Is Obama’s foreign policy playbook future-proof?
Barack Obama’s visit to Cuba this week has set in place a central element of what he hopes will be a transformational legacy in foreign policy. When he was campaigning for the presidency, Mr Obama set a goal of turning the page on the history of American “arrogance” in Latin America by engaging with Cuba and ending the long-running communist insurgency in Colombia.
He is well on the way to achieving this. Washington and Havana now have diplomatic relations, while the Colombian peace process, which would have been unthinkable without the US-Cuban rapprochement, is transforming the politics of the country, even if a deadline for a final agreement has been missed. That good news aside, the visit to Havana illustrated the other side of Mr Obama’s management of the US role in global affairs. While he was watching a baseball match beside president Raoul Castro, the world was talking about the terrorist bombings in Brussels. It looked to Mr Obama’s many critics as if he was pursuing a professorial policy line while the rest of the world went to hell. When he came to power – elected as the “anti-Bush” who would end America’s military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan – he had three key agendas. The first was to end the enemy status of countries such as Iran, Myanmar and Cuba. Myanmar proved easy – the dictatorship was desperate for America’s help to prevent the country becoming an economic colony of China. Years of engagement with Iran finally led to a deal to curb its nuclear programme, though by the time it was signed, much of Washington’s foreign policy community was suspicious of it. Even the rapprochement with Cuba, which ends decades of unnecessary and ineffective attempts to topple communist rule, has been greeted in Washington with muted applause, with critics noting that Mr Castro has had to do little in return. At the same time, Mr Obama made clear that he was unhappy with America’s relationship with some long- standing allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. They got the message that it was time to broaden their network of alliances.
The third and central goal of his two terms in the White House was even more controversial: to rip up the “Washington playbook” – which required the US to use military force at regular intervals to defend its credibility as a superpower – and replace it with a policy based on negotiation. We know these goals from an extraordinary series of interviews conducted by Jeffrey Goldberg for The Atlantic magazine. Here Mr Obama focuses on his 2013 decision to go back on his promise to attack the Syrian regime if it used chemical weapons, which he had declared to be a “red line”. The president’s critics see this as the original sin of his time in office, when Russia and China saw him blink, and concluded that America could now be pushed around. Allies felt let down. Mr Obama is unrepentant, telling Goldberg that this was the moment he finally stood up the “Washington foreign policy establishment” – the think tanks, armchair strategists and retired officials of past administrations. The president’s view is, according to Goldberg, that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force”.
There are astonishing nuggets in the interviews which would be newsworthy if they appeared in his memoirs five years after leaving power. He calls Britain and France “free- riders” for allowing Libya to collapse into chaos after the removal of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.
The Middle East, in his view, is home to the “malicious, nihilistic, violent parts of humanity” and a distraction from other more promising parts of the world, such as Asia.
The Washington foreign policy elite has struck back, lamenting that Mr Obama has not learnt to keep his disputes with allies private. Nicholas Burns, a former diplomat now at Harvard University, has retorted: “However much Mr Obama may believe the old rules do not apply, it is an ancient truth that a great power has to back up its threats if it wishes to be respected by its friends and feared by its adversaries.” Mr Obama emerges as a lonely advocate in the White House, a genuine outsider, seemingly more at odds with his allies than with the countries that challenge US power abroad. The Atlantic magazine essay, which should be required reading for diplomats all over the world, often invokes the ques- tion: what makes him tick? One diplomatic practitioner highlights Mr Obama’s childhood in Hawaii and schooling in Indonesia as examples of how his formative influences are very different from those of average Americans, black or white. It is as if when he arrived at university, he was a foreign student, the diplomat says.
Goldberg’s essay recounts a conversation between Mr Obama and Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister of Australia, where the president says he has watched Indonesia move from a “relaxed, syncretistic Islam” to a more “fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation”, a development he blames on Saudi Arabian-funded madrassahs.
Mr Obama has put all this into the open. The question now is what his successor as president will do. Will he or she continue the policy of strategic retrenchment – effectively ruling out US involvement in foreign conflicts unless there is a real threat to the homeland? Or might a successor be so keen to restore lost credibility that some reckless interventions are undertaken? Either – or a combination of both – is a possibility.
The real test will, no doubt, be the Iranian nuclear deal. There will surely be Iranian actions – such as missile launches or attempts to bypass agreed controls – that will provoke crises along the way. Then we will see whether Mr Obama has in fact written a new playbook for foreign policy, one where diplomacy is divorced from the use of military force.