Obama’s Love of Cake

Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article on the development of Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy is, as always, full of interestig stuff even if, perhaps unavoidably, I suspect it depends a little too heavily upon the Slaughter-Power approach. Nevertheless, Ryan gets to the heart of Obama’s presidency – or at least the style of it – here:

Obama’s instinct was to try to have it both ways. He wanted to position the United States on the side of the protesters: it’s always a good idea, politically, to support brave young men and women risking their lives for freedom, especially when their opponent is an eighty-two-year-old dictator with Swiss bank accounts. Some of Obama’s White House aides regretted having stood idly by while the Iranian regime brutally suppressed the Green Revolution; Egypt offered a second chance. Nonetheless, Obama wanted to assure other autocratic allies that the U.S. did not hastily abandon its friends, and he feared that the uprising could spin out of control. “Look at all the revolutions in history, especially the ones that are driven from the ground up, and they tend to be very chaotic and hard to find an equilibrium,” one senior official said. The French Revolution, for instance, he said, “ended up in chaos, and they ended up with Bonaparte.” Obama’s ultimate position, it seemed, was to talk like an idealist while acting like a realist.

Obama, like many people, wants to have his cake and eat it. His words means precisely what he deems them to mean until such point as they mean something else. So he supports Hosni Mubarak until it becomes impossible to sustain that support and needs determine a shift in approach. Comparably, Obama was never against “all wars” only “dumb” ones and to prove it he campaigned promising more, not fewer, troops in Afghanistan. Did he believe this was the best strategic approach or was it a tactic improvised on the campaign trail to protect an otherwise vulnerable flank? A bit of both perhaps. As always.

Perhaps he is playing a longer game and turning America’s foreign policy ship around takes a long time. But I think it’s also true that a President unusually invested in the idea of himself (unusual by even the standards of the presidential genre) had little real interest in foreign affairs until he reached Washington and even when running for the Presidency viewed foreign affairs as a tiresome distraction from the bigger, more important battles at home. It’s not where his heart lies.

No Obama speech is a proper Obama speech unless it contains a rejection of “false choices”. Often the choices he deems “false” are actually the choices you’d think a President must make. But, again, Obama doesn’t see it that way. Much of his presidency is oddly, perhaps unusually, conditional. He’s for or against a public option for health care as circumstances demand or allow. He’s certainly in favour of closing Guantanamo but only if it can be done without fuss or too much opposition. Like everything else, it just depends. That was then but this is now. Judge me on what I do, not what I say. Except there are times when you should judge me on what I say, not what I do. And so on.

In some respects this produces an administration that can be impressively nimble. The speed with which the Americans ditched Mubarak was impressive in its own way. But Obama’s style also makes for a White House that can sometimes seem strangely passive or reactive. What does the President really believe?

Managing foreign policy is difficult, of course. But, as Ryan Lizza’s piece makes clear, the White House’s approach is also confusing. How can it be otherwise when the President’s own people like to claim his approach is in the tradition of George HW Bush and John F Kennedy? Most people might think there were some differences (and not just because of circumstances either) between Bush Senior and JFK and that any synthesis of their approaches or worldviews risks confusing everyone at best and, just as probably, disappointing everyone for being neither quite one thing nor wholly another. And when you start claiming, as his people do, that Obama honours Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy as well then, well, it all starts looking just a little silly.

But which guy is the real Obama? The one we see in his approach to Egypt and Iran or the other fellow we see with respect to Afghanistan and Libya? One seems prudent and even strategic, the other rash and merely tactical. Doubtless expecting the White House to behave differently, let alone with clarity, is just another false choice.

Meanwhile, if I were one of his political advisers I wouldn’t be keen on having other administration people talking about “leading from behind”. Expect to hear Rpublicans bring this up a lot between now and novermber 2012:

Nonetheless, Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the President’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. It’s a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world. Pursuing our interests and spreading our ideals thus requires stealth and modesty as well as military strength. “It’s so at odds with the John Wayne expectation for what America is in the world,” the adviser said. “But it’s necessary for shepherding us through this phase.”

Again, perhaps this is a wise approach. It’s certainly one that recognises complexity and is disinclined to believe in sweeping answers. But it’s not likely to excite many people, on left or right, and risks leaving the President seem a manager, not a leader. There’s something to be said for that, of course, especially compared with the juvenile bombast we’ll endure from a Romney or a Gingrich but it’s not quite what people may have thought they were getting when they signed up for Obama ’08. That doesn’t mean he’s a worse President than John McCain would have been. Far from it. But it’s not wholly satisfying either.