by David Milne
A month in advance of the publication of the document—to prepare the Pentagon for the pain that would inevitably follow—Obama invited the Joint Chiefs and the military’s most prominent figures to a ceremonial dinner at the White House’s State Dining Room. From 2001 to 2011, the Pentagon’s budget had grown by 67 percent in real terms. Its annual budget of $700 billion exceeded that of the next twenty nations combined. Obama told the assembled brass that this was unsustainable, that the defense budget would contract by $500 billion over the next ten years. He torpedoed the Pentagon’s proposal to keep one hundred thousand troops on standby to engage in “stability operations” of the type the United States had been engaged in in Afghanistan and Iraq for close to ten years. Obama was indicating that the expensive business of counterinsurgency and overseas nation-building was over. “This was the end of an era,” one commander told David Sanger afterward, “and that was a hard concept for many in the room to accept.”98 Obama’s decision not only ended an era inaugurated by the second Bush administration, it also shut out the maximalist crisis logic contained in Paul Nitze’s NSC-68.
In his January 2012 State of the Union address, Barack Obama echoed Madeleine Albright in emphasizing the nation’s pivotal world role: “America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs—and as long as I am President, I intend to keep it that way.”99 His words were both sincere and accurate. Britain and France had agitated for intervention in Libya but could do nothing without U.S. participation. The same is true in respect to Syria. In spite of swinging cuts to the Pentagon’s budget, the United States has no genuine peer competitor in the military realm.
But there was something new. The concept of “opportunity cost” had become central to American decision making on matters of diplomacy. R. Nicholas Burns had served as a high-level diplomat for thirty years prior to Obama winning the presidency. Through that tumultuous era, he said, “No one ever stopped and asked, ‘How much will this cost?’” Now it is the first question posed. In a major set piece speech on the Arab Spring in May 2011, Obama mooted the possibility of forgiving $1 billion of Egypt’s debts and establishing a “Middle East Fund,” seeded with another $1 billion to support reform across the region. This is small change in development terms. The Marshall Plan cost $150 billion in real terms. But how could Obama justify spending more to the American people?100
Further steep cuts in the defense budget were made in 2013 and 2014. In January 2013, Barack Obama nominated Chuck Hagel to replace Leon Panetta as secretary of defense. Senate Republicans objected strenuously to the appointment of Hagel, a Republican, to head the Pentagon. A decorated Vietnam veteran, Hagel had served on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and as cochair of the president’s intelligence advisory board. In 2006, however, Hagel had caused controversy by observing that the “Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people” in Congress. Hagel had also publicly supported the launch of meaningful dialogue with Iran on its nuclear capabilities and had voiced skepticism about the efficacy of a military strike against Iranian facilities.101
Fellow Republican Lindsay Graham observed that Hagel, if confirmed, would be “the most antagonistic secretary of defense toward the state of Israel in our nation’s history.” Senate Republicans filibustered his nomination—emboldened by Hagel’s uncertain performance during his confirmation hearings—for as long as they could. Provocatively, Ted Cruz of Texas mused that if Hagel was unable to provide the source for some of his speaking fees, then it was “relevant” to wonder if those monies in fact came from America’s enemies, such as North Korea. James Inhofe of Oklahoma suggested that Hagel was “cozy” with terrorist regimes such as Iran. But reality eventually caught up with the chamber, and the Senate voted for cloture on February 26, confirming Hagel by the narrow margin of 58 to 41.102
A year later, in February 2014, some of the GOP’s fears regarding Hagel’s alleged irresolution appeared to be realized. The Pentagon leaked a preview of its 2015 budget, which would necessitate a cut in the size of the Army from 522,000 to 440,000 troops, the lowest level since the Second World War—and 50,000 fewer than the proposal announced in 2011. Dick Cheney intemperately observed that this decision showed that President Obama “would much rather spend money on Food Stamps” than on keeping the nation strong. John McCain denounced the proposed reduction as a “serious mistake.” But like most political disputes in Washington these days, this contretemps is blighted by histrionics. The United States still possesses eleven aircraft carrier groups—where Russia and China have just one each, fitted with significantly poorer technology. The United States still spends more on defense than the next ten nations combined. This remarkable scenario far exceeded the wildest expectations of any number of individuals who have strenuously advocated “preparedness” in recent history, including Alfred Thayer Mahan, Walter Lippmann, and even Paul Nitze. The “correlation of forces” is still strongly tilted in America’s favor, even if the “correlation of economic forces” is more diffuse and complex. On the latter point, America’s place in the world is substantively different from ten years ago, which Barack Obama clearly understands.
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The civil war in Syria is one of the gravest crises confronting the Obama administration, and indeed the world. In February 2013, the UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, confirmed that 70,000 had been killed in Syria since the uprisings began two years previously.103 A year later, in March 2014, the British-based anti-Assad group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated that some 146,000 Syrians had died.104 The humanitarian imperative is acute. But toppling Assad’s regime could also bring numerous strategic benefits. Iranian influence in the region would be diminished; the Middle East would be shorn of another ruthless dictator; Israel’s position would be strengthened.
China and Russia—the latter a long-standing ally of Damascus—were resolved to veto any Security Council measure to attack Assad’s substantial military capabilities, the only action that would realistically stem the bloodshed. But even with Moscow and Beijing’s abstention, Syria represents the most painful of dilemmas. The opposition to Assad contains a substantial extremist element. Were Assad removed from power, a bloody sectarian reckoning would inevitably follow. And Syria is a hugely challenging environment in which to launch a military campaign. It is doubtful that air strikes would be sufficient to topple Assad as they did Gaddafi. Reflecting on how the Libyan parallel flattered to deceive, one State Department official observed, “The only reason that we’re not doing the same for the Syrians is that it is hard.” A senior adviser to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told David Sanger, “There is no way to do this other than a full-scale war.”105
In June 2013, with great reluctance, Obama decided to begin arming the rebellion in Syria, primarily through the provision of antiaircraft weaponry. Too many “red lines” had been crossed. After receiving disturbing intelligence for a number of months, the president had concluded with certainty that Assad had used chemical weapons “on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year.”106 The likes of Paul Wolfowitz, John McCain, and Anne-Marie Slaughter had been urging the president to arm the rebels since the conflict commenced. A week before Obama made his announcement, in a “closed press” dialogue with Senator John McCain (subsequently published on Politico), Bill Clinton called for intervention in Syria to assist the rebellion. The former president observed that Obama ran the risk of looking “like a total wuss” if he heeded skeptical public opinion by refusing to intervene. “Sometimes,” Clinton said, “it’s just best to get caught trying, as long as you don’t overcommit—like, as long as you don’t make an improvident commitment.” He elaborated on the reasons why a U.S. intervention might be provident in the circumstances, paying reference to his own procrastination in Bosnia and Rwanda, and reflected more broadly on the lessons of history:
My view is that we shouldn’t over-learn the lessons of the past. I don’t think Syria is necessarily Iraq or Afghanistan—no one
has asked us to send any soldiers in there. I think it’s more like Afghanistan was in the ’80s when they were fighting the Soviet Union … when President Reagan was in office [and] got an enormous amount of influence and gratitude by helping to topple the Soviet-backed regime and then made the error of not hanging around in Afghanistan.107
The former president’s Afghanistan analogy was dramatic, suggesting a costly long-term U.S. commitment to Syria when Assad is removed from power. And for all Clinton’s tough talk about ignoring public opinion, there is a good reason why sitting presidents—as opposed to ex-presidents—don’t allow significant gaps to emerge between diplomacy and what the public can bear. It tends to end badly for the political party the president leads.
That Obama was mindful of this fact was borne out two months later. On August 21, rockets containing the odorless and invisible nerve agent sarin rained down on Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. Médicins Sans Frontières reported at least 3,600 Syrians had been treated for “neurotoxic symptoms” at hospitals it supported, and 355 of them had died. A preliminary U.S. government assessment placed the death toll at 1,429 (including 426 children). The White House said that the relevant agencies had ascertained “with high confidence” that the Syrian government was responsible. A French intelligence assessment baldly stated that the attack “could not have been ordered and carried out by anyone but the Syrian government,” observing that “the launch zone for the rockets was held by the regime while the strike zone was held by the rebels.” For his part, Russian president Vladimir Putin described the American and French assessments as “utter nonsense,” instead concurring with Assad’s version of events: that the rebels had launched the chemical weapons attack to provoke a U.S.-led military intervention against his government.108
British prime minister David Cameron was determined to lend the United States his full support in any attack against Syria. On August 29, he recalled Parliament to vote to authorize British military action against Assad’s regime if evidence became conclusive that it had used chemical weapons. The government was defeated by a vote of 285 to 272, ruling out any British involvement in U.S.-led strikes and leading some Cassandras to declare the special relationship dead. Obama’s response to this setback was equally surprising. On October 31, he stated his desire to launch swift reprisal attacks against Assad but requested formal congressional approval before any action was taken. Pundits wondered about Obama’s motives. Congressional support was not certain, given that both parties were deeply divided on the merits or otherwise of launching air strikes against Syria. “The moral thing to do is not to stand by and do nothing,” Obama said, before posing the question: “I do have to ask people, well, if in fact you’re outraged by the slaughter of innocent people, what are you doing about it?”109
But Obama’s congressional gambit showed that the response to an atrocity could not simply be refracted through categories such as “right” and “wrong.” The president had deployed a humanitarian casus belli for military action against Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya in 2011, but he had not sought congressional approval in doing so. Syria was different; the strategic stakes and impediments to military action were higher, as was the potential for disaster if a radical Islamist group assumed power in the vacuum that would accompany Assad’s fall. Paul Wolfowitz strongly supported a military assault against Assad’s regime, noting, “It’s not Iraq 2003. It’s Iraq in 1991 … In 1991 we had an opportunity without putting any American lives at risk to enable the Shia uprisings against Saddam to succeed. Instead we sat on our hands and watched him kill tens of thousands. We did nothing and we could have very easily enabled those rebellions to succeed. I think if we had done so we could have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and there would not have been a second war.”110 But Wolfowitz’s historical analogy was dubious. Air strikes alone would not have ousted Assad; that would have required a much larger intervention, with all the uncertainty that entailed.
Events took a bizarre turn a week or so after the vote in the House of Commons. During a press conference in London on September 9, a reporter asked Secretary of State John Kerry whether Assad could do anything to prevent a U.S.-led military strike against his regime. “Sure,” replied Kerry with more than a hint of sarcasm, “he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week—turn it over, all of it without delay and allow the full and total accounting [of it],… but he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done.”111 Ignoring the tone, Russia immediately seized on Kerry’s words, proposing that Assad should eradicate his chemical weapons under UN supervision. Obama’s interest was immediately piqued. On September 14, John Kerry and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, agreed to put a plan into action that would charge the United Nations with the removal of Assad’s chemical weapons.
A pragmatist to his core, Barack Obama handed the initiative to Russia in resolving the crisis and unemotionally pulled back from the brink of military action. On This Week, George Stephanopoulos quoted the critical assessment of Richard Haas, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations: “Words like ‘ad-hoc,’ ‘improvised,’ ‘unsteady’ come to mind. This is probably the most undisciplined stretch of foreign policy in your presidency.” What do you make of that?” asked Stephanopoulos. “Well, you know, I think that folks here in Washington like to grade on style,” Obama replied, “and so had we rolled out something that was very smooth and disciplined and linear, they would have graded it well, even if it was a disastrous policy. We know that, because that’s exactly how they graded the Iraq war … [But] I’m less concerned about style points. I’m much more concerned about getting the policy right.”112 A survey commissioned by the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of Americans approved of Obama’s decision to support the Russian proposal, even though only a quarter believed that Assad would ultimately comply.113 In August 2014, Rand Paul wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that staked out a significant difference of opinion with Hillary Clinton, who had expressed her frustration at Obama’s unwillingness to take stronger action against Assad. “We are lucky Mrs. Clinton didn’t get her way and the Obama administration did not bring about regime change in Syria. That new regime might well be ISIS.” Moving well beyond Clinton, Paul noted acerbically, “Our so-called foreign policy experts are failing us miserably.”114
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Barack Obama confronts an increasingly risk-averse public and a series of crises that defy easy categorization, let alone solutions. At the outset, at least, the United States can weigh in decisively in certain theaters (Libya), but with far less certainty—and with unknowable repercussions in both cases—in others (Syria, Iraq). After the Second Iraq War, the public’s appetite for supporting a policing function for the United States in the Middle East is vastly diminished. The debacle in Iraq demonstrated that fine-sounding plans and actual outcomes don’t always match—that worldmaking in the Middle East is well nigh impossible. In twenty years’ time, U.S. policymakers may well look back on the Mubarak era as halcyon. Obama’s critics assail his weak strategic handle on the situation—his reactiveness and reluctance to announce a doctrine—but how does one devise a “grand strategy” toward the Middle East in such a tumultuous era? Is the Arab Spring merely a process whereby radical Islamism replaces secular despotism? Or will it lead to a cycle of sectarian violence and the withering of the rule of law? Will this wave of democratization lead to pluralism, economic modernization, and the dispersal of wealth and opportunity across the Middle East? Will active U.S. engagement assist or discourage one or the other? No one can possibly know, and expert predictions are confounded by events almost weekly. One can understand why Obama is reluctant to walk purposefully in a straight line across this minefield.
But the news has not all been bad in the region. A major breakthrough in U.S.-Iranian relations was achieved on September 26, 2013, when Barack Obama spoke on the telephone with Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who had been elected Iran’s president on Aug
ust 3, succeeding the hard-line Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was the first conversation between the presidents of Iran and the United States since 1979. The conversation followed from an announcement made the day previously that in-depth negotiations with Iran over its nuclear activities and capabilities would commence in Geneva on October 15. “We’ve got a responsibility to pursue diplomacy,” Obama said, “and … we have a unique opportunity to make progress with the new leadership in Tehran.”115 The Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu was less enthusiastic about this diplomatic breakthrough, the speed of which had largely blindsided him.
The October meetings in Geneva closed without a deal, but the mood music was promising. The breakthrough arrived on November 24, when a preliminary six-month nuclear agreement, brokered by the European Union’s Catherine Ashton, was reached between Iran and six world powers: Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia, and the United States. Tehran agreed to suspend enriching uranium beyond the levels needed for its power stations. It also halted the installation of new centrifuges designed to enrich uranium and agreed to a cap on the amount of enriched uranium it is allowed to produce from existing devices. In a statement delivered from Washington, Barack Obama said that the measures make it virtually impossible for Iran to build a nuclear weapon without being detected. In return, international sanctions against Iran worth approximately $7 billion would be relaxed.
The deal vindicated Obama’s dual policy of attempting to engage Iran while strengthening the sanctions imposed on the nation—which severely devalued Iran’s currency and halved its oil exports. Some compared the breakthrough with Tehran to President Nixon’s rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China. Congressional Republicans were predictably less impressed, with some, such as Senator John Cornyn of Texas, suggesting that the deal was brokered to deflect attention from the Obamacare debacle—a remarkably parochial perspective, although not entirely surprising given the parlous state of contemporary political debate.116 Ranking Republicans in the House and Senate also emphasized that the real threat Iran posed to Israel would not be mitigated by the agreement. To assuage such concerns, Secretary of State Kerry described the deal as a “serious step” toward resolving the crisis with Iran, observing that it “will make our partners in the region safer. It will make our ally Israel safer.”117