing policy, which held that the nation should possess sufficient military resources to win two concurrent wars in different theaters, was abandoned. America’s declared policy is now to be able to win one war while merely stymying a potential assault elsewhere. “This country is at a strategic turning point after a decade of war,” Obama’s preface to the document declared, “and, therefore, we are shaping a Joint Force for the future that will be smaller and leaner, but will be agile, flexible, ready, and technologically advanced.” The document called for the Pentagon “to reduce the ‘cost of doing business.’”97

A month in advance of the publication of the document—to prepare the Pentagon for the pain that would inevitably follow—Obama invited the Joint Chiefs and the military’s most prominent figures to a ceremonial dinner at the White House’s State Dining Room. From 2001 to 2011, the Pentagon’s budget had grown by 67 percent in real terms. Its annual budget of $700 billion exceeded that of the next twenty nations combined. Obama told the assembled brass that this was unsustainable, that the defense budget would contract by $500 billion over the next ten years. He torpedoed the Pentagon’s proposal to keep one hundred thousand troops on standby to engage in “stability operations” of the type the United States had been engaged in in Afghanistan and Iraq for close to ten years. Obama was indicating that the expensive business of counterinsurgency and overseas nation-building was over. “This was the end of an era,” one commander told David Sanger afterward, “and that was a hard concept for many in the room to accept.”98 Obama’s decision not only ended an era inaugurated by the second Bush administration, it also shut out the maximalist crisis logic contained in Paul Nitze’s NSC-68.

In his January 2012 State of the Union address, Barack Obama echoed Madeleine Albright in emphasizing the nation’s pivotal world role: “America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs—and as long as I am President, I intend to keep it that way.”99 His words were both sincere and accurate. Britain and France had agitated for intervention in Libya but could do nothing without U.S. participation. The same is true in respect to Syria. In spite of swinging cuts to the Pentagon’s budget, the United States has no genuine peer competitor in the military realm.

But there was something new. The concept of “opportunity cost” had become central to American decision making on matters of diplomacy. R. Nicholas Burns had served as a high-level diplomat for thirty years prior to Obama winning the presidency. Through that tumultuous era, he said, “No one ever stopped and asked, ‘How much will this cost?’” Now it is the first question posed. In a major set piece speech on the Arab Spring in May 2011, Obama mooted the possibility of forgiving $1 billion of Egypt’s debts and establishing a “Middle East Fund,” seeded with another $1 billion to support reform across the region. This is small change in development terms. The Marshall Plan cost $150 billion in real terms. But how could Obama justify spending more to the American people?100

Further steep cuts in the defense budget were made in 2013 and 2014. In January 2013, Barack Obama nominated Chuck Hagel to replace Leon Panetta as secretary of defense. Senate Republicans objected strenuously to the appointment of Hagel, a Republican, to head the Pentagon. A decorated Vietnam veteran, Hagel had served on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and as cochair of the president’s intelligence advisory board. In 2006, however, Hagel had caused controversy by observing that the “Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people” in Congress. Hagel had also publicly supported the launch of meaningful dialogue with Iran on its nuclear capabilities and had voiced skepticism about the efficacy of a military strike against Iranian facilities.101

Fellow Republican Lindsay Graham observed that Hagel, if confirmed, would be “the most antagonistic secretary of defense toward the state of Israel in our nation’s history.” Senate Republicans filibustered his nomination—emboldened by Hagel’s uncertain performance during his confirmation hearings—for as long as they could. Provocatively, Ted Cruz of Texas mused that if Hagel was unable to provide the source for some of his speaking fees, then it was “relevant” to wonder if those monies in fact came from America’s enemies, such as North Korea. James Inhofe of Oklahoma suggested that Hagel was “cozy” with terrorist regimes such as Iran. But reality eventually caught up with the chamber, and the Senate voted for cloture on February 26, confirming Hagel by the narrow margin of 58 to 41.102

A year later, in February 2014, some of the GOP’s fears regarding Hagel’s alleged irresolution appeared to be realized. The Pentagon leaked a preview of its 2015 budget, which would necessitate a cut in the size of the Army from 522,000 to 440,000 troops, the lowest level since the Second World War—and 50,000 fewer than the proposal announced in 2011. Dick Cheney intemperately observed that this decision showed that President Obama “would much rather spend money on Food Stamps” than on keeping the nation strong. John McCain denounced the proposed reduction as a “serious mistake.” But like most political disputes in Washington these days, this contretemps is blighted by histrionics. The United States still possesses eleven aircraft carrier groups—where Russia and China have just one each, fitted with significantly poorer technology. The United States still spends more on defense than the next ten nations combined. This remarkable scenario far exceeded the wildest expectations of any number of individuals who have strenuously advocated “preparedness” in recent history, including Alfred Thayer Mahan, Walter Lippmann, and even Paul Nitze. The “correlation of forces” is still strongly tilted in America’s favor, even if the “correlation of economic forces” is more diffuse and complex. On the latter point, America’s place in the world is substantively different from ten years ago, which Barack Obama clearly understands.

*   *   *

The civil war in Syria is one of the gravest crises confronting the Obama administration, and indeed the world. In February 2013, the UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, confirmed that 70,000 had been killed in Syria since the uprisings began two years previously.103 A year later, in March 2014, the British-based anti-Assad group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated that some 146,000 Syrians had died.104 The humanitarian imperative is acute. But toppling Assad’s regime could also bring numerous strategic benefits. Iranian influence in the region would be diminished; the Middle East would be shorn of another ruthless dictator; Israel’s position would be strengthened.

China and Russia—the latter a long-standing ally of Damascus—were resolved to veto any Security Council measure to attack Assad’s substantial military capabilities, the only action that would realistically stem the bloodshed. But even with Moscow and Beijing’s abstention, Syria represents the most painful of dilemmas. The opposition to Assad contains a substantial extremist element. Were Assad removed from power, a bloody sectarian reckoning would inevitably follow. And Syria is a hugely challenging environment in which to launch a military campaign. It is doubtful that air strikes would be sufficient to topple Assad as they did Gaddafi. Reflecting on how the Libyan parallel flattered to deceive, one State Department official observed, “The only reason that we’re not doing the same for the Syrians is that it is hard.” A senior adviser to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told David Sanger, “There is no way to do this other than a full-scale war.”105

In June 2013, with great reluctance, Obama decided to begin arming the rebellion in Syria, primarily through the provision of antiaircraft weaponry. Too many “red lines” had been crossed. After receiving disturbing intelligence for a number of months, the president had concluded with certainty that Assad had used chemical weapons “on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year.”106 The likes of Paul Wolfowitz, John McCain, and Anne-Marie Slaughter had been urging the president to arm the rebels since the conflict commenced. A week before Obama made his announcement, in a “closed press” dialogue with Senator John McCain (subsequently published on Politico), Bill Clinton called for intervention in Syria to assist the rebellion. The former president observed that Obama ran the risk of looking “like a total wuss” if he heeded skeptical public opinion by refusing to intervene. “Sometimes,” Clinton said, “it’s just best to get caught trying, as long as you don’t overcommit—like, as long as you don’t make an improvident commitment.” He elaborated on the reasons why a U.S. intervention might be provident in the circumstances, paying reference to his own procrastination in Bosnia and Rwanda, and reflected more broadly on the lessons of history:

My view is that we shouldn’t over-learn the lessons of the past. I don’t think Syria is necessarily Iraq or Afghanistan—no one has asked us to send any soldiers in there. I think it’s more like Afghanistan was in the ’80s when they were fighting the Soviet Union … when President Reagan was in office [and] got an enormous amount of influence and gratitude by helping to topple the Soviet-backed regime and then made the error of not hanging around in Afghanistan.107

The former president’s Afghanistan analogy was dramatic, suggesting a costly long-term U.S. commitment to Syria when Assad is removed from power. And for all Clinton’s tough talk about ignoring public opinion, there is a good reason why sitting presidents—as opposed to ex-presidents—don’t allow significant gaps to emerge between diplomacy and what the public can bear. It tends to end badly for the political party the president leads.

That Obama was mindful of this fact was borne out two months later. On August 21, rockets containing the odorless and invisible nerve agent sarin rained down on Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. Médicins Sans Frontières reported at least 3,600 Syrians had been treated for “neurotoxic symptoms” at hospitals it supported, and 355 of them had died. A preliminary U.S. government assessment placed the death toll at 1,429 (including 426 children). The White House said that the relevant agencies had ascertained “with high confidence” that the Syrian government was responsible. A French intelligence assessment baldly stated that the attack “could not have been ordered and carried out by anyone but the Syrian government,” observing that “the launch zone for the rockets was held by the regime while the strike zone was held by the rebels.” For his part, Russian president Vladimir Putin described the American and French assessments as “utter nonsense,” instead concurring with Assad’s version of events: that the rebels had launched the chemical weapons attack to provoke a U.S.-led military intervention against his government.108

British prime minister David Cameron was determined to lend the United States his full support in any attack against Syria. On August 29, he recalled Parliament to vote to authorize British military action against Assad’s regime if evidence became conclusive that it had used chemical weapons. The government was defeated by a vote of 285 to 272, ruling out any British involvement in U.S.-led strikes and leading some Cassandras to declare the special relationship dead. Obama’s response to this setback was equally surprising. On October 31, he stated his desire to launch swift reprisal attacks against Assad but requested formal congressional approval before any action was taken. Pundits wondered about Obama’s motives. Congressional support was not certain, given that both parties were deeply divided on the merits or otherwise of launching air strikes against Syria. “The moral thing to do is not to stand by and do nothing,” Obama said, before posing the question: “I do have to ask people, well, if in fact you’re outraged by the slaughter of innocent people, what are you doing about it?”109

But Obama’s congressional gambit showed that the response to an atrocity could not simply be refracted through categories such as “right” and “wrong.” The president had deployed a humanitarian casus belli for military action against Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya in 2011, but he had not sought congressional approval in doing so. Syria was different; the strategic stakes and impediments to military action were higher, as was the potential for disaster if a radical Islamist group assumed power in the vacuum that would accompany Assad’s fall. Paul Wolfowitz strongly supported a military assault against Assad’s regime, noting, “It’s not Iraq 2003. It’s Iraq in 1991 … In 1991 we had an opportunity without putting any American lives at risk to enable the Shia uprisings against Saddam to succeed. Instead we sat on our hands and watched him kill tens of thousands. We did nothing and we could have very easily enabled those rebellions to succeed. I think if we had done so we could have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and there would not have been a second war.”110 But Wolfowitz’s historical analogy was dubious. Air strikes alone would not have ousted Assad; that would have required a much larger intervention, with all the uncertainty that entailed.

Events took a bizarre turn a week or so after the vote in the House of Commons. During a press conference in London on September 9, a reporter asked Secretary of State John Kerry whether Assad could do anything to prevent a U.S.-led military strike against his regime. “Sure,” replied Kerry with more than a hint of sarcasm, “he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week—turn it over, all of it without delay and allow the full and total accounting [of it],… but he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done.”111 Ignoring the tone, Russia immediately seized on Kerry’s words, proposing that Assad should eradicate his chemical weapons under UN supervision. Obama’s interest was immediately piqued. On September 14, John Kerry and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, agreed to put a plan into action that would charge the United Nations with the removal of Assad’s chemical weapons.

A pragmatist to his core, Barack Obama handed the initiative to Russia in resolving the crisis and unemotionally pulled back from the brink of military action. On This Week, George Stephanopoulos quoted the critical assessment of Richard Haas, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations: “Words like ‘ad-hoc,’ ‘improvised,’ ‘unsteady’ come to mind. This is probably the most undisciplined stretch of foreign policy in your presidency.” What do you make of that?” asked Stephanopoulos. “Well, you know, I think that folks here in Washington like to grade on style,” Obama replied, “and so had we rolled out something that was very smooth and disciplined and linear, they would have graded it well, even if it was a disastrous policy. We know that, because that’s exactly how they graded the Iraq war … [But] I’m less concerned about style points. I’m much more concerned about getting the policy right.”112 A survey commissioned by the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of Americans approved of Obama’s decision to support the Russian proposal, even though only a quarter believed that Assad would ultimately comply.113 In August 2014, Rand Paul wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that staked out a significant difference of opinion with Hillary Clinton, who had expressed her frustration at Obama’s unwillingness to take stronger action against Assad. “We are lucky Mrs. Clinton didn’t get her way and the Obama administration did not bring about regime change in Syria. That new regime might well be ISIS.” Moving well beyond Clinton, Paul noted acerbically, “Our so-called foreign policy experts are failing us miserably.”114

*   *   *

Barack Obama confronts an increasingly risk-averse public and a series of crises that defy easy categorization, let alone solutions. At the outset, at least, the United States can weigh in decisively in certain theaters (Libya), but with far less certainty—and with unknowable repercussions in both cases—in others (Syria, Iraq). After the Second Iraq War, the public’s appetite for supporting a policing function for the United States in the Middle East is vastly diminished. The debacle in Iraq demonstrated that fine-sounding plans and actual outcomes don’t always match—that worldmaking in the Middle East is well nigh impossible. In twenty years’ time, U.S. policymakers may well look back on the Mubarak era as halcyon. Obama’s critics assail his weak strategic handle on the situation—his reactiveness and reluctance to announce a doctrine—but how does one devise a “grand strategy” toward the Middle East in such a tumultuous era? Is the Arab Spring merely a process whereby radical Islamism replaces secular despotism? Or will it lead to a cycle of sectarian violence and the withering of the rule of law? Will this wave of democratization lead to pluralism, economic modernization, and the dispersal of wealth and opportunity across the Middle East? Will active U.S. engagement assist or discourage one or the other? No one can possibly know, and expert predictions are confounded by events almost weekly. One can understand why Obama is reluctant to walk purposefully in a straight line across this minefield.

But the news has not all been bad in the region. A major breakthrough in U.S.-Iranian relations was achieved on September 26, 2013, when Barack Obama spoke on the telephone with Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who had been elected Iran’s president on August 3, succeeding the hard-line Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was the first conversation between the presidents of Iran and the United States since 1979. The conversation followed from an announcement made the day previously that in-depth negotiations with Iran over its nuclear activities and capabilities would commence in Geneva on October 15. “We’ve got a responsibility to pursue diplomacy,” Obama said, “and … we have a unique opportunity to make progress with the new leadership in Tehran.”115 The Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu was less enthusiastic about this diplomatic breakthrough, the speed of which had largely blindsided him.

The October meetings in Geneva closed without a deal, but the mood music was promising. The breakthrough arrived on November 24, when a preliminary six-month nuclear agreement, brokered by the European Union’s Catherine Ashton, was reached between Iran and six world powers: Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia, and the United States. Tehran agreed to suspend enriching uranium beyond the levels needed for its power stations. It also halted the installation of new centrifuges designed to enrich uranium and agreed to a cap on the amount of enriched uranium it is allowed to produce from existing devices. In a statement delivered from Washington, Barack Obama said that the measures make it virtually impossible for Iran to build a nuclear weapon without being detected. In return, international sanctions against Iran worth approximately $7 billion would be relaxed.

The deal vindicated Obama’s dual policy of attempting to engage Iran while strengthening the sanctions imposed on the nation—which severely devalued Iran’s currency and halved its oil exports. Some compared the breakthrough with Tehran to President Nixon’s rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China. Congressional Republicans were predictably less impressed, with some, such as Senator John Cornyn of Texas, suggesting that the deal was brokered to deflect attention from the Obamacare debacle—a remarkably parochial perspective, although not entirely surprising given the parlous state of contemporary political debate.116 Ranking Republicans in the House and Senate also emphasized that the real threat Iran posed to Israel would not be mitigated by the agreement. To assuage such concerns, Secretary of State Kerry described the deal as a “serious step” toward resolving the crisis with Iran, observing that it “will make our partners in the region safer. It will make our ally Israel safer.”117

Israel’s president, Benjamin Netanyahu, was not placated by Kerry’s soothing words. “What was achieved last night in Geneva,” he said, “is not a historic agreement; it is a historic mistake … Today the world has become a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world has taken a significant step toward attaining the most dangerous weapon in the world.”118 The Israeli minister of the economy, Naftali Bennett, went even further: “If in another five or six years, a nuclear suitcase explodes in New York or Madrid, it will be because of the agreement that was signed this morning.”119 U.S.-Israeli relations have never been warm during the Obama administration, but the agreement the United States made with Iran marked a genuine low point. Whether the interim deal can be translated into something more enduring is unknowable, though it certainly rests on precarious foundations. President Rouhani has come under repeated criticism in Iran for gifting too many concessions to Washington. Crucially, he retains the all-important support of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But the long-term prospects for U.S.-Iranian rapprochement depend largely on Khamenei’s continued approval. In this respect, Israel’s furious reaction to the deal has only helped Rouhani’s cause.

Whether an overwhelmingly pro-Likud GOP—encouraged in this direction by the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—will tolerate Obama’s diplomacy is another question entirely. But the signs are not good. On March 9, 2015, forty-seven Republican senators signed an open letter to “the leaders of the Islamic State of Iran,” noting that any treaty signed by President Obama would require a two-thirds majority in the Senate to become law—an unlikely scenario: “We will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”120 It was a rare partisan congressional intrusion into an ongoing diplomatic negotiation.

The irritation and obstructionism displayed by Senate Republicans toward the Obama administration’s Iran diplomacy had many sources. Principal among them was the fact that Obama had responded to comprehensive electoral defeat at the November 2014 midterms—the GOP won a 54–46 majority in the Senate and increased its majority in the House—not with chastened humility but with a renewed sense of purpose. On December 17, Barack Obama made one of the most startling announcements of his presidency: “In the most significant changes in our policy in more than fifty years, we will end an outdated approach that, for decades, has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries. Through these changes, we intend to create more opportunities for the American and Cuban people, and begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas.” Vowing to “cut loose the shackles of the past,” Obama ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba and the opening of a U.S. embassy in Havana.121 The president’s policy shift was the result of eighteen months of intensive negotiations—involving a complex prisoner swap—in which Pope Francis had become involved. It was a remarkably bold move for a president contemplating the looming reality of a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Senate from January 3, 2015.

Most Republicans in Congress announced that they would resist lifting the fifty-four-year-old trade embargo. Some denounced the policy shift with real vehemence. “This entire policy shift announced today is based on an illusion, on a lie, the lie and the illusion that more commerce and access to money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people,” warned Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. “All this is going to do is give the Castro regime, which controls every aspect of Cuban life, the opportunity to manipulate these changes to perpetuate itself in power.”122 Yet the polls suggested that this harsh appraisal was not shared by a majority of Americans. A CNN/ORC poll conducted soon after the historic announcement showed that six out of ten Americans supported the restoration of full diplomatic relations and that two-thirds wanted the travel ban overturned.123 In a press briefing on December 19, Obama said, “I share the concerns of dissidents there and human rights activists that this is still a regime that represses its people.” But he also noted that the “whole point of normalizing relations is that it gives us greater opportunity to have influence with that government.”124 The restoration of U.S.-Cuban relations and the ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran will provoke sharp disputes in 2015 and 2016 between President Obama and the Republican-controlled Congress. While his opponents portray the president as a spineless appeaser—the historically illiterate John Bolton described him as “worse than Neville Chamberlain”—Obama believes that his policy of engaging with Tehran and Havana will reap tangible results, making Israel and the region safer, and Cuba more prosperous and politically open.125

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The People’s Republic of China’s swift economic rise makes it likely that the nation will surpass America’s GDP sometime in the next thirty years. It is advancing its military capabilities faster than any other competitor nation. It is the world’s biggest consumer of energy and producer of greenhouse gases. It is the world’s largest holder of foreign-exchange reserves, including more than $1 trillion in U.S. treasury bonds.126 And the largely U.S.-made global financial crisis has suggested to China’s leadership that its centralized economic model is uniquely stable and virtuous—discouraging any latent momentum for political liberalization. At the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2010, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao chided “Western” economic practices “and their unsustainable model of development characterized by prolonged low savings and high consumption; excessive expansion of financial institutions in a blind pursuit of profit.”127 The combination of an emboldened China and an irascible America has the potential to make a lot of trouble for the rest of the world. “If we get China wrong,” one senior Obama adviser remarked, “in thirty years that’s the only thing anyone will remember.”128

Obama has experimented with two approaches to managing relations with China: extending friendship and avoiding conflict; and pursuing a narrower, interests-driven approach that accepts some antagonism as inevitable. The former style predominated from 2009 to 2011 and was shaped by Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg and National Security Council Senior Director for East Asia Jeffrey Bader. Its critics maintain that China sensed weakness and began behaving with remarkable haughtiness. During the Copenhagen Summit of December 2009, called to reach an international agreement on climate change, Premier Wen Jiabao declined to attend a heads of state meeting, sending a subordinate to sit opposite President Obama.129

Little wonder that the president’s critics alleged that his friendly approach to China secured nothing but Beijing’s scorn. In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney strongly attacked the administration:

President Obama came into office as a near supplicant to Beijing, almost begging it to continue buying American debt so as to finance his profligate spending here at home … Now, three years into his term, the president has belatedly responded with a much-ballyhooed “pivot” to Asia … The supposed pivot has been oversold and carries with it an unintended consequence: It has left our allies with the worrying impression that we left the region and might do so again.130

Romney’s damning critique was formulated by one of his principal foreign-policy advisers, Aaron L. Friedberg, a professor of politics and international relations at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His 2011 book, A Contest for Supremacy, issued a warning that the United States is “on track to lose” the strategic battle for power and influence in the Western Pacific. He chides Obama for focusing too intently on engagement with Beijing and not devoting sufficient resources to contingency planning if the worst-case scenario materializes in the form of armed conflict over any number of issues.

This line of criticism was persuasive when Friedberg wrote the book but was less so in the months after it was published. In November 2011, the president announced that the United States would station an additional twenty-five hundred troops in northern Australia: their strategic purpose was clear enough and China was predictably dismayed. In addition, Secretary of State Clinton was proactive in encouraging Myanmar to move in the direction of genuine independence and pull itself away from Beijing’s orbit. Finally, the Obama administration was steadfast in supporting the Philippines over China’s strong-armed approach to their territorial dispute in the South China Sea. On the deck of a U.S. warship in Manila Bay—one need not be Freudian to discern a message—Secretary of State Clinton announced that “we are making sure that our collective defense capabilities and communications infrastructure are operationally and materially capable of deterring provocation from the full spectrum of state and nonstate actors.” Ramon Casiple, executive director of the Manila-based Institute for Political and Economic Reform, observed that “Filipinos appreciate symbolism.”131

Obama’s “pivot” to Asia can be attributed to many sources. China’s swift rise means it makes strategic sense for the United States to redeploy resources to the Pacific to better guard its interests and allies there. There are many friendly nations desperate for Washington’s reassurance, and this has now been provided. But there is a personal element too. Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. He lacks the habitual eastward orientation of his predecessors. Most American presidents have had a strong Atlanticist perspective, believing that Europe is the continent in which the world’s most significant geostrategic conflicts play out. America’s Cold War strategy was predicated on this axiom. But Europe is clearly no longer the fulcrum. “The future of the United States is intimately intertwined with the future of the Asia-Pacific,” wrote Secretary of State Clinton in an article to coincide with her Pacific tour. “A strategic turn to the region fits logically into our overall global effort to secure and sustain America’s global leadership.”132

The pivot toward Asia may be viewed as the Obama administration’s principal foreign-policy legacy thirty years hence. It is clearly imperative that the United States responds skillfully to China’s rise. The consequences are momentous if it does not. In placing U.S.-Chinese rivalry in historical context, the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison has identified a phenomenon he describes as “the Thucydides trap,” fretting that precedent suggests that conflict between these two nations, moving in opposite directions, may be inevitable. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.” For Athens, read China; for Sparta, America. As Allison writes:

For six decades after the Second World War, an American “Pax Pacifica” has provided the security and economic framework within which Asian countries have produced the most rapid economic growth in history. However, having emerged as a great power that will overtake the U.S. in the next decade to become the largest economy in the world, it is not surprising that China will demand revisions to the rules established by others.133

The difference between now and then, of course, is that China and America are much more invested in each other’s economic success than Sparta and Athens were in 431 B.C., or Germany and Great Britain were on the eve of the First World War. Economic interdependence—the colossal hybrid entity tagged “Chimerica” by the historian Niall Ferguson and the economist Moritz Schularick—is the strongest guarantee against a calamitous war between the two nations.134

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The prospects for broadly harmonious U.S.-Chinese relations appear relatively bright. But a more familiar type of conflict, which brought to mind World War II and Yalta, visited the world in March 2014, when President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Crimea, the southerly region of Ukraine that includes Sevastopol—and Russia’s Black Sea fleet—and a large ethnic Russian majority. Putin explained that his hand was forced by the ousting of the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, following a series of demonstrations against him, and the odious pro-European government that replaced him. Putin claimed that the opposition groups that had compelled Yanukovych to flee Kiev for Moscow on February 21 had far-right or fascistic tendencies and that he had intervened in Crimea to protect ethnic Russians from reprisals. Russia set up a referendum on March 16, in which 97 percent of Crimeans supported incorporation into Russia (the pro-Ukrainian Tatar minority refused to take part). That Wilsonian self-determination had been deployed to serve cynical purposes was made clear by the chair of Russia’s upper house of parliament, Valentina Matviyenko: “Deciding to hold [a] referendum is a sovereign right of Crimea’s legitimately elected parliament … the right of people to self-determination.”135 Clearly, the Obama administration possessed no realistic military options to discourage President Putin. But this did not stop critics from suggesting that his irresolution had invited Russian aggression and that his response to this flagrant Russian aggression was weak on substance and tepid in presentation.

America’s foreign-policy commentariat weighed in with a series of editorials, and most were entirely predictable. Zbigniew Brzezinski suggested that the West should privately convey to Russia “that the Ukrainian army can count on immediate and direct Western aid so as to enhance its defensive capabilities” and recommended that “NATO forces, consistent with the organizations’ contingency planning, should be put on alert.”136 Charles Krauthammer endorsed Brzezinski’s approach eleven days later, but also suggested sending “the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to the Baltics to arrange joint maneuvers,” and proposed that Obama should “order the Energy Department” to expedite the export of more gas to Europe to render crippling sanctions against Russia more palatable to Britain, France, and Germany.137 On the left, Stephen Cohen, a professor of Russian history at New York University, criticized the United States for failing to comprehend Putin’s strategic perspective and for needlessly inflaming the situation.138

Age ninety and liberated from his usual default position of pursuing or advising power—which had led to his awkward tête-à-tête with Sarah Palin in 2008—Henry Kissinger drafted one of the most nuanced analyses of the crisis. Writing in The Washington Post on March 5, Kissinger faulted Russia for failing to comprehend that forcing Ukraine into accepting a satellite status “would doom Moscow to repeat its history of self-fulfilling cycles of reciprocal pressures with Europe and the United States.” But he also chided many in “the West” for failing to comprehend that “to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then.” Historically literate, elegantly crafted, and eminently sensible, Kissinger offered a penetrating account of the misconceptions, and lack of empathy, blighting both sides:

The United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington. Putin is a serious strategist—on the premises of Russian history. Understanding U.S. values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point of U.S. policymakers. Leaders of all sides should return to examining outcomes, not compete in posturing.139

For Kissinger, Obama’s response to the Ukrainian crisis has little connection to credibility, which is at stake only in genuinely contested areas. Crimea falls within the Russian sphere of influence, and this has to be recognized. Managing the crisis requires understanding Putin’s perspective, clearly communicating how damaging the annexation of Crimea will be to Russia’s world position, and not needlessly inflaming the situation through reckless promises—Kissinger echoed Kennan in warning that Ukrainian membership in NATO is not an option.

President Obama appears to side with Kissinger on the best way to deal with Putin’s aggression. On February 19, Obama had described Ukraine as a “client state of Russia” and cautioned that the region should not be seen as “some Cold War chessboard in which we are in competition with Russia.”140 On March 25, in response to a question on the magnitude of the threat posed by Moscow, Obama observed cuttingly, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors—not out of strength but out of weakness.” The president understands that even if Russia is left largely alone, the lessons of history suggest that it will suffer in the long run for its belligerence. “I think it would be dishonest to suggest that there’s a simple solution to resolving what has already taken place in Crimea,” Obama observed. “Although history has a funny way of moving in twists and turns and not just in a straight line.”141

On Ukraine, and a multitude of other issues, Obama’s critics accuse him of fretting too much about alienating the public—that the president follows rather than leads, lacking as he does a grand strategy. Vali Nasr, a senior State Department adviser to Richard Holbrooke from 2009 to 2011 and the current dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, published a book-length assault on Obama’s foreign policies in 2013:

In the cocoon of our public debate Obama gets high marks on foreign policy. That is because his policies’ principal aim is not to make strategic decisions but to satisfy public opinion—he has done more of the things that people want and fewer of the things we have to do that may be unpopular. To our allies, however, our constant tactical maneuvers don’t add up to a coherent strategy or a vision of global leadership. Gone is the exuberant American desire to lead in the world.142

Nasr’s portrayal of Obama as weak and led by opinion polls underestimates the coherence and sincerity of his pragmatic worldview and his genuine desire to marshal resources in a fashion consistent with the enhancement rather than diminishment of America’s world position. Obama finds complaints such as Nasr’s unfair, noting that his critics seem to believe that he possesses a “joystick” with which he is able to maneuver precise outcomes.

Near the end of a series of interviews, which became the basis of a fascinating profile in The New Yorker, David Remnick asked Obama if he was “haunted” by his decision not to intervene in Syria. “I am not haunted by my decision not to engage in another Middle Eastern war,” replied Obama. “It is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which our involvement in Syria would have led to a better outcome, short of us being willing to undertake an effort in size and scope similar to what we did in Iraq.” Another Iraq-style military intervention, of course, is a fantastical prospect to Obama and, indeed, to the public he serves. But Obama provided Remnick with a description of his policymaking method:

I have strengths and I have weaknesses, like every President, like every person. I do think one of my strengths is temperament. I am comfortable with complexity, and I think I’m pretty good at keeping my moral compass while recognizing that I am a product of original sin. And every morning and every night I’m taking measure of my actions against the options and possibilities available to me, understanding that there are going to be mistakes that I make and my team makes and that America makes; understanding that there are going to be limits to the good we can do and the bad that we can prevent, and that there’s going to be tragedy out there and, by occupying this office, I am part of that tragedy occasionally, but that if I am doing my very best and basing my decisions on the core values and ideals that I was brought up with and that I think are pretty consistent with those of most Americans, that at the end of the day things will be better rather than worse.143

These words, extolling recognition of complexity and comprehension of the limits of what is achievable, could have been spoken by George Kennan. In contrast to Vali Nasr, Obama appears to believe that “exuberance” has caused some of the United States’ most damaging foreign-policy missteps, that it is a trait best left to motivational speakers and sports announcers. Sobriety is much more in keeping with Obama’s style. In thirty years or so, historians will be better placed to determine who is correct. But the past fifteen years suggest that Nasr’s “exuberant American desire to lead” may well have destabilized the world more than it has steadied it. It is little wonder that the United States has a diminished capacity and inclination for worldmaking.

During a supposedly off-the-record discussion with reporters in the summer of 2014, Obama observed that his core strategic doctrine could be summarized simply as “Don’t do stupid shit.” During an on-the-record interview with The Atlantic, Hillary Clinton disagreed: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”144 Yet when the interviewer invited Clinton to spell out her own organizing principle, she answered, “peace, progress, and prosperity,” alliterative boilerplate that any American politician since the inception of the republic could have uttered. Clinton understands the problems with neat organizing principles all too well. As she wrote in her 2014 memoir, Hard Choices, “Although some may have yearned for an Obama Doctrine—a grand unified theory that would provide a simple and elegant road map for foreign policy in this new era, like ‘containment’ did during the Cold War—there was nothing simple or elegant about the problems we faced.”145 This was true when Clinton became secretary of state and it remains so today.

President Obama delivered an important speech at West Point in 2014 that set out a typically equivocal vision:

It is absolutely true that in the 21st century American isolationism is not an option. We don’t have a choice to ignore what happens beyond our borders … But to say that we have an interest in pursuing peace and freedom beyond our borders is not to say that every problem has a military solution. Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences—without building international support and legitimacy for our action; without leveling with the American people about the sacrifices required.146

The usual suspects assailed the speech as weak and unprincipled—“One can only marvel at the smallness of it all,” wrote Charles Krauthammer.147 Of course, no one seriously believes that every crisis has a military solution, and in this sense the president was disingenuous in setting up “a somber parade of straw men,” as Krauthammer wittily phrased it. But Obama’s observation that “some of our most costly mistakes came not from restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences” contains wisdom.