This Max Fisher piece for Vox is annoying. But, then, our foreign policy elites are also annoying. Fisher praises the president for having basically the right set of policies, especially in the big picture and for the long term, but he criticizes him for lack of decisiveness and inaction in the small picture and for the short term.
The presumption behind the whole piece is that America is not only responsible for what happens in places like Ukraine and Egypt and Syria and Iraq, but that we can control (or could have controlled) what happens in those places in ways that will be mutually beneficial to our citizens and theirs.
So, when Fisher moves to provide us with some examples of the president’s indecisiveness and lack of boldness, he comes up with this:
Worse, the US could not decide how severely to punish the [Egyptian] coup regime, or whether to even denounce it at all; they condemned it one day and praised it the next. They spent months denying a coup had happened, then responded by withdrawing some military aid. Egypt now has a military dictator who openly reviles the US; Obama could not decide whether he wanted to support democracy there or maintain a useful if authoritarian ally, so now the US has neither. That failure, a direct result of disengagement and indecisiveness, will persist after he leaves office.
Obama has been similarly wishy-washy on Syria. He did not support the rebels early in the conflict, when it might have made a difference, but now that it is too late to matter he has tilted toward arming the rebels more fully. In Iraq, he favored withdrawing from the country’s political and security challenges when they were non-urgent but also less daunting to address, and now that they are harder and more pressing he is finally coming around.
Let’s start with Egypt. The fall of Hosni Mubarak was an extraordinarily awkward moment for U.S. foreign policy leaders. In some sense, either this country supports representative government or it does not, but things are never quite so simple. When you have allies like Saudi Arabia and air and naval bases in places like Bahrain and Qatar, taking the side of a popular revolution against a long-time strongman ally will put enormous strains on foreign relations. President Obama inherited this situation, and he had to manage a very difficult transition when the Arab Spring broke out. How could we encourage the forces of democratization without blowing up our existing arrangements?
It’s understandable that the country’s foreign policy elites were sending mixed messages. They didn’t know what to think, and they had to straddle both sides of the fence. That the resulting elections in Egypt brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power was a second challenge. Do we continue to have a close relationship with this government and hope that they either moderate with time or fail spectacularly and discredit themselves? How can we not be at least rhetorically committed to supporting elected officials over military brutes?
When the coup came in Egypt, we again had to straddle. Military coups are officially bad. But this one was a done deal, and it overthrew a bad government that had lost legitimacy. Should the administration have welcomed the coup with open arms and showered the generals with praise?
The key here is that America was not behind the overthrow of Mubarak. We did not work to elect the Muslim Brotherhood, and we did not encourage the military coup that followed. We didn’t have control over those things. We could have stepped in and tried to control them, but it’s not obvious that we could have succeeded and it’s even less obvious that it would have served our long-term interests.
Then we get to Syria, where we get another iteration of the mantra that Obama could have helped the rebels early on “when it might have made a difference.” Given that the rebels have always been dominated by radical Sunni Islamists, all that getting involved early would have done is give these rebels more weaponry.
What President Obama recognized from the start is that we could not aid the rebels in Syria without taking sides in a sectarian war. And we would have been taking the side that sought to overthrow the government in Baghdad. While everyone in Washington was pushing the president to force Assad out of power by force, he found a way to take away their chemical weapons without firing a shot. No one has ever come up with a plausible way that the president could have removed Assad and left a Syria that was at peace.
A similar problem arose in Iraq. With Prime Minister Maliki acting increasingly sectarian and authoritarian, do we continue to work with him? Do we respect the Iraqi elections? Ultimately, the answer was no and we actually did engineer a coup of sorts. Did we wait too long? Well, we had to wait until the conditions were such that Maliki would leave office peaceably. Certainly, it is better to have a coup under these conditions where it is approved by all the regional players, rather than having U.S. troops toppling the elected government, is it not?
The situation in Ukraine provides another example of the limits of American power and influence. Russia remains a country with enough nuclear weapons to end life on this planet as we know it. How belligerent do we want President Obama to be about an ethnic conflict on Russia’s border? His view is that Russia is punching itself in the face. He’d be happier if it stopped punching itself in the face, but he’s not going to risk World War Three over it.
The one area where the president followed along with the warmongers was in Libya. There, we had the power to intervene decisively with airpower, owing to Libya’s unique geography. We had a ready-made villain in Moamar Gaddafi. What we didn’t have is any clue about what would happen if Gaddafi was removed from power. Did we help Libya with our intervention? Did we help ourselves? Of course, not. Libya is an unmitigated hellhole today. And we have neither the power not the will to do a damn thing about it. All we have is our share of responsibility for the result, and all the ill-will that comes with that.
America can be a stabilizing force, but only to a point. We can’t make people stop wanting to kill each other. When we commit to stabilizing actions, they can be destabilizing (as in Libya) or expensive failures (as in Iraq or Vietnam). They can have unintended spillover effects (as in Mali, Cambodia, and Syria). When we make a commitment in once place, it can come with costs in another (as in Afghanistan).
If people are really worried about Russia, the best thing to do is to resist getting embroiled in all these other theaters that threaten to tie down our resources without benefiting us at all.
That’s what this president has done, for the most part, and what most other presidents would not have done.
That’s why a lot of us elected him over Clinton and McCain in the first place.
