by Kim Ghattas
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America’s careful diplomacy combined with China’s missteps meant that Asia was a bright spot in the Obama administration’s foreign policy, but the good news made few headlines. There never seemed to be much room for optimism on front pages covered with stories about the dismal state of the world. Even administration officials who worked on other regions and hot spots were unable to recognize the nascent success in Asia, a policy that would become known as the “Asia pivot.”
The news back at home wasn’t great, either.
11
MAKING THE CUT
Yellow leaves were starting to fall, and the mood in Washington was grim as the end of 2010 approached. The newspapers were full of stories about people losing their homes, towns trying to balance their budgets, and industries struggling to stay alive while Wall Street executives got paid million-dollar bonuses.
A government town, Washington suffered much less than the rest of the country; restaurants were full and new ones continued to open, new residential buildings were under construction, and international institutions brought a steady stream of visitors into the city. But the District was not immune to the pervasive nationwide malaise about where America was heading. My American friends worried not just about their jobs but about the future of their country. What was America really about these days? It didn’t feel like the land of opportunity to them, so what did it represent? The contrarian, radical-right Tea Party movement looked like it was sweeping the country. America’s first black president was not uniting or transforming the country. In fact, the United States felt more divided than before, politics as partisan as ever. Unemployment stagnated around 9 percent—a nagging reminder that Obama’s efforts to revive the economy were still failing. The extent of the financial crisis that had hit the United States—and much of the world—in 2008 was more extensive than anyone had first realized. It would take patient, diligent work to unravel years of damage, but unemployed and frustrated people could not wait any longer.
In November, Americans voted in the midterm elections for Congress and showed their lack of patience on the home front. Americans often seemed to dole out time like accountants: the minute something didn’t work, they gave up and tried something else. Two years after electing change, they voted for change again. The Democrats lost sixty-two seats and their majority in Congress. They still had a tiny majority in the Senate. Obama had only barely managed to get his health care reform plan through Congress in March, even with a Democratic majority in both houses. The next two years were looking exceedingly difficult.
Around the globe, it appeared that chaos had broken out too. World news was never an orderly event, and wars, economic meltdowns, and earthquakes didn’t politely wait their turn, but somehow, during this time, the globe felt rudderless.
I headed out after work one day in mid-November to meet a high-level official for an informal conversation about American diplomacy; such conversations were a staple of life for journalists in Washington. A lot of the conversations were had on the phone or by e-mail when you needed a quick comment or one quote for a story, but whenever possible breakfasts, coffees, lunches, drinks, and dinners were arranged. Quality face time was important to develop a level of trust that enabled officials to part with some of their more interesting information, beyond the talking points issued in statements. If you were a reporter for a top national American media outlet, your access was almost guaranteed. Others, especially foreigners, had to work a bit harder. It was naturally in the interest of officials to talk to the press, so they could put their mark on the stories that were published. Sometimes they called you because they wanted something out there—all sources have an agenda. As a journalist, your responsibility was to read between the lines and corroborate the facts. In a country like Lebanon or Pakistan, the task was even harder as it involved determining whether officials were giving you facts or outright lying and rumormongering. There was often a remarkable openness to what American officials said in private, a tangible connection to the heart of the decision-making machine. On the plane, Hillary spoke to us often, off the record, which meant we could not use the information, but it added context to the knowledge we had about a developing story. Robert Gates did the same with reporters on his plane.
The briefings we got regularly by lower-ranking administration officials allowed us to understand what they were thinking, what they were trying to do, and, sometimes, what they were trying to hide. Even when European or Arab diplomats took on a confidential tone and said, “Let’s talk off the record,” what followed was often just a repetition of what they had said in public. Occasionally, briefings by U.S. officials were utterly useless: when negotiations were in a delicate phase or they had nothing to show for their efforts or, as in any government, if they simply didn’t want to share sensitive information. President Obama gave regular interviews and answered questions often, either alone or in press conferences with visiting foreign leaders. Reporters did not get to speak to the president as often as they did with Clinton or Gates, but White House reporters would be able to question someone very senior who was in the room with him when a key decision was taken, for example. American officials—from cabinet secretaries to the CIA chief and the top military brass—were regularly grilled in Congress, in lengthy testimonies that were televised for all to see.
In relatively closed countries like China, journalists’ access to officials with real power is close to nonexistent; barely anyone knows what is going on at the top of the leadership. Journalists may be able to speak to lower-level bureaucrats or foreign officials who have met senior leaders like we did after every trip to China, but sitting down with Councilor Dai Bingguo or President Hu Jintao or Zhou Yongkang, China’s security chief, was impossible. Of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the body that governs China, only the prime minister Wen Jiabao occasionally spoke to the foreign press and held a regular press conference—once a year.
A cold wind was blowing when I sat down over a cup of coffee in a Starbucks with the high-level official. The gloom from the midterm elections had permeated deep into the foreign policy–making machine at the State Department and the White House.
“We’re holding things together with chewing gum and rubber bands,” said the official. “It’s bad, really bad.”
He went through the list. More desperate efforts to get peace talks going in the Middle East had resulted in nothing, despite high-profile summitry at the White House and in the region over the summer. The Israelis were being a pain, demanding rewards for doing what they were meant to do anyway, and mostly, the official complained, the Israelis didn’t care that their obstructionism was further eroding America’s credibility in the Arab world. The Palestinians refused to yield to any pressure or make any gesture whatsoever. They were stuck in their own version of a Greek tragedy. Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai was being his unreliable, moody self. The Pakistanis were as impossible as always, gobbling up American money but dragging their feet on anything that could be helpful to the United States. And Iran? Let’s not even go there. Nothing was going America’s way. It felt as though everybody was testing the limits of American power, pushing Washington around to see how much ground they could gain themselves.
“Success begets success,” the official went on, obviously implying that the opposite was true as well. If a sense of failure settled in, things could unravel, and America’s prestige would be eroded even further, its power reduced even more. The foundations that the Obama administration had been carefully laying for two years to position America for the twenty-first century were still extraordinarily fragile. Nothing had really taken root yet, except in Asia. But even that progress could be jeopardized if the trajectory took a downward turn.
I went home feeling deeply unsettled. Gum and rubber bands? I was stunned by the candor. I knew America couldn’t get things done just by pushing a button. I’d heard Hillary say there was no magic wand, and for two years I had watched American off
icials do the heavy lifting required to get anything done around the world. But this was too vulnerable, too raw. Was this what decline looked like? I thought back to those days in Beirut, when America had taken a beating. The headlines had been all about decline then too. Were we wrong then but right now? Were things really worse? It was one thing to believe that mighty America was wilting because you were looking at the ruins of its embassy in Beirut and you believed history started and ended in your country. It was quite another to be sitting in Washington with American officials who had all the pieces of the puzzle in their hands but felt they were losing control.
I read former secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s memoir and found she had shown some of the same despair when writing about 1998. “It seemed that wherever I looked, I saw either gridlock or peril. For all the power of the United States, we were not able to dictate events. The North Koreans, Serbs, Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis, Iraqis, Russians, African leaders, even our allies seemed indifferent or hostile to our requests. My personal confidence level was down.” I was surprised. The Clinton presidency was thought of nostalgically by some as the heyday of American hegemony and unchallenged power in a unipolar world in the years after the Soviet Union collapsed.
I dug further. In early 1975, American diplomacy, with Henry Kissinger at the helm, seemed to lie in tatters around the world as well, especially in Asia: the Vietnam War had been a disaster; the Khmer Rouge was about to take over Cambodia; a key ally of the United States, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, had been assassinated by a member of his own family; and the Israelis were making Washington’s life so difficult in the aftermath of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War that President Nixon was ready to go toe-to-toe with Israel no matter what the domestic political consequences.29 During the war, the “oil-for-arms” agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, which had started back in 1945 with Truman, had broken down for the first (and so far last) time. Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil producing countries had decided to use oil as a weapon to punish the United States for its military support for Israel. They imposed an oil embargo, which caused oil prices to quadruple and provoked lines at gas stations in the United States.
All the way back in 1950, there had been dire warnings, including a key National Security Council document about America not having the military or financial means to meet all its global strategic commitments, and fears there could be a serious relative decline of America and the free world in the face of a rising Soviet Union. Chairman Mao was convinced that the United States was in decline, that it could not take on any more commitments around the world and would be incapable of maintaining its hegemony in its part of the world.30 This all sounded rather familiar.
The talk of decline seemed cyclical; feelings of confidence ebbed and flowed. It was not a clear curve going up or down. But there were some inevitable facts showing that America was no longer the giant it had been, especially economically. America’s share of the world’s GDP was 50 percent after World War II; it had fallen to 25 percent in the 1970s as Europe rebuilt itself, and has lingered there ever since. The rise of other economic powers was often a benefit to America itself. They traded with the United States, and American companies found new markets. But there was no doubt that as other countries prospered and lifted their populations out of poverty or found political stability, they started vying for a bigger share of the pie.
If America had less and less of a say in the world, where did that leave me? Would I be better off if America was less powerful? Would Lebanon? The Middle East? Pakistan? Like so many around the world, growing up in Lebanon I had often thought America should mind its own business, go home, and leave us to sort out our own affairs. But I had never seriously thought about what or who would replace America as a superpower. I’m not sure anyone who ranted against America around me had gone to the end of that thought process. And Americans who wanted their government to retreat from the world didn’t seem to have fully thought through the consequences on their daily life. What would happen if China monopolized shipping lanes in the South China Sea unchallenged and the price of rice or iPads shot up? Or if Turkey and Brazil enabled Iran’s nuclear ambitions and Tehran developed an atomic bomb, using its newfound power to further assert its control over Lebanon? In part it was perhaps because American power seemed to be a given and no one could actually imagine a world without it or picture the far-reaching consequences on the world system if America suddenly “went home.”
And yet the United States hadn’t been a superpower long enough to have perfected the art of governing the world. On a historical scale, six decades were nothing. America was still maturing and finding its footing, but was American power benign or nefarious? America’s faults were many: from fomenting coups in Latin America to backing dictators in the Arab world. So why did so many countries and people appeal for American help?
I had come to appreciate many of the officials I dealt with on a daily basis. There was something rather earnest about American diplomats. But did their actions amount to making America a force for good around the world? Surely, their primary concern was protecting their country’s national interests. Were national interests and moral choices mutually exclusive?
Life in the United States was free of the kind of fear I had experienced in Lebanon—fear that was a staple in so many countries. Rule of law prevailed here. There were no thugs grabbing you out of your house in the dead of night, no extrajudicial killings, no gangs chopping off people’s heads or militants setting off bombs in markets. I felt safe. But if you lived on the receiving end of American foreign policy, as I had in Lebanon, it could be painful. Was it worse to suffer at the hands of your own government or as a consequence of American actions? Was an Iranian tortured in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison worse or better off than an inmate in Guantánamo Bay detained for years with no trial? Was it worse to live under Syrian occupation in Lebanon or to live in fear of night raids by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan? Was it worse to be humiliated in Abu Ghraib prison at the hands of American soldiers or tortured in an Uzbek or Chinese prison?
The thoughts racing through my mind were constantly pushing me into a reductive discussion about the essence of American power, about values that were hard to define, but I knew the world was not good or evil, black or white; it was shades of gray. There was no simple answer, but the difference seemed to be recourse to the law. I was astounded by the fervor with which American officers were serving as lawyers for defendants on trial in Gitmo. When I asked Lieutenant Brian Mizer how he could be defending a man who was accused of having aided Osama bin Laden, America’s enemy number one, he told me everybody deserved a fair trial. In theory, yes, except that in Lebanon, for example, few if any would dare defend someone accused of aiding Israel, officially Lebanon’s enemy. Both defendant and lawyer could be accused of treason. In countries like Syria, China, or Russia, the law meant nothing if you were poor or had no connections to the powerful. Laws didn’t protect you against the whims of your own government, and the feeling of utter powerlessness this could engender was mind-numbing. I thought of Brazil’s refusal to condemn the stoning of women in Iran, China’s crushing of dissent, Russia’s hunting down of journalists. Would they help save a dissident from brutal repression in another country? Perhaps world governing wasn’t anyone’s responsibility, not America’s either, but I still wondered about a globe where present-day China called all the shots.
Perhaps a real multipolar world was better, with power distributed more evenly among the different players around the world. Checks and balances were a healthy way to make sure might was not concentrated in the hands of one. In 1998, when U.S. dominance was unchallenged, France’s foreign minister had compared America to a steamroller, calling it a hyperpower. The hubris had led to the excesses of the Bush administration. The war in Iraq had been the exception to the rule of American reluctance to intervene abroad, and the United States had enthusiastically plunged headfirst into a war of choice. But the end of empir
es and eras usually involves an outbreak of violence as the balance of power shifts, and someone inevitably tries to take the upper hand. For now, and probably for decades to come, no single country would have more power than America. So the competition for world leadership wasn’t between America and China, or America and the BRICs. It was America or no one. New rising powers pushing against American influence, asserting themselves on the world stage, were also pushing against each other. They may have resented America, but they disliked each other even more. So unless America maintained the edge, a multipolar world sounded like a recipe for global gridlock.
Suddenly, the idea of American decline seemed utterly unappealing to me. But it seemed to be under way already or, at least, everyone was saying it was inevitable.
And just when things couldn’t get worse, a virtual hurricane engulfed the Building and blew its classified documents to the four corners of the world.
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In the summer of 2010, an organization called WikiLeaks had started to release videos and cables from the Pentagon about Iraq and Afghanistan that showed the war effort in its raw, unvarnished form. The logs revealed the extent of the failures in Afghanistan and a higher number of civilian casualties than had been officially disclosed. The group wanted to shine a light on the dark workings of governments and warned that the information they were revealing was cause for war crimes prosecution. In the end, there wasn’t much in the cables that hadn’t already been in the public reel, but it was now all in one location, conveniently accessible on the WikiLeaks website. WikiLeaks promised that the State Department was the next target. The rumblings started in late October: the group had gotten hold of 250,000 diplomatic cables.