Ferguson:
Henry Kissinger long ago recognized the problem: a talented vote-getter, surrounded by lawyers, who is overly risk-averse.
Even
before becoming Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger
understood how hard it was to make foreign policy in Washington. There “is no
such thing as an American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger wrote in 1968. There
is only “a series of moves that have produced a certain result” that they “may
not have been planned to produce.” It is “research and intelligence organizations,”
he added, that “attempt to give a rationality and consistency” which “it simply
does not have.”
Two
distinctively American pathologies explained the fundamental absence of
coherent strategic thinking. First, the person at the top was selected for other
skills. “The typical political leader of the contemporary managerial society,”
noted Mr. Kissinger, “is a man with a strong will, a high capacity to get
himself elected, but no very great conception of what he is going to do when he
gets into office.”
Second,
the government was full of people trained as lawyers. In making foreign policy,
Mr. Kissinger once remarked, “you have to know what history is relevant.” But
lawyers were “the single most important group in Government,” he said, and
their principal drawback was “a deficiency in history.” This was a
long-standing prejudice of his. “The clever lawyers who run our government,” he
thundered in a 1956 letter to a friend, have weakened the nation by instilling
a “quest for minimum risk which is our most outstanding characteristic.”
Let’s
see, now. A great campaigner. A bunch of lawyers. And a “quest for minimum
risk.” What is it about this combination that sounds familiar?
I have
spent much of the past seven years trying to work out what Barack Obama’s
strategy for the United States truly is. For much of his presidency, as a
distinguished general once remarked to me about the commander in chief’s strategy,
“we had to infer it from speeches.”
At
first, I assumed that the strategy was simply not to be like his predecessor—an
approach that was not altogether unreasonable, given the errors of the Bush
administration in Iraq and the resulting public disillusionment. I read Mr.
Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech—with its Quran quotes and its promise of “a new
beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world”—as simply the
manifesto of the Anti-Bush.
But
what that meant in practice was not entirely clear. Precipitate withdrawal of
all U.S. forces from Iraq, but a time-limited surge in Afghanistan. A “reset”
with Russia, but seeming indifference to Europe. A “pivot” to Asia, but mixed
signals to China. And then, in response to the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt,
Syria and Libya, complete confusion, the nadir of which was the September 2013
redline fiasco regarding the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria
and Mr. Obama’s declaration that “America is not the global policeman.”
An
approximation of an Obama strategy was revealed in April last year, at the end
of a presidential trip to Asia, when White House aides told reporters that the
Obama doctrine was “Don’t do stupid sh—.”
I now
see, however, that there is more to it than that.
The
president always intended to repudiate more than George W. Bush’s foreign policy.
In a 2012 presidential debate with Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama made clear that he
was turning away from Ronald Reagan, too. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for
their foreign policy back,” he jeered, “because the Cold War’s been over for 20
years.” Mr. Romney’s reference to Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe”
now looks prescient, whereas the president’s boast, in a January 2014 New Yorker magazine interview, that he didn’t “really even need George Kennan right
now” looks like hubristic rejection of foreign-policy experience itself. Two
months later, Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea.
Mr.
Obama also had his own plan for the Middle East. “It would be profoundly in the
interest” of the region’s citizens “if Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on
killing each other,” Mr. Obama said in that same interview. “If we were able to
get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist
organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries,
and not developing a nuclear weapon—you could see an equilibrium developing
between . . . predominantly Sunni Gulf states and Iran.”
Now I
see that this was the strategy—a strategy aimed at creating a new balance of
power in the Middle East. The deal on Iran’s nuclear-arms program was part of
Mr. Obama’s aim (as he put it to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in May) “to find
effective partners—not just in Iraq, but in Syria, and in Yemen, and in Libya.”
Mr. Obama said he wanted “to create the international coalition and atmosphere
in which people across sectarian lines are willing to compromise and are
willing to work together in order to provide the next generation a fighting
chance for a better future.”
The
same fuzzy thinking informed Mr. Obama’s speech at the U.N. General Assembly
last week, in which he first said he wanted to “work with other nations under
the mantle of international norms and principles and law,” but then added that,
to sort out Syria, he was willing to work with Russia and Iran—neither famed
for spending time under that particular mantle—so long as they accepted the
ousting of yet another Middle Eastern dictator.
A
fighting chance for a better future in the Middle East? Make that a better
chance for a fighting future.
It is
clear that the president’s strategy is failing disastrously. Since 2010, total
fatalities from armed conflict in the world have increased by a factor of close
to four, according to data from the International Institute of Strategic
Studies. Total fatalities due to terrorism have risen nearly sixfold, based on
the University of Maryland’s Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
database. Nearly all this violence is concentrated in a swath of territory
stretching from North Africa through the Middle East to Afghanistan and
Pakistan. And there is every reason to expect the violence to escalate as the
Sunni powers of the region seek to prevent Iran from establishing itself as the
post-American hegemon.
Today
the U.S. faces three strategic challenges: the maelstrom in the Muslim world,
the machinations of a weak but ruthless Russia, and the ambition of a
still-growing China. The president’s responses to all three look woefully
inadequate.
Those
who know the Obama White House’s inner workings wonder why this president, who
came into office with next to no experience of foreign policy, has made so
little effort to hire strategic expertise. In fairness, Denis McDonough (now
White House chief of staff) has some real knowledge of Latin America. While at
Oxford, National Security Adviser Susan Rice wrote a doctoral dissertation on
Zimbabwe. And Samantha Power, ambassador to the U.N., has published two
substantial books (one of which—“A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”—she
will need to update when she returns to academic life).
But
other key players are the sort of people Henry Kissinger complained about more
than half a century ago: Michael Froman, the trade representative, was one of
Mr. Obama’s classmates at Harvard Law School; Deputy Secretary of State Tony
Blinken is a Columbia J.D.; éminence grise Valerie Jarrett got hers from the
University of Michigan. What about Secretary of State John Kerry? Boston
College Law School, ’76. Not one of the people who advise the president could
claim to have made contributions to strategic doctrine comparable with those
made by Mr. Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski before they went to Washington.
Some
things you can learn on the job, like tending bar or being a community
organizer. National-security strategy is different. “High office teaches
decision making, not substance,” Mr. Kissinger once wrote. “It consumes
intellectual capital; it does not create it.” The next president may have cause
to regret that Barack Obama didn’t heed those words. In making up his strategy
as he has gone along, this president has sown the wind. His successor will reap
the whirlwind. He or she had better bring some serious intellectual capital to
the White House.
