The Long Game (9 page)

For Obama, the trickiest questions have been when and how to confront China. The results have been mixed. The United States has used its military presence to reassure partners and to challenge Beijing's unilateral claims in the South China Sea (in an attempt to control access of vital sea lanes), yet China has built new military bases on reef islands. The Obama administration tried to convince its partners not to join a new financial institution to rival the IMF, known as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), but largely failed (with Britain leading the way to join) and subsequently
found itself on the outside looking in. The administration could have handled this issue with more dexterity, trying to channel Beijing's ambitions constructively and without the premature opposition that only served to isolate Washington.

D
ESPITE SUCH SETBACKS
, the rebalance to Asia has been a significant strategic shift, positioning the US for the future. The analyst David Milne concluded that Obama's strategy “toward Asia may be viewed as the Obama administration's principal foreign policy legacy thirty years hence.”
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Administration officials often remark how much better America's standing in Asia is today, saying that when they attend Asia summits, they don't hear much about US “retreat” or “credibility” or “red lines”—terms that dominate the conversation in other regions, especially the Middle East. But in at least three ways, the story of the rebalance also reveals some of the challenges to the strategy in both concept and execution.

First, although nearly every foreign policy expert believes the rebalance makes strategic sense, it is very hard to get credit for such moves in the moment. Secretary Clinton described the rebalance as a “quiet effort,” one in which “a lot of our work has not been on the front pages, both because of its nature—long-term investment is less exciting than immediate crises—and because of competing headlines in other parts of the world.”
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The key payoffs of the rebalance—closer relationships and more effective regional institutions; a robust military presence; improved economic ties—are not blockbuster developments that attract fanfare. They can only be fully appreciated in time. The rebalance is what Obama had in mind when he spoke of turning a ship's direction just a few degrees at a time—what appears incremental can ultimately be profound.

Rebalancing requires patience and stamina, which can be tough to sustain when other events place demands on finite resources and time. Leaders can be distracted by other parts of the world and
competing priorities, especially when prodded by the Washington debate, which tends to magnify disproportionally issues of the moment. During many of Obama's trips to Asia, events elsewhere crowded out the news, making it hard to get much attention. And some Asian officials and experts perceived that with the departure of such officials as Hillary Clinton and Tom Donilon, who were critical to designing the rebalance strategy and were deeply invested in it, implementation lost focus. That is unfair—especially because the most important driver of the rebalance wasn't any single advisor, but the president—yet such perceptions matter.

Domestic politics can also throw a strategy off course. Sometimes this is indirect—in October 2013 Obama had to cancel a four-country trip to Asia because of budget battles with Republicans in Congress that threatened a government shutdown. But other times politics has a direct impact—on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has come out against the TPP agreement that she had championed as secretary of state.

Second, even if the Obama administration gets credit for having the right approach, it has been dogged by worries that the strategy's implementation falls short of its ambition. There is constant concern that, because the rebalance is one of those “important” issues that the “urgent” pushes aside, it is under-resourced. There is only so much military, economic and political bandwidth to go around. This is true today, but would even be more apparent should future presidents make different decisions. For example, if the US gets involved in another major ground war in the Middle East, it will be harder if not impossible to sustain the rebalance to Asia.

Maintaining American staying power has been a constant theme, especially in an era of tighter budgets and governing gridlock in Washington. In the administration's two most important strategic statements about the rebalance—Obama's November 2011 speech to the Australian Parliament and Clinton's October 2011 essay in
Foreign Policy
—both went to great lengths to reassure regional partners who wondered about America's ability to deliver on its future commitments. Obama pledged that while the US defense budget would have to be cut, he would prioritize the American mission and presence in Asia, while Clinton wrote that the US would resist the temptation to “come home” and not be “distracted again by events elsewhere.”
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This created a third challenge. The parts of the world where “events elsewhere” took place wondered how this strategic shift would affect them. Those concerns help explain the somewhat esoteric debate about the strategy's terminology, and whether the approach to Asia was a “pivot” or “rebalance.” The terms were used interchangeably, but the use of the former fed suspicions in other regions that, because one has to pivot away from something, they were going down the priority list. This was true among Europeans, who fretted that more American time and attention in Asia meant less for them (my former Pentagon colleagues who worked on Europe joked that they were the “ass end of the rebalance”). And it was also true for US allies in the Middle East, who had been the subjects of America's post-9/11 “distractions.” To them, all the talk of the “pivot” caused unnecessary stress.

Yet these key relationships—with Europe, with Russia, and with the Muslim world—were the focus of another component of Obama's effort to build a strategy for the long term—a
reset
to repair America's image and reestablish its leadership position.

RESET

In Europe, the reset began before Obama even got elected. There is no better symbol of this than his July 2008 address in Berlin, which he visited as a presidential candidate. It will likely be remembered for a long time—if not necessarily for its message, then for the imagery
of over 200,000 wildly enthusiastic, mostly young Germans packed into Berlin's Tiergarten, creating an atmosphere more like a rock festival than a policy conference. As Obama's top campaign adviser, David Plouffe, later reflected, the Berlin event was an opportunity to “visually demonstrate an important premise: the world was still hungry for American leadership, but of a different, more cooperative kind that only Barack Obama could deliver.”
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During the Bush years, the US-European relationship had been especially choppy. The policy debate had been dominated by influential analysts such as Robert Kagan, who argued that the United States and Europe lived on entirely different planets and were therefore drifting apart. The Europeans, Kagan observed, lived in a world of Kantian “perpetual peace,” whereas Americans lived in a Hobbesian world of grave threats. Among leaders, insults flew across the Atlantic, with the Bush team belittling “old Europe” (traditional partners like France and Germany) and European officials openly deriding Bush's “cowboy” approach.

Such bitterness was especially evident in Europe's most pivotal country, Germany, which is a key example of the damage the post-9/11 years had done to America's image in the world (this impact is still being felt today, when Germans complain about an issue like torture long after Obama ended it). The year before Obama's visit to Berlin, opinion polls showed 86 percent of Germans disapproved of President Bush's handling of foreign policy, and 59 percent did not want the United States to play a leading role in world affairs. The US-German relationship was defined by mutual recriminations and suspicions, and even to express solidarity with the United States was a risky proposition politically. In 2003, Angela Merkel, then still virtually unknown in the United States, nearly undermined her political career by writing an article for the
Washington Post
to make the unpopular point that then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder didn't speak for all Germans when he criticized the Iraq War.

By 2008, Europe was clamoring for new American leadership, and Obama represented the ideal. To the thousands packed in the Tiergarten who hung on his every word, Obama embodied all of their dreams about the United States; to them he truly was, as Obama described himself in the speech, a “citizen of the world.” Obama used the Berlin address to outline the idea that “partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity.” But he also reminded his audience that this would be a two-way street, and that just as the United States would seek to reach out, the Europeans would need to step up.

In many ways, Bush's foreign policy had let European leaders off the hook. Because the United States had expected less of Europe—and because it had become politically easy, if not advantageous, to oppose the United States due to Bush's unpopularity—many European leaders had been able to shirk hard choices. That's why Obama stressed the common burden that the United States and Europe must share, one that, he said, “a change of leadership in Washington will not lift.” In fact, Obama promised things would only get tougher, because “in this new century, Americans and Europeans alike will be required to do more—not less.”

The Berlin speech laid the basis for Obama's approach to the transatlantic relationship: for all the talk of pivots and rebalancing, when it came to solving problems, Europe remained America's partner of first resort. Obama promised a new kind of leadership, but had high expectations in return. In this way, the speech also set the stage for the mutual disappointment that riddled the relationship during Obama's presidency. Just as Obama could not meet the unrealistic hopes that Europeans had placed on him to change the world with the snap of his fingers, as Europeans' frenzy of enthusiasm waned, many still proved unprepared to make tough choices to meet the challenges ahead.

T
HE SECOND RELATIONSHIP
in need of a reset was with Russia. Obama's approach to Moscow, which was also first outlined during his 2008 campaign, combined both wariness and a sense of opportunity.

As a candidate, Obama was clear about the dangers Russia posed, especially after its invasion of Georgia in August 2008. During the first presidential debate with John McCain, Obama had warned of “a resurgent and very aggressive Russia” as a threat to global stability. Obama also expressed concerns about Russia's drift away from democracy and its bullying behavior toward neighbors such as Ukraine and NATO allies in the Baltics, saying that the Russian leadership needed to understand that “you can't be a twenty-first-century power and act like a twentieth-century dictatorship.” However, Obama also believed that because Russia was simply too important to ignore, one had to find a way to work with it. For Obama, the key was to approach Russia with clear-eyed pragmatism.
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Since the end of the Cold War, the disputes over how the United States should approach Russia have never really been about what we wanted to achieve. Democrats and Republicans largely agreed that the fundamental goal should be to help promote a democratic Russia at peace with itself and its neighbors, working where possible to cooperate with the rest of the world in solving problems.

Therefore, the debate has always been over how most effectively to influence Russian behavior, especially when it turns negative. The policy struggle is about whether the United States should seek to engage or isolate Russia; whether our policies should do more to accommodate the Kremlin or confront it; and how one weighs the value of Russia's cooperation abroad with its progress toward democracy at home.

When Obama entered office, he found the relationship with Moscow adrift, believing that the accumulated differences of the previous decade had made it harder to work together on common endeavors—such as nuclear security, trade and economics, or dealing
with Iran and North Korea. There were still deep concerns about Russia's political direction—in 2008 Putin had switched jobs with his prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, but was still seen as the power behind the throne—as well as over the way Moscow dealt with its neighbors. Yet the administration believed it needed to find a way to work together on the issues where cooperation was possible. As Secretary Clinton put it: “Straight up transactional diplomacy isn't always pretty, but often it's necessary.”
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That was the core logic of the Russia “reset.” It was not, as the critics later insisted, some naïve attempt to work with Russia at all costs, to brush aside differences, or to establish a new era of harmony. The US-Russian relationship has always combined a mix of cooperation, competition, and disagreement, and the reset era was no exception. It was a policy driven by pragmatism, not ideology; to work with Russia where our interests converged, stand firm where they did not, and engage directly with the Russian people as they continued to press for political freedom and economic reforms.

This approach paid dividends for a time. But it did not solve all our problems with Russia—and some would come roaring back as Obama's tenure in office neared its end.

T
HE THIRD ASPECT
of the reset was broader: to present a new face of the United States overseas.

This was more than just an attempt to generate good feelings. It was an effort to reestablish the credibility and sense of legitimacy that had been lost during the post-9/11 era. This was a significant reason Obama chose Hillary Clinton to be his first secretary of state—both because of her widely respected skills but also the message it sent by placing a former political rival in such an important role. Some of this restoration was also achieved by early policy changes such as renouncing torture and pledging to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. But Obama aspired to something
even grander—to outline a new narrative for America's global leadership.