Goodwill squandered, U.S. foreign policy is adrift
Barack Obama’s international reputation is in free fall, writes PAUL H. CHAPIN. And that’s bad news whatever your political affiliation.
A sign of the deterioration in Obama’s domestic strength is that Bush’s ratings now beat Obama’s. Americans’ views of the former president — vilified as few political personages have ever been — are now more positive than negative. Time obviously provides perspective.
The foreign policy of the United States is beginning to accumulate a record of diplomatic failure among the worst in U.S. history. Not since Woodrow Wilson raised the hopes of the world after the First World War and then failed to deliver U.S. leadership has an American president been such a disappointment. Barack Obama’s international standing today is in free fall, and that is bad news whatever one’s political affiliations. The United States is on the road to losing the war against Islamism, and among the futures we must now contemplate are mullah oligarchies ruling from North Africa to West Asia, nuclear brinkmanship between regimes in the Gulf, more asymmetric warfare in the streets of the great cities of the world, and perhaps another war for Israel’s survival.
President Obama took office in 2009 amid some of the highest expectations ever for an incoming president of the United States. It was a classic case of irrational exuberance. By any objective measure, he had one of the weakest resumés of any new president, and his closest advisers had even less grounding in foreign affairs than he did. Moreover, the president appointed no foreign policy veteran of stature as secretary of state or national security adviser to compensate for his own limitations, and he marginalized the best people he had such as Hillary Clinton, Jim Jones and Richard Holbrooke. Robert Gates was retained from the Bush administration as secretary of defence, but largely to see through the drawdown of U.S. forces from Iraq and then Afghanistan. He was gone in two years.
Nor did the president apparently seek advice. According to the former foreign editor of Newsweek, Edward Klein, in 2011 when Bill Clinton was urging Hillary to run again against Obama, he told a group of insiders: “I’ve had two successors since I left the White House — Bush and Obama — and I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama ... Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent ... Barack Obama is an amateur.”
The stakes are high, and the tragedy is that such a great opportunity has been lost. The Obama record provides an object lesson in squandering good will. In July 2008, while he was still just a candidate for president, Obama visited Berlin and was greeted by a crowd of 200,000. When he returned as president in June of this year, the crowd was not much more than 5,000, most of whom were invited guests. Reuters reported “He’s ‘demystified’ and ‘no longer a superstar’ in German eyes. Now he’s just another world leader on a state visit, and whatever problems people have with U.S. policy are on his shoulders.”
According to an annual Gallup tracking poll, European approval of U.S. leadership dropped from 47 per cent in 2009 to 36 per cent in 2012. Worldwide, the median approval of U.S. leadership across 130 countries declined from 49 per cent in Obama’s first year to 41 per cent last year. In Canada — innocent and blinkered as ever — 59 per cent approved and 32 per cent disapproved in 2012.
Only in Africa is Obama’s popularity still quite high. But it has fallen from the days when virtually the entire population of the continent erupted in joy that an American of Kenyan descent had become president. The president’s approval numbers today appear to be in the 70 per cent range, down some 20 points from four years ago. When he visited South Africa two weeks ago, he has met by demonstrations. According to the London Telegraph, presidents Bush and Clinton are more fondly remembered in Africa for their multi-billion-dollar programs to treat AIDS and ease trade. “It would not be wrong,” in the view of a senior academic at the University of Johannesburg, “to say that George W. Bush probably did more for this continent.”
The president is also in political trouble at home, with foreign policy being one of the reasons. In the time that has passed since Obama was first elected president, a sense of inevitability has attached to his victory which carried through to the 2012 election. But if his first win was comfortable, it was no landslide (52.9 per cent of the popular vote) and his second was closer still (51 per cent). The mainstream media wrote off Mitt Romney, but he got a million more votes than John McCain did, along with a very respectable 206 electoral college votes. In the 2010 midterm elections, Obama lost control of the House of Representatives and he did not win it back in 2012.
A sign of the deterioration in Obama’s domestic strength is that Bush’s ratings now beat Obama’s. Americans’ views of the former president — vilified as few political personages have ever been — are now more positive than negative (49 per cent to 46 per cent) and are better than those of the current president (47 per cent to 44 per cent). Time obviously provides perspective. Earlier this year, Micah Cohen of The New York Times reported that Obama’s approval ratings in foreign policy were “barely above water.” In April, polls indicated that the president’s net job approval on foreign policy (the percentage of those who approve minus the percentage of those who disapprove) was in the range of plus-1 to plus-3, compared to plus-9 to plus-19 right after the election. In the view of Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, things may get worse for Obama as current scandals further erode his support. “Obama used Bush as an excuse for practically every miscue and problem right up through the election. ... Obama, one suspects, has no net to catch him now as his support and credibility plunge.” So what happened? In his study of the world Obama faced on coming to office, The Inheritance, David Sanger of The New York Times wrote that: “The symbolism of electing a biracial president with the middle name Hussein is a powerful antidote to the caricature of America as an intolerant, hegemonic power.” But he warned that it would only take the U.S. so far “in restoring our leverage and deploying our portfolio of influence around the world.” Three years later, in Confront and Conceal, Sanger would write that Obama “promised to restore traditional American ‘ engagement’ by talking and listening to America’s most troubling adversaries and reluctant partners ... But it quickly became evident that engagement is just a tactic, not a real strategy.”
As it turned out, the essence of Obama’s foreign policy strategy was to act unilaterally when confronted with a direct threat to American security — and to decline to act on a threat to the global order unless others with more immediate interests at stake were prepared to commit greater resources and take greater risks. This is not a strategy any U.S. president since Franklin Roosevelt would have recognized, with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter. And it is not one other democratic states should leave unattended. If the U.S. is not going to take the lead in dealing with global problems, others must do so. To date, however, only France and Britain have demonstrated any international leadership.