The Long Game (13 page)

There was no daylight between Obama and Clinton in their views on the importance of domestic renewal and extracting the US military from Iraq. Nor was there any meaningful difference on understanding the reality of limits and the importance of avoiding bad choices. But Clinton worried that this kind of talk could go too far, and that all the emphasis on renewal at home would be perceived as a sign of withdrawal. She warned the president that the idea that the administration was accepting a reduced role for the United States was getting traction abroad. “When you're down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back,” she later told Jeffrey Goldberg, “you're not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward.” A big part of the problem, Clinton said, “is that we don't even tell our own story very well these days.”
²¹

In her own speech at the Council on Foreign Relations just a few days after Obama's August 2010 Oval Office address, Clinton tried to tell this story. She did not deny the importance of restraint—after all, every nation must operate within limits. But she emphasized that the United States has the fewest limits of any nation globally,
and argued that the way the world is changing presents not just challenges but important opportunities as well because of America's capacity for innovation, its openness, and the respect it enjoys. Clinton called this a “New American Moment,” one in which “global leadership is both a responsibility and an unparalleled opportunity.”

This assertion of confidence offered a more uplifting tone. However, some analysts assert that when compared with Obama, Clinton's rhetoric reveals a deeper disagreement about America's role in the world.
²²
This overstates the differences between the two. Obama and Clinton agreed that there were real, growing constraints on American power—whether because of the shifting global landscape or urgent demands at home—and they shared the core belief that with the kinds of policies Obama had laid out as his affirmative agenda during his first years in office, American leadership could be renewed. In fact, Obama's rhetoric in his last State of the Union address in 2016 echoes Clinton's call that, compared to any other country, this is America's moment.

CHAPTER 4

A CASCADE OF CRISES

A
fter the Obama administration's first two years, there was a renewed sense of confidence that the United States could drive the global agenda. While there were plenty of unexpected crises—including natural disasters such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, terrorist threats, and ongoing tensions with North Korea—and managing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was hardly simple, there seemed to be more control over the foreign policy rudder. Obama and his team had weathered early tests, steadied the ship, and felt able to chart a forward-looking course. Rather than just reacting, the administration had succeeded in laying out an affirmative agenda. At the midpoint of Obama's first term, the foundations for the Long Game seemed established.

That sense of control changed abruptly with the political upheaval that began in Tunisia in late 2010, which soon spread across the Arab world. Although we did not fully appreciate it at the time, the events of early 2011 ushered in a sustained period where the United States found itself responding to events, causing many to doubt the effectiveness and willingness of America to lead. The cascade of crises was
unceasing. In a way, there have been two eras of Obama's foreign policy: before 2011, and after.

The unraveling of the existing order in the Middle East—the so-called “Arab Spring”—fundamentally challenged Obama's approach, bringing to the surface issues that would define the rest of his presidency: how to define America's core interests in such a vital part of the world; what tools it has to shape events; when, where, and how America should use its military power; and how the United States manages tensions between its values and interests. Despite Obama's best efforts to rebalance US global engagement and forge policies that represented the diversity of America's interests and foreign policy instruments, the Washington commentariat and many around the world still looked to his handling of the turmoil in the Middle East as the most consequential test of his leadership.

HOPE SPRINGS

It started with very misleading optimism. The Arab Spring was an historic moment not seen since the collapse of Communism over two decades earlier. Many of us working in the White House and State Department at the time saw it with the same sense of amazement and hope. The changes sweeping the Middle East after January 2011 reinforced Obama's belief in the power of brave individuals to take control of their destinies and to transform a tired, corrupt political order. Importantly, the demands for greater political freedoms and economic opportunity were coming from the bottom up, within Arab societies, not through solutions imposed from the outside.

Initially, this political earthquake seemed to serve American interests. By creating more equitable and just systems of governance across the region, the White House believed that the Arab Spring could help the region solve its own problems. This also seemed to directly contradict the extremist narrative, as regional change was
being sparked not by violent jihadists calling for a return to the 7
^th
Century, but peaceful protestors demanding greater political freedoms, openness, and accountability.

T
HE
A
RAB
S
PRING
coincided with my move from Hillary Clinton's State Department to the White House, where in February 2011, I started as the NSC's senior director for strategic planning. My first week on the job was dominated by the events in Egypt, as millions of Egyptians took to the streets and President Hosni Mubarak's thirty-year reign came to an end. With each day the drama seemed to spread—after Tunisia and Egypt, we saw the same demand for change and threat of unrest in Libya, Bahrain, and Jordan.

The debate about how to react to the Arab Spring rested on the most enduring and well-examined fault line of American foreign policy: whether our approach should be driven by interests or values, choosing between policies focused on promoting stability or demanding reform. Inside the administration, these debates were often seen as breaking down along generational lines, with older officials like Clinton and Gates counseling caution while younger advisors like Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power pressed for a bold change of course. While there were certainly differences of emphasis and timing, the perceived divide was often exaggerated. We saw the choices between interests and values as false ones, for the United States had to uphold both.

Obama's approach to the Arab Spring was driven mainly by his sense of pragmatism. He did not believe the United States could or should stand in the way of the changes that were sweeping the region, but he saw that it was in America's interests to see this transformation evolve in an orderly way. This was what Obama was thinking when he encouraged Egypt's leader Hosni Mubarak to step aside in early 2011. He hoped calling for a smooth transition would help defuse tensions.
Also, by getting behind what was happening in the streets, the US might preserve some influence over Egypt's future.

D
URING THESE TUMULTUOUS
early months of 2011, Obama saw a need to do “some truth-telling” about how things got to this point and what the United States needed to do next. Obama thought America's historic interest in regional stability had enabled these problems to fester. He wanted to put America firmly on the side of regional change and speak to the aspirations of the millions who were demanding it.

He also wanted to explain how long and difficult this process would be—and to emphasize the United States still had enduring friends and interests in the region that it would continue supporting. He needed to temper expectations, making clear there were no easy answers and that the United States could not dictate solutions to the Middle East's problems. The president intended to push back against the notion that there was some elegant solution he was missing—that, as he put it, all we needed was for a modern-day Henry Kissinger to go out there and start pulling strings. It was a complicated, caveat-filled script that he had in mind.

Obama was itching to give this kind of speech. It was an opportunity to take a step to further the ideas he had first expressed in Cairo in June 2009. He liked the high stakes, at one point observing that this “is in many ways my international race speech,” referring to his historic address in Philadelphia on race relations during the 2008 campaign. Although those of us in the White House diligently worked with our colleagues across the government to come up with fresh ideas, Obama knew what he wanted to say.

In one of the meetings to discuss the speech, he mused (with a wry hint of sarcasm) about what he would say if he were writing an essay about these events in the
New York Review of Books
or the
Financial Times.
The president said he wanted to speak about the
underlying causes of the unrest, which he saw principally as autocratic governments trying to stay in power, using the lack of an Arab-Israeli settlement as an excuse not to reform, and drawing on the sectarian divides between Sunnis and Shia. He also thought it important to talk frankly about the difficult trade-offs the United States had to manage.

“We can acknowledge that some of our interests are not exactly pure here,” he said, referring to America's reliance on the region's energy supplies, “and that these equities need to be weighed in terms of how to proceed.” Usually American policymakers tried to obscure such policy contradictions, but Obama believed we needed to go to the pain and confront them head-on. “The conventional wisdom has been that we don't talk about the things we can't solve,” he said. “I don't buy that.”

Obama pulled his themes together in a speech delivered in May 2011 at the State Department. As intended, his message broke the mold. While other senior officials had spoken hard truths about the region—earlier that year Hillary Clinton had delivered an important address in Doha, Qatar warning that “the region's foundations are sinking into the sand”—it was unusual for a president to speak so bluntly.

Obama called for a broad change of approach in America's engagement with the Middle East, placing emphasis on the centrality of political and economic reform. While Obama reiterated America's enduring security interests, he acknowledged that grievances had accrued among ordinary people that “only feed the suspicion that has festered for years that the United States pursues our interests at their expense.” The speech was heralded for its sharp diagnosis of the problem and willingness not to pull punches. It was also widely interpreted as a dramatic swing away from his customary caution and pragmatism—one commentator later described it as a speech of “uncharacteristic exuberance.”
¹

T
HIS ATTEMPT TO
reorient decades of US policy presented at least three practical problems, some of which we only fully appreciated with time.

The first, and the one we did worry about at the moment, was that America's actual resources to support political and economic reform fell far short of our stated aspirations. We knew we needed to avoid the “Cairo trap,” referring to the dashed expectations of the 2009 speech, raising hopes for a new beginning but with little tangible follow-through.

So we pressed hard to come up with some innovative policies, and discovered some good ideas. But we never could muster enough money to generate real leverage or develop a Middle East Marshall Plan. This was especially true when compared to the amount of money those less interested in such comprehensive reforms (the Saudis, for example) were willing to dispense.

The timing was terrible. At a moment when the president and Republicans in Congress were locked in a fierce battle on the budget and deficit spending, the idea of some massive assistance program for the Middle East was a nonstarter. The consequence was that the promise of Obama's soaring embrace of such change was not matched by sufficient action. Therefore, in the eyes of many, the administration again got caught over-promising yet under-delivering.

The second challenge was that alongside the frustrated aspirations of some, from others we faced anxieties and fears of US abandonment. Such a bold call for change made America's closest partners in the region very nervous—especially the Jordanians, the Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Israelis. They were invested in the status quo and wanted to keep it. When considering Obama's commitment to stand with those who wanted to upend the existing order and his willingness to withdraw support from those like Mubarak who had been a key ally for decades, America's friends wondered what this meant for them.

These countries feared the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists would fill the vacuum, giving the advantage to aspiring regional powers like Iran or terrorist groups like Hamas (and soon, ISIS). Marc Lynch, one of the most thoughtful and sympathetic observers of Obama's Middle East policy, later described the approach as “visionary but incoherent.” The administration, Lynch accurately describes, “struggled to grasp the fact that the old order under attack was a US-backed regional order, defended by US allies concerned, above all, with keeping themselves in power.”
²
This deep sense of uncertainty about what the US wanted made it harder to reassure regional partners—and later, these anxieties would only be exacerbated by the US approach to Syria and Iran.

Finally, the emphasis on reform failed to keep pace with events once the regional order unraveled further and faster. As the instability spread beyond our expectations, the administration instinctively hunkered down, focusing more on protecting America's core security interests (like safeguarding against external aggression against our allies or partners, maintaining the free flow of energy, and fighting terrorism). Although we never believed we could control events, we increasingly found ourselves watching as bystanders.

Toward the end of his Arab Spring speech, Obama made mention of three places that, unintentionally, foreshadowed the challenges to come. Despite all the unknowns, he wanted to recall the reasons to have hope. He cited the examples of the Libyan city of Benghazi, at that moment protected by US and allied planes; young people cramming Egypt's Tahir Square to demand political change; and the protestors in Syria, braving bullets while chanting “peaceful, peaceful.” In May 2011, these examples symbolized potential, and our cautious optimism seemed reasonable. Yet it was in these three places most of all—Libya, Egypt, and Syria—where our hopes for the Arab Spring cratered.

LIBYA AND THE “IMMACULATE INTERVENTION”

President Obama was not happy. When he sat down with his top advisers in the Situation Room late the afternoon of March 15, 2011 to discuss the looming humanitarian catastrophe in Libya, it soon became clear that he only had half-baked options.
³

When the Libyan people began to rise up against Muammar Qaddafi, the threat to civilians made the situation different than that in other Arab Spring countries. We believed that if we allowed this rebellion to be crushed violently, it would slam the brakes on the momentum of regional political change, and worse, show that dictators could stay in power if they were brutal enough. Reports were pouring in from all corners—diplomatic and intelligence assessments from the United States and Europe, press stories, and eyewitness accounts—of arbitrary arrests, torture, and killings perpetrated by the regime. Given Qaddafi's past as a sponsor of terror (as well as his increasingly bizarre, madman behavior), the world rallied to pressure him to relent. In late February, the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution calling for an immediate end to the violence, imposing an arms embargo on Libya and sanctions against the Qaddafi family as well as key regime members.

But things only got worse. Qaddafi's actions and chilling rhetoric made clear to those of us in Washington—and importantly, the rest of the world, even the usually skeptical Russia and the typically fragmented Arab League—that he would not step aside without a fight. Many senior government figures started to defect from the regime (including the Libyan Ambassador in Washington), fearing what was to come. If the uprising continued, Qaddafi's forces would eventually regroup and rout the rebel forces with the benefit of superior arms. Qaddafi went to the airwaves and pledged “no mercy,” threatening that his troops would go house to house looking for “traitors” and
“capture the rats.” As Qaddafi's forces bore down on Benghazi, a city of 700,000 people, the world saw a slaughter in the making.