This Max Fisher piece for Vox is annoying. But, then, our foreign policy elites are also annoying. Fisher praises the president for having basically the right set of policies, especially in the big picture and for the long term, but he criticizes him for lack of decisiveness and inaction in the small picture and for the short term.
The presumption behind the whole piece is that America is not only responsible for what happens in places like Ukraine and Egypt and Syria and Iraq, but that we can control (or could have controlled) what happens in those places in ways that will be mutually beneficial to our citizens and theirs.
So, when Fisher moves to provide us with some examples of the president’s indecisiveness and lack of boldness, he comes up with this:
Worse, the US could not decide how severely to punish the [Egyptian] coup regime, or whether to even denounce it at all; they condemned it one day and praised it the next. They spent months denying a coup had happened, then responded by withdrawing some military aid. Egypt now has a military dictator who openly reviles the US; Obama could not decide whether he wanted to support democracy there or maintain a useful if authoritarian ally, so now the US has neither. That failure, a direct result of disengagement and indecisiveness, will persist after he leaves office.
Obama has been similarly wishy-washy on Syria. He did not support the rebels early in the conflict, when it might have made a difference, but now that it is too late to matter he has tilted toward arming the rebels more fully. In Iraq, he favored withdrawing from the country’s political and security challenges when they were non-urgent but also less daunting to address, and now that they are harder and more pressing he is finally coming around.
Let’s start with Egypt. The fall of Hosni Mubarak was an extraordinarily awkward moment for U.S. foreign policy leaders. In some sense, either this country supports representative government or it does not, but things are never quite so simple. When you have allies like Saudi Arabia and air and naval bases in places like Bahrain and Qatar, taking the side of a popular revolution against a long-time strongman ally will put enormous strains on foreign relations. President Obama inherited this situation, and he had to manage a very difficult transition when the Arab Spring broke out. How could we encourage the forces of democratization without blowing up our existing arrangements?
It’s understandable that the country’s foreign policy elites were sending mixed messages. They didn’t know what to think, and they had to straddle both sides of the fence. That the resulting elections in Egypt brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power was a second challenge. Do we continue to have a close relationship with this government and hope that they either moderate with time or fail spectacularly and discredit themselves? How can we not be at least rhetorically committed to supporting elected officials over military brutes?
When the coup came in Egypt, we again had to straddle. Military coups are officially bad. But this one was a done deal, and it overthrew a bad government that had lost legitimacy. Should the administration have welcomed the coup with open arms and showered the generals with praise?
The key here is that America was not behind the overthrow of Mubarak. We did not work to elect the Muslim Brotherhood, and we did not encourage the military coup that followed. We didn’t have control over those things. We could have stepped in and tried to control them, but it’s not obvious that we could have succeeded and it’s even less obvious that it would have served our long-term interests.
Then we get to Syria, where we get another iteration of the mantra that Obama could have helped the rebels early on “when it might have made a difference.” Given that the rebels have always been dominated by radical Sunni Islamists, all that getting involved early would have done is give these rebels more weaponry.
What President Obama recognized from the start is that we could not aid the rebels in Syria without taking sides in a sectarian war. And we would have been taking the side that sought to overthrow the government in Baghdad. While everyone in Washington was pushing the president to force Assad out of power by force, he found a way to take away their chemical weapons without firing a shot. No one has ever come up with a plausible way that the president could have removed Assad and left a Syria that was at peace.
A similar problem arose in Iraq. With Prime Minister Maliki acting increasingly sectarian and authoritarian, do we continue to work with him? Do we respect the Iraqi elections? Ultimately, the answer was no and we actually did engineer a coup of sorts. Did we wait too long? Well, we had to wait until the conditions were such that Maliki would leave office peaceably. Certainly, it is better to have a coup under these conditions where it is approved by all the regional players, rather than having U.S. troops toppling the elected government, is it not?
The situation in Ukraine provides another example of the limits of American power and influence. Russia remains a country with enough nuclear weapons to end life on this planet as we know it. How belligerent do we want President Obama to be about an ethnic conflict on Russia’s border? His view is that Russia is punching itself in the face. He’d be happier if it stopped punching itself in the face, but he’s not going to risk World War Three over it.
The one area where the president followed along with the warmongers was in Libya. There, we had the power to intervene decisively with airpower, owing to Libya’s unique geography. We had a ready-made villain in Moamar Gaddafi. What we didn’t have is any clue about what would happen if Gaddafi was removed from power. Did we help Libya with our intervention? Did we help ourselves? Of course, not. Libya is an unmitigated hellhole today. And we have neither the power not the will to do a damn thing about it. All we have is our share of responsibility for the result, and all the ill-will that comes with that.
America can be a stabilizing force, but only to a point. We can’t make people stop wanting to kill each other. When we commit to stabilizing actions, they can be destabilizing (as in Libya) or expensive failures (as in Iraq or Vietnam). They can have unintended spillover effects (as in Mali, Cambodia, and Syria). When we make a commitment in once place, it can come with costs in another (as in Afghanistan).
If people are really worried about Russia, the best thing to do is to resist getting embroiled in all these other theaters that threaten to tie down our resources without benefiting us at all.
That’s what this president has done, for the most part, and what most other presidents would not have done.
That’s why a lot of us elected him over Clinton and McCain in the first place.
Drum has covered this a lot. People are upset over the president’s foreign policy while agreeing with his decisions. As a people we like thinking of ourselves as the world’s policeman / helper and even when the decision is right puncturing our self delusions angers us.
Also my opposition to a lot of the foreign adventures of the last 15 years had basically been because I loathe and fear China and see a strong economy and actual social and environmental justice in my own country as the foundational building blocks needed to oppose them successfully.
Thank you for this. Very educational.
The Syrian situation is particularly difficult. Assad is a dictator and a dreadful person. His wife seems to be worse.
However, like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Tito in Yugoslavia, and other dreadful dictators in many places, he has improved matters for a variety of groups. Women in particular have NOTHING to gain by replacing Assad with some Islamic caliphate. The various fundamentalist groups will drag Syria back 100 years into the past, maybe 1400. The Assad regime has also been good to Christian, Jewish, and other minorities.
Picking sides in this conflict is not simple. Both sides are dreadful. In Iraq, we are beginning to see that removing Hussein might end up with a horrible situation in which ISIS rules the north, eradicates non-Islamic groups, and does dreadful things to women (yazidi prisoners recently were forcibly converted, married off, and basically put into slavery – the men were killed first of course).
Had we armed “rebels” of one sort or another, we might have woken up about now realizing that we created ISIS, just as Carter created Usama bin Laden. Unexpected consequences IS what happens over there.
Tell me in what way his wife is worse? I find the statement remarkable.
We did arm the rebels in Syria through aid to our Saudi and Gulf State “allies”. Qatar even relocated surplus weapons from Libya to Syria after Gadhafi fell. Regardless of its first destination, it wound up in ISIS hands and was used in the attacks on Mosul, which delivered ISIS even more US weapons.
Iraq is however using Russian weapons because that’s what Saddam Hussein had, what Iraqis are most familiar with using, are reliable, and inexpensive.
Most calls to supply arms to the region are from shills for US defense contractors who want to boost their sales underwritten by US taxpayers.
The Middle East is awash with all kinds of small arms and ammunition.
As I recall, Assad lent a helping hand to us during our Iraq occupation, during our extraordinary rendition operations. He tortured people that the CIA captured.
I find it remarkable that the US can build up a narrative about Assad being bad because he tortures his citizens when we used him to torture people for the US. I see a shitload of hypocrisy in this.
Sort of like capturing Noriega because he helped the CIA move drugs and launder money.
I do remember something about using Syria for extraordinary rendition but as in all international relationships, it was more complicated.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/assad-policies-aided-rise-of-islamic-state-militant-group-1408739733
A nation that has a trillion-dollar bigfooting military and a 66-year-old alliance with almost all European nations, alliances with Japan and South Korea and the Anglophone metropolitan and colonial white people countries, a UN Security Council permanent membership, keeps calling itself the “indispensable nation”, referred to the past century as The American Century, and congratulates itself that it is still the “sole superpower” clearly positions itself as ” responsible for what happens in places like Ukraine and Egypt and Syria and Iraq”. It should not be surprising when people inside and outside the US hold the US responsible for its ineptness and bigfooting military style and invasive intelligence operation.
It is more than likely very incorrect to place Barack Obama as the person responsible for all of that despite Harry Truman’s “the buck stops here” sign. There are everywhere troubling signs of a national security and intelligence community doing its own thing without accountability in an atmosphere of Congressional gridlock and complicity. For too many players in government, the President of the United States is the least indispensable player when it comes to foreign policy.
Through double-dealing, ambiguity, delay, bureaucratic maneuvers, personnel changes, and departure from principles and campaign promises, President Obama likely has played the complexities of US politics in a chaotic period of US imperial withdrawal as well as a single human being could be expected, given the other crises left intentionally by others on his agenda. I will grant him that and only because the Democratic establishment has so deserted reality in foreign policy. A 100-to-0 resolution approving of Israel’s war of choice on Gaza and silence on the largest land theft since Menachem Begin. That sort of unreality about Middle East policy and how it all fits together.
Look, President Obama was speaking a a fundraiser for an upcoming midterm election that he would like Democrats to win to at least restore a modicum of sanity to the Congress. The venue demands optimism and flag-waving patriotism and as little candor as one can squeak by with. Fisher hopping on this is just an excuse to meet a deadline. The President, whatever he is, is not stupid about the situation that the world and the US are in at the moment despite his insistence on exceptionalist rhetoric.
His own situation is that with a divided legislature and gridlock, other leaders in the world are trying to corner him with their own agendas. And so are the media-blessed GOP foreign policy wankers. And the Clintonista advisers on his own foreign policy team. His flexibility, willingness to listen to reason, waiting for a situation to ripen before he makes a decision, and demands for hard data that the deep state is unwilling to provide have placed him in a current bind of being spread over multiple crises.
After two nail-biting campaigns, this is the sort of chaos that tends to clarify his strategic thinking and focus his attention creatively.
The imperative of this zeitgeist with regard to US foreign policy is to have a foundation of global stability restored to what the pre-WWI generation would have termed normalcy before the next President is inaugurated. Two years and four months left to establish a working international architecture that provides security from wars for all people. Call that Hillary fuck-up insurance.
There are possible diplomatic plays to make that happen. There are few military plays that move in that direction. The diplomatic plays require dramatic breaks with post-World War II US foreign policy goals and practices.
For the short term the difficult diplomatic plays are better relations with Russia, using Assad to restabilize Syria without US involvement, full diplomatic recognition of Iran (and Cuba as well), eliminating US aid to Israel, backing away from our alliances with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and beginning the end of our occupation of Europe and admitting that NATO is an expensive alliance that has become more destabilizing than stabilizing in the world.
All of those must become fait accompli’s before Hillary or any Republican takes office.
Otherwise, I fear for our survival when the neo-con loonies are set free on the world again.
But like you, I’m just a passenger in this handbasket–waiting to see whether the driver really is changing the destination sign to “Hell”. Absent that certainty, one can only be optimistic.
You laid out a tall order. I hope some of it can come to pass. I too, am somewhat fearful of HRC and likely any R President we get.
Tall orders are what happens when “pragmatism” postpones needed changes to policy for decades.
I, for one, remain vigilant for the mini-drones that ISIS (ISIL?) may have gotten from Saddam’s regime to rain down Anthrax, Ebola – or whatever the virus/WMD fear of the day is – on the East Coast of the US, that frightens people the most.
Get a grip.
If we should have learned anything, it’s how little our advanced military can do.
But, “we isn’t learning…”
This reads as if the U.S. is drawn by circumstances out of a passive attitude into other people’s problems. Was the U.S. not an active player in Ukraine? I would say so. The whole thing backfired. Putin showed his teeth—growl. So you have a growl for a growl. About Iraq—well no one needs to explain that. Syria is a bit more complicated because the U.S. never got to openly show its cards for various reasons: the British parliament voted against military involvement (the U.S. had then lost it’s poodle); Obama then could push the whole thing on to Congress’s shoulders (sigh of relief, of course the whole meme that the U.S. people are sick of war is specious); and Putin got Assad to dump his biological weapons (later it became evident that his forces were probably not responsilbe for the Sarin attak, so what was everyone getting so worked up about anyway?). Could anger at Putin be, in part, due to his sleight of hand in Syria, and might the active attitude of the State Department in the Ukraine coup be an act of frustration. After all, where is Snowden residing? The granting of asylum to Snowden definitely plays into everything the U.S. government and media decide and propagandize about Russia. There we are again. The U.S. has discovered EVIL in the world. But maybe one day it will think about the dictum about who our enemy really is. Iraq wasn’t pure evil? Oh no, not by a long shot. And the U.S. attitude towards the Palestinians doesn’t have an evil tinge. Oh no, little me. Good, you get it. I want to know who shot down the Malaysian passenger plane over Ukraine.
The US has active military barracked in something like 130 to 150 countries around the world. We’ve always got a finger in it.
Like what you’ve written although I question whether the Syrian rebels were ALWAYS dominated by Sunni extremists and disagree this conflict was sectarian from the beginning.
Supporting the rebels early in the conflict was a problem because the rebels weren’t a coherent structure. They were an unknown soup of hundreds of different militias. Even the militias that could be eventually vetted and deemed acceptable worked hand and hand with extremists. Proliferation is a given as we’ve seen in Libya and Afghanistan. So providing the heavy advanced weaponry that might have turned the tide against Assad would have been reckless.
On the sectarian issue, I’m pretty certain I’ve read plenty of articles on the mixed support from Druze, Syriacs, and even some young Alawites for the early protests. Only when Assad began to crack down, militias formed and then foreign countries became directly involved did the conflict become sectarian.
Libya’s success in overthrowing Gadhafi provided the illusion that the US had found a way to use Arab Spring protests as an instrument of regime change. The clue that it would not work came when the US sponsored a conference of ex-pat Syrian in Istanbul and proclaimed them as the “democratic forces”. The protesters who had been in Homs and Hamaa and Damascus for over a year disagreed with that.
The Free Syrian Army started with non-Alewites started defecting from the military as their relatives were killed or brutalized by Assad’s repression.
The assassination of the Syrian Defense Minister on a street in Damascus (by whom?) is when the civil war began in earnest and McCain and the War Hawks (and Hillary) wanted to arm the “Syrian rebels”. Instead the US stood aside as the Saudis and Qatar armed who they pleased (no telling what the US CIA was doing). Instead of strengtening “moderate rebels”, al Quaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra grew and had a schism that caused the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shahm (ISIS) to tighten its organization. That schism is likely as much a personality, regional, or ethnic conflict (like the split between Zintan, Benghazi, and Misrata militias in Libya) than an ideological one. And apparently a conflict over effective tactics.
Non-Sunni Syrians are very concerned that no matter which Sunni group takes power (even the Moslem Brotherhood), it will diminished the few civil rights that these minorities have. And those groups include Syrian Jews and Christians.
Political accommodation by Assad in 2011 (and not the Scott Walker sort of sham political accommodation) might have brought a different result. We will never know.
Foreigners have no agency. If it’s not done out of a basement in Langley, or Foggy Bottom, it doesn’t happen at all.
ISIS just released its news that it has beheaded Sotloff.
Cue John McCain and his partner Lindsay Graham. Cue the US Wall Street media. In 10-9-8….
Best US reaction is to not freak out at a theatrically staged execution intended to terrorize and draw an overreaction.
No US troops as targets means locals have ISIS troops as targets.
The US should not become a distraction to the locals working out their post-US-invasion politics by launching another invasion (third in 25 years).