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Authors: Edward Klein

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Jones hardly knew Obama when he was appointed to head the National Security Council. In fact, the two men had met only twice. The first time was in 2005, when then Senator Obama’s foreign policy aide, Mark Lippert, arranged a meeting between the two men. Obama and Jones met again in the fall of 2008, when President-elect Obama asked Jones to become his chief national security adviser. Despite his low-key manner and the deference he showed to the young, inexperienced president, Jones was never able to bond with Obama the way his predecessors in the NSC job, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, had bonded with George W. Bush.
There were signs from the beginning that Jones’s calm, systematic approach to problems did not fit the frenetic, highly politicized atmosphere in the Obama White House. That lesson was brought home to Jones when he was asked to phone Marine General Anthony Zinni, a former commander of Central Command and a friend of thirty years, and offer him a key job in the new administration.
“Jones ... asked if I would be willing to serve as ambassador to Iraq or in one of the envoy jobs, on the Middle East peace process,” Zinni recalled. “I said yes. Then [right after the inauguration], Jones called and said, ‘We talked to the secretary of state, and everybody would like to offer you the Iraq job.’ I said yes. The [vice] president called and congratulated me.”
The next thing Zinni knew he was asked to meet with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her office at the State Department. When he showed up, Clinton introduced him to Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns. “She asked me my views on Iraq,” Zinni said. “She said to Burns and Steinberg, ‘We’ve got to move quickly. [Ambassador Ryan] Crocker is leaving [Iraq]. We’ve got to get someone in there and get the paperwork done and hearings.... Lots to do to get ready to go.’”
Zinni expected to get a call the next day, and when he didn’t, he phoned Undersecretary Bill Burns.
“To make a long story short, I kept getting blown off all week,” Zinni said. “Meantime, I was rushing to put my personal things in order.... I was beginning to set up to resign from boards and put my financial house in order, kiss my wife goodbye. And nothing happened.... Finally, nobody was telling me anything. I called Jones ... several times. I finally got through late in the evening. I asked Jones, ‘What’s going on?’ And Jones said, ‘We decided on Chris Hill.’ I said, ‘No one told me. If I hadn’t called you, I’d have read about it in the
Washington Post
.’ And Jones said, ‘I didn’t know.’”
Jones was mortified by the way the Obama White House had treated his old friend and fellow Marine. As things turned out, it was only the first of many humiliations he suffered while working with Barack Obama.
Despite his considerable prestige, Jones was not permitted to pick his own staff. What’s more, he was rarely allowed to see the president alone. When he went to the Oval Office, he was usually accompanied by a phalanx of aides, including three political operatives who had played key roles in Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign: Jones’s chief of staff, Mark Lippert; his deputy, Tom Donilon, who had coached Obama for his debates against John McCain; and Denis McDonough, the director of strategic communications. At times, this group was expanded to include Hillary Clinton, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and, on rare occasions, Michelle Obama. Most of the attendees were not foreign policy experts. However, that didn’t stop people like Valerie Jarrett from expressing opinions on matters about which they knew little or nothing.
Making Jones part of a large and diffuse group signaled to everyone in Washington that he didn’t have Obama’s ear on foreign policy. His influence was further diminished by the way Obama conducted meetings on foreign policy. He liked to do most of the talking. Others in the room, including Jones, were there to listen and agree, even on military matters like the deployment of aircraft carrier groups.
Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that no president had taken more personal control over foreign policy than Obama. “This is an Obama-centric decision-making operation. In other administrations, a lot of decisions were made below the presidential level. But Obama shapes most policies. He takes pen to paper and writes decision papers. Usually presidents have other things to do than sit down and write a document that takes an inordinate amount of time. But Obama makes the calls on most every subject and with a degree of personal intensity.”
Both in the Oval Office and at National Security Council meetings in the Situation Room, Obama seemed to pass quickly over Jones in favor of his deputy, Tom Donilon. Understandably enough, this annoyed Jones. He had little use for Donilon, a Democratic Party insider who had worked as an aide for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, and was a former Washington lobbyist and executive at Fannie Mae.
Jones was particularly annoyed by Donilon’s habit of making derogatory remarks about American military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan—two theaters of war that Donilon had never bothered to visit. On one occasion, Jones told Donilon that, given his lack of overseas experience, “You have no credibility with the military.” But Donilon was protected by Rahm Emanuel (who openly snubbed Jones in favor of Donilon) and by Vice President Joe Biden (Donilon’s wife, Cathy, was chief of staff to Biden’s wife, Jill).
Not everyone in the administration was sold on Donilon. No less a player than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates agreed with Jones that Donilon had a poor record of working with the military. But that didn’t stop Obama from appointing Donilon, who was a favorite with the Democratic Party’s leftwing base, to succeed as national security adviser when Jones finally decided to pack it in after nineteen vicious months.
CHAPTER 18
 
MIND-MELD
 
I’m a genocide chick.
 
—Samantha Power, senior director for multilateral affairs, National Security Council
 
 
 
 
 
 
T
he shameful treatment of General Jones pointed to a neglected fact about Barack Obama’s foreign policy—namely, that it was as ideologically skewed to the Left as his domestic policy. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who had followed Obama’s ascent to power on the left flank of the Democratic Party. Obama won his party’s nomination at least in part because he promised to end the Bush-era wars, and put a stop to “torture” and the imprisonment of terrorists without trial. Equally important, he pledged to re-establish American foreign policy on a whole new set of lofty-sounding but dubious liberal principles.
Obama’s approach was a rupture with the past. For several decades during the Cold War, there had been general agreement among Democrats and Republicans about the underpinnings of American national security. As Douglas Feith and Seth Cropsey wrote in an important article in
Commentary
magazine, most Americans, both left and right, subscribed to the following ideas:
American interests, rather than global interests, should predominate in U.S. policymaking. American leadership, as traditionally defined, is indispensible to promoting the interests of the United States and our key partners, who are our fellow democracies. American power is generally a force for good in the world. And, as important as international cooperation can be, the U.S. president should cherish American sovereignty and defend his ability to act independently to protect the American people and their interests.
 
Obama challenged all of these basic assumptions. In his view, American power had done more harm than good. Global interests should generally come before American interests. International law should be taken into consideration by American courts. Washington should hesitate to act without the cooperation of the world community. America had an obligation to extend an olive branch to everyone, including its sworn enemies in North Korea and Iran.
The Obama Doctrine, as it came to be known, was given official status in the administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), a 30,000-word document, required by an act of Congress, which repudiated President George W. Bush’s “unilateralism” and argued in favor of “counting more on U.S. allies.”
“Most notably,” wrote Miles E. Taylor in
World Politics Review
, “Obama’s NSS downplays the promotion of American values when compared to those of his predecessors. The words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty,’ for example appear only 14 times in the text. This is stunning when compared to the Bush NSS, released in 2006, which stressed those core principles no less than 110 times—and in a document that was substantially shorter than Obama’s.... The Obama NSS declares that ‘American values’ like freedom and democratic governance are ‘the essential sources of our strength.’ Why, then, are they given comparably short shrift in the document itself?
“The answer,” Taylor continued, “is that the Obama team has been consistently cool toward the idea of democracy promotion since winning the White House, partly to avoid the appearance of being similar to Bush and partly to avoid ruffling the feathers of rogue regimes with which it hoped to engage.”
All of this struck a chord with members of Obama’s leftwing base, who had wailed and gnashed their teeth over George W. Bush’s policies of preemptive wars and nation building. However, having bought Obama’s do-gooder rhetoric, liberals were thrown into a state of shock when he increased the number of American troops in Afghanistan, failed to end the war in Iraq immediately (he merely modified the Bush administration’s timeline for withdrawal), and upped the ante on Bush’s unmanned drone war against terrorists. What’s more, liberals were rendered practically speechless by the fact that, under Obama, America’s relationship with Europe turned out to be no better than it had been under Bush, and that—despite all his ballyhooed diplomatic overtures to the Islamic world—polling showed that Islamic countries actually felt more hostile toward the United States than before.
Naturally enough, conservatives did not suffer the same disillusionment and buyer’s remorse. Many of them had forecast disaster for Obama, and they were not surprised when their predictions came true. To conservatives who championed a muscular foreign policy of
Realpolitik
, the Obama Doctrine was a confused hodgepodge at best and
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Foreign Policy
at worst.
The Obama Doctrine wasn’t born full-blown from the head of the newly elected president. The ideas that animated his worldview could be traced back to the end of the Cold War and a debate that broke out in the ranks of the Democratic Party over the proper role of America in the world.
By the early 1990s, liberal Democrats were raising questions about the limits of American power and the willingness of the American people to act as the policemen of the world. Alan Tonelson, a research director for the liberal Economic Strategy Institute, argued in the quarterly
Foreign Affairs
that “the superpower role that America has played since 1945 is now not only too expensive and risky for the public taste, but it is also unnecessary.” And in May 1993, just four months into Bill Clinton’s first term, Peter Tarnoff, the undersecretary of state and the third-ranking official in the Clinton State Department, went a good deal further than that.
In a lunch with the Overseas Writers Club, a group of diplomatic reporters, Tarnoff said: “Our economic interests are paramount,” and given America’s limited resources, the United States must “define the extent of its commitment commensurate with those realities—this may on occasion fall short of what some Americans would like and others would hope for.”

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