Worldmaking (86 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.

*   *   *

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.