THE incredible shrinking president
Iraq. Syria. Ukraine. Gaza. As the U.S. steps back from the world stage, the trouble spreads. Is it time for Obama to get tough?
When a plane was shot from the sky over Ukraine and tank shells and rockets pounded Gaza and Israel this week, neither the battle plans nor the trigger fingers came from Washington, but that did not stop a line being drawn to President Barack Obama.
Just as anxious residents of a crime-plagued neighbourhood decry a failure of an embattled police chief to protect them, a world with unravelling peace and security wonders where the most powerful nation on the planet is amidst the hurly-burly.
Mr. Obama is facing stern questions, both studiously academic and nakedly political, on whether he is failing on the global stage.
The world has witnessed much carnage since it was remade after the Second World War and, individually, the problems we have now do not stand above past calamities. But one thing that looks markedly different is the place of the United States of America, whether at the bargaining table, wrestling in the backrooms and diplomatic chambers, bellowing from podiums in the White House or gassing up its tanks, for good or for ill effect.
In the Middle East, the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now joined by a wide arc of crises from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran. An expansionist Russia and emboldened China are making U.S. allies twitchy.
Mr. Obama has already been much criticized for his foreignpolicy forays: his outreach to the Muslim world, which appears to have been snubbed; failure to take the lead in Libya; hastily embracing a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt while abandoning an old ally, even if he was a dictator, as well as drawing “red lines” in Syria only to see them trampled over.
To some the world has never needed a global policeman more. But exhausted by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. public is in no mood to patrol the world’s troubled streets and Mr. Obama is of a similar frame of mind.
Past presidents outraged by the downing of a passenger jet and the death of almost 300 people might have spoken about how the U.S. would demand justice. At the White House Friday, Mr. Obama searched to be more inclusive when he said the “international community stands on the side of justice and on the side of truth.”
Veteran U.S. Republican Senator John McCain, a member of the Senate foreign relations committee, said he has never seen more turmoil.
“I would argue that given conditions in the Middle East,” he told CNN last weekend, “this might be more dangerous than any time in the past. The United States’ influence has never been less than it is today. And we’re seeing the results of that.”
While the Republicans have reason to poke at the Democrat in the White House, questions are coming from a broad spectrum.
The debate was sparked in earnest by a recent essay by U.S. historian Robert Kagan in The New Republic that seized Washington’s attention. Called “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” Mr. Kagan argued “the American world order” has generally kept a lid on strife around the world, preventing things from getting too crazy.
“In recent years, the world has picked up unmistakable signals that Americans may no longer want to carry the bu- rden of global responsibility,” he wrote. And they are acting accordingly.
“When Vladimir Putin failed to achieve his goals in Ukraine through political and economic means, he turned to force, because he believed that he could,” wrote Mr. Kagan.
The journal Foreign Policy added to the debate in an analysis asking, “Have we hit peak America?”
But it is not a one-sided argument. In many ways, Mr. Obama is giving the American people what he promised to give them.
“Obama was elected on a policy of ending wars, not starting them and he has been pretty cautious about responding,” said John Higginbotham, a fellow at Ottawa’s Carleton University and former Canadian diplomat in Washington, Hong Kong and Beijing.
Mr. Higginbotham looks to spread the blame more widely.
It’s a failure of the whole political and economic system
“It’s a failure of the United States, not a failure of the Obama administration. It’s a failure of the whole political and economic system in adapting to new challenges and world conditions,” he said.
Stephen Sestanovich, senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies with the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the recent book Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama, does not buy Mr. Kagan’s overarching premise of a fundamental shift.
He said Mr. Obama epitomizes a retrenchment president — downsizing the U.S. role and defence spending, having less commitment to allies and a responsibility for the world’s problems.
U.S. presidencies alternate between activist and retrenchment administrations, he said, with one trying to balance the overreach or underachievement of the other. “[Retrenchment presidents] are basically brought in by the American people to mop up a mess and the American people over- whelmingly re-elect them, but then, questions arise, once they are disengaged from the mess of the past, as to what the policy is supposed to be going forward.
“And here’s what is important about retrenchment presidencies: They end,” meaning it is not a permanent state of affairs.
Mr.. Obama focused much of his first term on domestic problems, said Colin Campbell, a Canada Research Chair in U.S. Government and Politics at the University of British Columbia. “And now that he’s looking at the world more broadly, as he has the liberty to do it, he’s found a heck of a lot more chaos than he could have ever imagined,” said Mr. Campbell. “It’s possible that it will swamp him.”
The tension has not escaped Mr. Obama. A speech in May at West Point U.S. military academy was seen as a rebuttal to Mr. Kagan’s essay.
“By most measures, America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world,” Mr. Obama said. “Those who argue otherwise — who suggest that America is in decline, or has seen its global leadership slip away — are either misreading history or engaged in partisan politics.”
Despite his sentiment that the United States was not the world’s policeman, he touted just that imagery in his speech: “When a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help,” he said to applause.
Mr. Obama’s retreat from the world stage — and its repercussions — is emboldening conservative hawks, those cowed by the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and revitalizing a world view of intervention.
“We are seeing the start of a debate which is going to continue through the next presidential election,” said Mr. Sestanovich. “One of the parties is probably going to be more interventionist and the other is going to be more in favour of disengagement.
“We just don’t know which one is going to be which yet.”