by Susan Rice
Dilma wasn’t having it. She kept ranting until finally she ran out of steam. I watched half amused at this fascinating study in male-female dynamics. Obama failed utterly to meet Dilma where she was, to defuse her anger with reciprocal passion in his regret. This exchange reminded me of a scene between old-marrieds, when the wife is going berserk over her husband stepping out on her, and the husband is so icy in response trying to chill her out that it totally backfires. It would have been funny, if the whole thing were not so serious.
President Obama was royally pissed that he had to eat crap from foreign leader after foreign leader for a set of transgressions that he did not even know had been committed. It was only a few days after I started at the White House in early July that we learned from The Guardian that the massive cache of extraordinarily sensitive, highly classified documents—which a young, self-righteous intelligence contractor named Edward Snowden stole from the National Security Agency and selectively leaked to the press—alleged that the NSA was eavesdropping on the European Union and at least thirty-eight friendly countries. We later learned these targets purportedly included the personal communications of allied leaders.
Snowden’s leaks did immeasurable damage to many aspects of U.S. national security, from our ability to detect and prevent terrorist attacks to revelations about how the U.S. allegedly conducts intelligence collection. To add insult to injury, after releasing vast quantities of stolen information, Snowden absconded to Vladimir Putin’s Russia where he shared God knows what.
Particularly upset by the eavesdropping allegations was Obama’s good friend and invaluable ally, Angela Merkel. In October 2013, she called so angry that she spoke the whole time in German for the first and only time I can recall in their many discussions. Her understandable fury (exacerbated by echoes of East Germany’s Stasi past) was palpable from across the Atlantic, despite Obama’s assurances that the U.S. “is not” and “will not” eavesdrop on her or other close allies’ personal communications. Merkel was not mollified, and public opinion in Germany, where privacy protections are highly prized, turned sharply against the United States.
Obama was deeply concerned that this breach might ruin his closest foreign partnership. My own early dealings with my German counterpart, Christoph Heusgen, were also poisoned by the Snowden revelations, especially after I implied that we believed their reaction was somewhat overheated. For months, Christoph and I did not speak directly but conducted business through my very capable senior director for Europe, Karen Donfried. When Karen later departed the NSC, Christoph and I had no choice but to engage each other on pressing issues from Ukraine to counterterrorism. Necessity bred familiarity and, ultimately, a strong partnership and friendship between me and Christoph. But the Snowden allegations substantially set back the larger U.S.-German alliance, which took time and real effort on both sides to repair.
French president François Hollande also lodged a firm protest about the Snowden revelations, but France’s objections were somewhat leavened by the tacit acknowledgment that the French are no boy scouts when it comes to spying, and their understanding of the importance of maintaining our joint counterterrorism cooperation. The Japanese and Mexican leaders were unhappy but less exercised.
For all the damage Snowden did to important bilateral relationships that is known to the public, the greatest harm was less visible. Suffice it to say, I spent much of my first six months as national security advisor trying to recover from and help clean up Snowden’s mess. Rarely, if ever, did I see President Obama more frustrated and insistent on the urgency of resolving a major problem than on the Snowden disclosures. Obama almost never raises his voice in anger, and I never saw him display explosive rage. Yet on this issue, he was fit to be tied, as he quietly pressed his almost daily demands that we fully fix the flaws that we inherited, and fast.
For my part, I was furious and incredulous that unaccountable people years ago seemingly made hugely consequential decisions about how to target our collection capacity—without senior-level oversight or thorough consideration of the policy implications of getting caught. Equally, I felt nearly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the damage Snowden inflicted and its almost infinite implications. My nerves were close to fraying, as from one day to the next we never knew what new shoe might drop.
I led intense and sometimes contentious separate negotiations with my French and German counterparts on how to modify our security relationships. The president commissioned a five-person, outside review panel to offer expert advice. My team, colleagues in the various agencies, and I conducted a months-long, comprehensive interagency review of our intelligence collection policies, targets, and procedures. After painstaking and near constant work to bring this vast issue under control and ensure that the most sensitive collection decisions are carefully vetted, we implemented a wide range of reforms, including those the president codified in Presidential Policy Directive 28, “Signals Intelligence Activities,” issued in January 2014.
Snowden’s leak of classified programs and practices constituted one of the most difficult and serious problems I encountered in government. Congress and the American people were outraged by the (mis)perception that the NSA was spying indiscriminately on U.S. citizens’ phone calls and emails. The European Union protested vehemently that U.S. intelligence agencies were vacuuming up vast quantities of E.U. citizen information without their knowledge or consent. American tech and telecom companies sought to put public and practical distance between themselves and the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community, taking steps that made critical cooperation on terrorist and other threats far more difficult. Trust on all sides—domestic and international—was sorely strained, if not ruptured.
The damage Snowden caused to U.S. national security cannot be overstated. Those who praise him as a “whistle-blower” and a hero have no idea what they are talking about. Snowden deserves a full reckoning with the U.S. justice system, which I am confident would render the punishment he has earned. Instead, he remains coddled in Moscow, where he escaped to the warm embrace of our committed adversary and precipitated the sharp, ongoing decline in U.S.-Russian relations. Snowden’s picture ought to be in the dictionary next to the definition of “traitor.”
18 The Furies
“You’re shitting me, right?” I asked White House chief of staff Denis McDonough on an evening in late August 2013.
“No, I’m serious. I was just on my nightly walk with the president, and he thinks we should pause and first go to Congress.”
I was stunned. Denis, standing in my office doorway, repeated his news—that President Obama had suddenly decided not to strike Syria immediately, as planned, but first to get congressional approval for U.S. military action in response to Syria’s horrific use of chemical weapons. Denis said a small group of us would soon gather in the Oval Office to discuss this further with the president.
As national security advisor for less than two months, I’d already chaired several Principals Committee meetings on our response to Syria’s violation of the president’s so-called “red line” on the use of chemical weapons. Nearly two thousand people, including many children, had been killed by the Syrian regime in a sarin gas attack on the Ghouta region. We almost all believed we needed to act militarily to demonstrate to Assad that he could not violate international law with impunity by using deadly gas against civilians without paying a price.
That afternoon, at an NSC meeting, the president agreed and approved appropriate military targets. We were very close to launching. Our primary impediment was the U.N., which needed time to move their personnel out of harm’s way. We had lined up international partners to join our military operation, notably France and the U.K. But Prime Minister David Cameron decided to seek parliamentary approval for this action and, shockingly, he had lost the vote. This was a major setback, an “own goal” by Cameron, but France remained gung ho.
When we gathered that Friday evening in the Oval, President Obama laid out his thinking. He b
egan with his description of the challenge he aimed to address. To start, he recounted, we did not have a clearly valid international legal basis for our planned action, but we could argue that the use of banned chemical weapons made our actions legitimate, if not technically legal. Domestically, we could invoke the president’s constitutional authority to use force under Article II, but that would trigger the War Powers clock—meaning, if our actions lasted longer than sixty days, the president would need to obtain congressional approval. Therefore, before we used any significant force in Syria to address its chemical weapons use, the president thought it best to invest Congress in the decision, and through them the American people.
As usual, Obama was thinking several plays down the field—to the potential need for military action against Iran, if diplomacy failed, to force Iran to give up its still nascent nuclear weapons program. Once the precedent was established that Congress should act to authorize military action in Syria, we could insist on the same kind of vote, should we need to confront Iran—a much higher-risk proposition that he would want Congress to own with us.
I admired the president’s logic but disagreed with his assumptions. As Obama polled his key aides assembled in the Oval for their individual views, all agreed with him. He called on me last, as he often did in my role as national security advisor.
The lone dissenter, I argued for proceeding with military action, as planned. We had signaled clearly and publicly (most recently that morning in a strong speech by Secretary Kerry) that we intended to hold Syria accountable through the use of force. Our military assets were in place. The U.N. was warned. Our allies were waiting. We needed to go. As Vice President Biden likes to say, “Big countries don’t bluff.” Finally, I invoked the painful history of Rwanda and predicted we could long be blamed for inaction.
Above all, I argued to the president, “Congress won’t grant you the authority.” That was my strong gut. I had come to believe from bitter experience that Republicans in Congress were so hostile to President Obama they would deny him anything of consequence he requested, even if they believed it was the right thing to do. I anticipated that congressional Democrats would splinter, as many did not want to vote for what they feared might become another war of choice in the Middle East. The president listened closely to us all and acknowledged my concerns. He concluded his argument with characteristic aplomb, predicting that we would get the votes. Neither a political strategist, the legislative affairs director, nor twice elected president, I rested my case.
The next morning, the president convened his whole national security cabinet to discuss Syria. Again, he laid out his thinking and polled the room. Everyone professed to agree with his arguments and proposed course of action, though I sensed some were not being fully forthcoming with their true opinion. When it was my turn at the end, I summarized with greater brevity the same concerns I had expressed the night before, for the other principals to hear: we would never get Congress on board; it was time to act. As the meeting ended, as anticipated, I was badly outvoted. So, figuratively, I saluted and moved out to implement the president’s decision.
President Obama later told me that he was not certain we would prevail in Congress but thought we had a fighting chance. He foresaw that a night or two of bombing might not change Assad’s calculus and that a more sustained military campaign may be needed to achieve our objectives. Given that reality, Obama felt that even if we might fall short of the needed votes, it was important to try to vest Congress in such a consequential decision to use force. After Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, Congress needed to be on board with such critical choices; it had to own them alongside us—one way or the other.
In the meantime, sensing that Russia feared that the U.S. was on the verge of major military action, President Obama pigeonholed Putin on the margins of the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg in early September 2013. Obama told Putin he was prepared to use force to punish Assad for deploying chemical weapons, though he remained open to a more permanent negotiated solution, if one could be found, to address Syria’s chemical stockpile. Intrigued, Putin agreed that Secretary Kerry and Foreign Minister Lavrov should discuss possible options. Obama later instructed me to alert Kerry to pursue this prospect with Lavrov.
The U.S. and Russia worked together to compel Assad to declare and relinquish his chemical weapons stockpile, subject to international verification. Russia vowed to exert the necessary pressure on Assad, and Kerry and Lavrov codified their agreement in a U.N. Security Council resolution, which threatened sanctions and, by implication, the use of force, if Syria failed to comply. The U.S. agreed to hold off bombing until we could see whether Assad would fulfill his commitments or not.
Ultimately, we would fail to garner the necessary support for a congressional authorization to use force. Republicans and Democrats had acted precisely as I predicted. Ironically, it turns out, I was right about the politics; but President Obama was right about the policy. Without the use of force, we ultimately achieved a better outcome than I had imagined. The bombing of some discrete chemical-weapons-associated targets (not actual stockpiles, for safety reasons) would have marginally set the Syrian regime back in the short term. It would have sent a message to Assad but would not have eliminated the vast bulk of his chemical weapons stockpile or changed the course of Syria’s civil war.
Some months later, Syria did declare its stockpile, joined the Chemical Weapons Convention, and shipped out under international supervision all of its declared chemical weapons stockpile—some 1,300 metric tons. Israel, which was directly threatened by Syrian gas, hailed the action and stopped distributing gas masks throughout the country. The removal of Syria’s declared stockpile could not have been accomplished through bombing. It was achieved through the credible threat of the use of force and painstaking U.S.-Russia diplomacy.
Unfortunately, this was not to be the end of the story. While we made considerable efforts to address any gaps and inconsistencies in Syria’s declaration, including by raising such issues with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), we were never fully satisfied that Syria had declared every element of their program. Ultimately, we were unable to point to anything sufficiently specific to prove this to the OPCW and, of course, Syria may have simply made new sarin gas. What we do know is that, in April 2017 and again in April 2018, Syria killed scores more in fresh chemical attacks. In both instances, President Trump dusted off the Obama-era military plans and target list and struck suspect facilities with cruise missiles and air strikes.
In my view, President Trump was right to act against Assad, who with Russian complicity had violated his agreement with the U.S. and the U.N. But his strikes were divorced from any strategy to leverage our use of force to catalyze a diplomatic solution. Senior Trump administration officials issued mixed public messages about the objective of the bombings, which further complicated matters. Ultimately, these U.S. strikes sent a message but failed to change any facts on the ground. The conflict persisted and Assad grew stronger, while continuing to kill innocents.
In both 2017 and 2018, the U.S. made clear too quickly that these were short-lived, limited packages of strikes. The Trump administration failed to keep Assad and Russia guessing, limiting their ability to again use the credible threat of force to pursue a diplomatic outcome that addressed our chemical weapons concerns or brought the conflict closer to conclusion. Syria’s chemical weapons problem remains unresolved. So too does the larger Syria policy conundrum.
For six years, the Obama administration wrestled painfully and unsuccessfully with Syria, which I believe to be the hardest policy challenge we faced. Assad, the murderous dictator, remains hell-bent on regaining full control from rebels who once occupied significant swaths of Syrian territory. He uses whatever vicious means necessary—barrel bombs, chemical weapons, targeting hospitals—to kill hundreds of thousands and cause millions to flee as refugees.
The human costs of his slaughter burned our collective conscience and directly im
plicated U.S. interests by driving destabilizing refugee flows into fragile neighboring states like Jordan and Lebanon, as well as Turkey, and further afield to Europe, which has not recovered politically or socially from the shock of the inflow. The active intervention of Hezbollah, Iran, and later Russia dramatically exacerbated the conflict, aiding Assad but also threatening Israel. Terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda and ISIS, exploited the chaos to establish safe havens from which they planned attacks on the West. It was a complete horror show that only got worse with time.
At every stage, the dilemma for the Obama administration was how deeply to involve the U.S. in trying to topple Assad and stop the bloodshed and refugee flows. The gap between our rhetorical policy and our actions constantly bedeviled U.S. policymaking. In August 2011, several months after the start of the Syrian uprising and in the midst of the Libya operation, President Obama joined our key European partners in declaring that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” But having learned the lessons of regime change in Iraq and sobered by the complexity of sustaining even an air campaign in Libya, no principal argued for direct military intervention with U.S. ground troops to force Assad out, as President Bush had done to Saddam Hussein. The costs in blood and treasure to the U.S. were massive in Iraq, and Syria would be at least as bad, if not worse, given Iran’s strong backing. Once Russia put its forces into Syria in September 2015, any effort at regime change could have courted World War III.
But we did consider and reconsider (again and again) many significant steps short of direct war against Assad. At the same time, we imposed what U.S. and European sanctions we could; but absent U.N. Security Council authority, which Russia consistently blocked, comprehensive global sanctions were not achievable. We provided almost $6 billion in humanitarian assistance to the victims of Syria’s conflict and more to the neighboring states coping with the burden. We spent untold amounts of senior-level energy trying to negotiate with Russia, Syria, and other key players to end the conflict peacefully. At various points, we tried to exploit potential diplomatic openings, but none ever came to fruition.