After looking at Steve M.’s take on President Obama’s foreign policy polling numbers, I suspect that Robert Kagan is correct about this:
A majority of Americans may not want to intervene in Syria, do anything serious about Iran or care what happens in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt or Ukraine. They may prefer a minimalist foreign policy in which the United States no longer plays a leading role in the world and leaves others to deal with their own miserable problems. They may want a more narrowly self-interested American policy. In short, they may want what Obama so far has been giving them. But they’re not proud of it, and they’re not grateful to him for giving them what they want.
President Obama has largely been doing what the American people say they want, even on the Crimean issue, yet the American people are unhappy with the president’s performance. On Crimea, the people want contradictory things. They want something done, but they reject everything except sanctions, which is exactly what the president decided to do.
I don’t know if pride is really the key here, but it could be. Ironically, even Kagan’s piece follows this pattern. He claims that the president isn’t leading, or that he’s leading a retreat from the world stage, but he doesn’t actually mention anything that the president ought to be doing that he isn’t doing. He doesn’t say that the president ought to do more to deter or punish Russia, and he makes no suggestions about what might be done differently with Iran or Syria, or any other hot spot.
I think, overall, the American people wish we could solve some of these problems, but they have no idea how to solve them and don’t support trying to solve them. In the end, a president gets rewarded for sticking his neck out if, and only if, he is successful. That’s why the following is meaningless:
Presidents are not always rewarded for doing what the public says it wants. Sometimes they are rewarded for doing just the opposite. Bill Clinton enjoyed higher approval ratings after intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo, even though majorities of Americans had opposed both interventions before he launched them. Who knows what the public might have thought of Obama had he gone through with his planned attack on Syria last August? As Col. Henry Stimson observed, until a president leads, he can’t expect the people to “voluntarily take the initiative in letting him know whether or not they would follow him if he did take the lead.”
President Clinton was rewarded because his unpopular interventions in the Balkans were basically successful. No one has demonstrated how we could be similarly successful in a place like Syria or how we could convince Russia to give the Crimea back to Ukraine.
