Worldmaking
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Israel’s president, Benjamin Netanyahu, was not placated by Kerry’s soothing words. “What was achieved last night in Geneva,” he said, “is not a historic agreement; it is a historic mistake … Today the world has become a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world has taken a significant step toward attaining the most dangerous weapon in the world.”118 The Israeli minister of the economy, Naftali Bennett, went even further: “If in another five or six years, a nuclear suitcase explodes in New York or Madrid, it will be because of the agreement that was signed this morning.”119 U.S.-Israeli relations have never been warm during the Obama administration, but the agreement the United States made with Iran marked a genuine low point. Whether the interim deal can be translated into something more enduring is unknowable, though it certainly rests on precarious foundations. President Rouhani has come under repeated criticism in Iran for gifting too many concessions to Washington. Crucially, he retains the all-important support of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But the long-term prospects for U.S.-Iranian rapprochement depend largely on Khamenei’s continued approval. In this respect, Israel’s furious reaction to the deal has only helped Rouhani’s cause.
Whether an overwhelmingly pro-Likud GOP—encouraged in this direction by the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—will tolerate Obama’s diplomacy is another question entirely. But the signs are not good. On March 9, 2015, forty-seven Republican senators signed an open letter to “the leaders of the Islamic State of Iran,” noting that any treaty signed by President Obama would require a two-thirds majority in the Senate to become law—an unlikely scenario: “We will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”120 It was a rare partisan congressional intrusion into an ongoing diplomatic negotiation.
The irritation and obstructionism displayed by Senate Republicans toward the Obama administration’s Iran diplomacy had many sources. Principal among them was the fact that Obama had responded to comprehensive electoral defeat at the November 2014 midterms—the GOP won a 54–46 majority in the Senate and increased its majority in the House—not with chastened humility but with a renewed sense of purpose. On December 17, Barack Obama made one of the most startling announcements of his presidency: “In the most significant changes in our policy in more than fifty years, we will end an outdated approach that, for decades, has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries. Through these changes, we intend to create more opportunities for the American and Cuban people, and begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas.” Vowing to “cut loose the shackles of the past,” Obama ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba and the opening of a U.S. embassy in Havana.121 The president’s policy shift was the result of eighteen months of intensive negotiations—involving a complex prisoner swap—in which Pope Francis had become involved. It was a remarkably bold move for a president contemplating the looming reality of a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Senate from January 3, 2015.
Most Republicans in Congress announced that they would resist lifting the fifty-four-year-old trade embargo. Some denounced the policy shift with real vehemence. “This entire policy shift announced today is based on an illusion, on a lie, the lie and the illusion that more commerce and access to money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people,” warned Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. “All this is going to do is give the Castro regime, which controls every aspect of Cuban life, the opportunity to manipulate these changes to perpetuate itself in power.”122 Yet the polls suggested that this harsh appraisal was not shared by a majority of Americans. A CNN/ORC poll conducted soon after the historic announcement showed that six out of ten Americans supported the restoration of full diplomatic relations and that two-thirds wanted the travel ban overturned.123 In a press briefing on December 19, Obama said, “I share the concerns of dissidents there and human rights activists that this is still a regime that represses its people.” But he also noted that the “whole point of normalizing relations is that it gives us greater opportunity to have influence with that government.”124 The restoration of U.S.-Cuban relations and the ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran will provoke sharp disputes in 2015 and 2016 between President Obama and the Republican-controlled Congress. While his opponents portray the president as a spineless appeaser—the historically illiterate John Bolton described him as “worse than Neville Chamberlain”—Obama believes that his policy of engaging with Tehran and Havana will reap tangible results, making Israel and the region safer, and Cuba more prosperous and politically open.125
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The People’s Republic of China’s swift economic rise makes it likely that the nation will surpass America’s GDP sometime in the next thirty years. It is advancing its military capabilities faster than any other competitor nation. It is the world’s biggest consumer of energy and producer of greenhouse gases. It is the world’s largest holder of foreign-exchange reserves, including more than $1 trillion in U.S. treasury bonds.126 And the largely U.S.-made global financial crisis has suggested to China’s leadership that its centralized economic model is uniquely stable and virtuous—discouraging any latent momentum for political liberalization. At the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2010, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao chided “Western” economic practices “and their unsustainable model of development characterized by prolonged low savings and high consumption; excessive expansion of financial institutions in a blind pursuit of profit.”127 The combination of an emboldened China and an irascible America has the potential to make a lot of trouble for the rest of the world. “If we get China wrong,” one senior Obama adviser remarked, “in thirty years that’s the only thing anyone will remember.”128
Obama has experimented with two approaches to managing relations with China: extending friendship and avoiding conflict; and pursuing a narrower, interests-driven approach that accepts some antagonism as inevitable. The former style predominated from 2009 to 2011 and was shaped by Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg and National Security Council Senior Director for East Asia Jeffrey Bader. Its critics maintain that China sensed weakness and began behaving with remarkable haughtiness. During the Copenhagen Summit of December 2009, called to reach an international agreement on climate change, Premier Wen Jiabao declined to attend a heads of state meeting, sending a subordinate to sit opposite President Obama.129
Little wonder that the president’s critics alleged that his friendly approach to China secured nothing but Beijing’s scorn. In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney strongly attacked the administration:
President Obama came into office as a near supplicant to Beijing, almost begging it to continue buying American debt so as to finance his profligate spending here at home … Now, three years into his term, the president has belatedly responded with a much-ballyhooed “pivot” to Asia … The supposed pivot has been oversold and carries with it an unintended consequence: It has left our allies with the worrying impression that we left the region and might do so again.130
Romney’s damning critique was formulated by one of his principal foreign-policy advisers, Aaron L. Friedberg, a professor of politics and international relations at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His 2011 book, A Contest for Supremacy, issued a warning that the United States is “on track to lose” the strategic battle for power and influence in the Western Pacific. He chides Obama for focusing too intently on engagement with Beijing and not devoting sufficient resources to contingency planning if the worst-case scenario materializes in the form of armed conflict over any number of issues.
This line of criticism was p
ersuasive when Friedberg wrote the book but was less so in the months after it was published. In November 2011, the president announced that the United States would station an additional twenty-five hundred troops in northern Australia: their strategic purpose was clear enough and China was predictably dismayed. In addition, Secretary of State Clinton was proactive in encouraging Myanmar to move in the direction of genuine independence and pull itself away from Beijing’s orbit. Finally, the Obama administration was steadfast in supporting the Philippines over China’s strong-armed approach to their territorial dispute in the South China Sea. On the deck of a U.S. warship in Manila Bay—one need not be Freudian to discern a message—Secretary of State Clinton announced that “we are making sure that our collective defense capabilities and communications infrastructure are operationally and materially capable of deterring provocation from the full spectrum of state and nonstate actors.” Ramon Casiple, executive director of the Manila-based Institute for Political and Economic Reform, observed that “Filipinos appreciate symbolism.”131
Obama’s “pivot” to Asia can be attributed to many sources. China’s swift rise means it makes strategic sense for the United States to redeploy resources to the Pacific to better guard its interests and allies there. There are many friendly nations desperate for Washington’s reassurance, and this has now been provided. But there is a personal element too. Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. He lacks the habitual eastward orientation of his predecessors. Most American presidents have had a strong Atlanticist perspective, believing that Europe is the continent in which the world’s most significant geostrategic conflicts play out. America’s Cold War strategy was predicated on this axiom. But Europe is clearly no longer the fulcrum. “The future of the United States is intimately intertwined with the future of the Asia-Pacific,” wrote Secretary of State Clinton in an article to coincide with her Pacific tour. “A strategic turn to the region fits logically into our overall global effort to secure and sustain America’s global leadership.”132
The pivot toward Asia may be viewed as the Obama administration’s principal foreign-policy legacy thirty years hence. It is clearly imperative that the United States responds skillfully to China’s rise. The consequences are momentous if it does not. In placing U.S.-Chinese rivalry in historical context, the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison has identified a phenomenon he describes as “the Thucydides trap,” fretting that precedent suggests that conflict between these two nations, moving in opposite directions, may be inevitable. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.” For Athens, read China; for Sparta, America. As Allison writes:
For six decades after the Second World War, an American “Pax Pacifica” has provided the security and economic framework within which Asian countries have produced the most rapid economic growth in history. However, having emerged as a great power that will overtake the U.S. in the next decade to become the largest economy in the world, it is not surprising that China will demand revisions to the rules established by others.133
The difference between now and then, of course, is that China and America are much more invested in each other’s economic success than Sparta and Athens were in 431 B.C., or Germany and Great Britain were on the eve of the First World War. Economic interdependence—the colossal hybrid entity tagged “Chimerica” by the historian Niall Ferguson and the economist Moritz Schularick—is the strongest guarantee against a calamitous war between the two nations.134
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The prospects for broadly harmonious U.S.-Chinese relations appear relatively bright. But a more familiar type of conflict, which brought to mind World War II and Yalta, visited the world in March 2014, when President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Crimea, the southerly region of Ukraine that includes Sevastopol—and Russia’s Black Sea fleet—and a large ethnic Russian majority. Putin explained that his hand was forced by the ousting of the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, following a series of demonstrations against him, and the odious pro-European government that replaced him. Putin claimed that the opposition groups that had compelled Yanukovych to flee Kiev for Moscow on February 21 had far-right or fascistic tendencies and that he had intervened in Crimea to protect ethnic Russians from reprisals. Russia set up a referendum on March 16, in which 97 percent of Crimeans supported incorporation into Russia (the pro-Ukrainian Tatar minority refused to take part). That Wilsonian self-determination had been deployed to serve cynical purposes was made clear by the chair of Russia’s upper house of parliament, Valentina Matviyenko: “Deciding to hold [a] referendum is a sovereign right of Crimea’s legitimately elected parliament … the right of people to self-determination.”135 Clearly, the Obama administration possessed no realistic military options to discourage President Putin. But this did not stop critics from suggesting that his irresolution had invited Russian aggression and that his response to this flagrant Russian aggression was weak on substance and tepid in presentation.
America’s foreign-policy commentariat weighed in with a series of editorials, and most were entirely predictable. Zbigniew Brzezinski suggested that the West should privately convey to Russia “that the Ukrainian army can count on immediate and direct Western aid so as to enhance its defensive capabilities” and recommended that “NATO forces, consistent with the organizations’ contingency planning, should be put on alert.”136 Charles Krauthammer endorsed Brzezinski’s approach eleven days later, but also suggested sending “the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to the Baltics to arrange joint maneuvers,” and proposed that Obama should “order the Energy Department” to expedite the export of more gas to Europe to render crippling sanctions against Russia more palatable to Britain, France, and Germany.137 On the left, Stephen Cohen, a professor of Russian history at New York University, criticized the United States for failing to comprehend Putin’s strategic perspective and for needlessly inflaming the situation.138
Age ninety and liberated from his usual default position of pursuing or advising power—which had led to his awkward tête-à-tête with Sarah Palin in 2008—Henry Kissinger drafted one of the most nuanced analyses of the crisis. Writing in The Washington Post on March 5, Kissinger faulted Russia for failing to comprehend that forcing Ukraine into accepting a satellite status “would doom Moscow to repeat its history of self-fulfilling cycles of reciprocal pressures with Europe and the United States.” But he also chided many in “the West” for failing to comprehend that “to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then.” Historically literate, elegantly crafted, and eminently sensible, Kissinger offered a penetrating account of the misconceptions, and lack of empathy, blighting both sides:
The United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington. Putin is a serious strategist—on the premises of Russian history. Understanding U.S. values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point of U.S. policymakers. Leaders of all sides should return to examining outcomes, not compete in posturing.139
For Kissinger, Obama’s response to the Ukrainian crisis has little connection to credibility, which is at stake only in genuinely contested areas. Crimea falls within the Russian sphere of influence, and this has to be recognized. Managing the crisis requires understanding Putin’s perspective, clearly communicating how damaging the annexation of Crimea will be to Russia’s world position, and not needlessly inflaming the situation through reckless promises—Kissinger echoed Kennan in warning that Ukrainian membership in NATO is not an option.
President Obama appears to side with Kissinger on the best way to deal with Putin’s aggression. On February 19, Obama had described Ukraine as a “client state of
Russia” and cautioned that the region should not be seen as “some Cold War chessboard in which we are in competition with Russia.”140 On March 25, in response to a question on the magnitude of the threat posed by Moscow, Obama observed cuttingly, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors—not out of strength but out of weakness.” The president understands that even if Russia is left largely alone, the lessons of history suggest that it will suffer in the long run for its belligerence. “I think it would be dishonest to suggest that there’s a simple solution to resolving what has already taken place in Crimea,” Obama observed. “Although history has a funny way of moving in twists and turns and not just in a straight line.”141
On Ukraine, and a multitude of other issues, Obama’s critics accuse him of fretting too much about alienating the public—that the president follows rather than leads, lacking as he does a grand strategy. Vali Nasr, a senior State Department adviser to Richard Holbrooke from 2009 to 2011 and the current dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, published a book-length assault on Obama’s foreign policies in 2013: