Obama pressured to increase Mideast engagement
The eruptions in the Middle East have posed perhaps the severest, most direct test yet of the limits of President Obama’s signature foreign policy innovation during his first term, what the White House hails as the “light footprint” strategy.
Sensitive to public sentiment that a decade of war had debilitated America, and eager to focus on economic problems at home, Obama quickly embraced a mix of remote-control technology and at-a-distance diplomacy to contain the most explosive problems in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. Strikes by unmanned drone aircraft increased sixfold, secret computer weapons were aimed at Iran, and special forces famously killed the world’s mostwanted terrorist and made night raids the currency of U.S. force.
For a while it worked. As Obama’s newly fallen director of central intelligence, David Petraeus, asked so succinctly a year ago, “Who wouldn’t want a lightfootprint strategy?”
But now Obama is under more pressure than ever to become engaged in the Middle East in a way that he avoided during the presidential campaign. In his own party, there are rumblings that he should intervene more directly to halt the slaughter in Syria — by placing Patriot missiles around the region to take down President Bashar Assad’s air power — and to renew efforts in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as soon as the current missile barrages can be contained.
Iran looms largest
Overarching all those problems is the question of Iran, which has fueled the Syrian conflict in part to show that it will not sit idly while sanctions eat away at its oil revenue. Obama has declared that he wants to start direct negotiations with Iran — but it is a last-ditch effort, his own aides acknowledge, to avert a military confrontation that they fear could come by the middle of 2013.
Since 2009, Obama has tried to avoid getting sucked into the vortex of Middle Eastern conflict and dysfunction that drained so many of his predecessors. It was a deliberate choice from the start, his aides say. Fresh to the presidency, he asked his national security staff to reassess where the United States was over-invested and underinvested around the world.
The answer, his national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, recalled last week, came back quickly: “We were over-weighted in some regions, such as our military commitments in the Middle East,” and underweighted in regions where America’s future prosperity lay, notably elsewhere in Asia.
Footprint too light
That helps explain why Obama is moving ahead this weekend with a trip to Thailand, Burma and Cambodia rather than burying himself in the Situation Room in a running conference call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt, whom Obama is leaning on to contain the militant Palestinian party Hamas and stop the predictable escalation of missile attacks.
To Obama’s critics, the root of the seeming absence of U.S. leverage in the Middle East today is a light footprint that was simply too light.
“I think the way to understand Obama’s approach — I wouldn’t call it a strategy — is that he has a uniform preference to keep most problems at a distance,” said Eliot Cohen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who worked for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. “That is what the light footprint has been all about. And it’s run out of gas.”