The Obama Doctrine the U.S

The Obama Doctrine The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world. BY JEFFREY GOLdbERG, THE ATLANTIC APRIl 2016 © 2016 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic Magazine. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency riday, August 30, 2013, the day the The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric feckless Barack Obama brought to a and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of Fpremature end America’s reign as the thought, helped bring his predecessor, George world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq. Obama entered alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and The president Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to believes that and stepped back from the consuming void— slay. And he was particularly mindful of Churchillian began with a thundering speech given on promising victory in conflicts he believed to be rhetoric and, Obama’s behalf by his secretary of state, John unwinnable. “If you were to say, for instance, Kerry, in Washington, D.C. The subject of that we’re going to rid Afghanistan of the more to Kerry’s uncharacteristically Churchillian Taliban and build a prosperous democracy the point, remarks, delivered in the Treaty Room at the instead, the president is aware that someone, Churchillian State Department, was the gassing of civilians seven years later, is going to hold you to that habits of by the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad. promise,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy thought, helped Obama, in whose Cabinet Kerry serves national-security adviser, and his foreign- faithfully, but with some exasperation, is policy amanuensis, told me not long ago. bring his himself given to vaulting oratory, but not But Kerry’s rousing remarks on that August predecessor, usually of the martial sort associated with day, which had been drafted in part by Rhodes, George W. Bush, Churchill. Obama believes that the were threaded with righteous anger and bold to ruinous war Manichaeanism, and eloquently rendered promises, including the barely concealed threat in Iraq. bellicosity, commonly associated with Churchill of imminent attack. Kerry, like Obama himself, were justified by Hitler’s rise, and were at times was horrified by the sins committed by the defensible in the struggle against the Soviet Syrian regime in its attempt to put down a Union. But he also thinks rhetoric should be two-year-old rebellion. In the Damascus weaponized sparingly, if at all, in today’s more suburb of Ghouta nine days earlier, Assad’s President Barack Obama in the White House ambiguous and complicated international arena. army had murdered more than 1,400 civilians 50 BUSINESS TODAY JUNE 2016 businesstoday.lk businesstoday.lk JUNE 2016 BUSINESS TODAY 51 with sarin gas. The strong sentiment inside the dispositionally interventionist among Obama’s Obama flipped this plea on its head. “When Martha’s Vineyard when they crossed paths Obama administration was that Assad had senior advisers, had argued early for arming you have a professional army,” he once told there later.) earned dire punishment. In Situation Room Syria’s rebels. Power, who during this period me, “that is well armed and sponsored by two Syria, for Obama, represented a slope meetings that followed the attack on Ghouta, served on the National Security Council staff, is large states”—Iran and Russia—“who have potentially as slippery as Iraq. In his first term, only the White House chief of staff, Denis the author of a celebrated book excoriating a huge stakes in this, and they are fighting he came to believe that only a handful of McDonough, cautioned explicitly about the succession of U.S. presidents for their failures against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who threats in the Middle East conceivably perils of intervention. John Kerry argued to prevent genocide. The book, A Problem From started out as protesters and suddenly now see warranted direct U.S. military intervention. vociferously for action. Hell, published in 2002, drew Obama to Power themselves in the midst of a civil conflict …” These included the threat posed by al-Qaeda; “As previous storms in history have while he was in the U.S. Senate, though the two He paused. “The notion that we could have—in threats to the continued existence of Israel (“It gathered, when unspeakable crimes were were not an obvious ideological match. Power a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military would be a moral failing for me as president of within our power to stop them, we have been is a partisan of the doctrine known as forces—changed the equation on the ground the United States” not to defend Israel, he once warned against the temptations of looking the “responsibility to protect,” which holds that there was never true.” The message Obama told me); and, not unrelated to Israel’s other way,” Kerry said in his speech. “History sovereignty should not be considered inviolate telegraphed in speeches and interviews was security, the threat posed by a nuclear-armed is full of leaders who have warned against when a country is slaughtering its own citizens. clear: He would not end up like the second Iran. The danger to the United States posed by inaction, indifference, and especially against She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the President Bush—a president who became the Assad regime did not rise to the level of silence when it mattered most.” speech he delivered when he accepted the tragically overextended in the Middle East, these challenges. Kerry counted President Obama among Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he declined. whose decisions filled the wards of Walter Reed Given Obama’s reticence about those leaders. A year earlier, when the Obama, Obama generally does not believe a president with grievously wounded soldiers, who was intervention, the bright-red line he drew for Obama would administration suspected that the Assad regime unlike liberal should place American soldiers at great risk in helpless to stop the obliteration of his Assad in the summer of 2012 was striking. Even say privately was contemplating the use of chemical interventionists, order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless reputation, even when he recalibrated his his own advisers were surprised. “I didn’t that the first weapons, Obama had declared: “We have been those disasters pose a direct security threat to policies in his second term. Obama would say know it was coming,” his secretary of defense very clear to the Assad regime … that a red line is an admirer of the United States. privately that the first task of an American at the time, Leon Panetta, told me. I was told task of an for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of the foreign- Power sometimes argued with Obama in president in the post-Bush international arena that Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly warned American chemical weapons moving around or being policy realism of front of other National Security Council was “Don’t do stupid shit.” Obama against drawing a red line on chemical president in the utilized. That would change my calculus. That President officials, to the point where he could no longer Obama’s reticence frustrated Power and weapons, fearing that it would one day have to post-Bush would change my equation.” George H. W. conceal his frustration. “Samantha, enough, others on his national-security team who had a be enforced. international Despite this threat, Obama seemed to many I’ve already read your book,” he once snapped. preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she Kerry, in his remarks on August 30, 2013, critics to be coldly detached from the suffering Bush and, in Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an suggested that Assad should be punished in arena was of innocent Syrians. Late in the summer of particular, of admirer of the foreign-policy realism of early and assertive response to Assad’s part because the “credibility and the future “Don’t do 2011, he had called for Assad’s departure. “For Bush’s national- President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton interests of the United States of America and stupid shit.” the sake of the Syrian people,” Obama said, security adviser, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent told me that “the failure to help build up a our allies” were at stake. “It is directly related “the time has come for President Assad to step Brent Scowcroft Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told credible fighting force of the people who were to our credibility and whether countries still aside.” But Obama initially did little to bring me). Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam the originators of the protests against Assad … believe the United States when it says about Assad’s end. (“I love that Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now something. They are watching to see if Syria He resisted demands to act in part because guy,” Obama deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet filled.” When The Atlantic published this can get away with it, because then maybe they he assumed, based on the analysis of U.S. once told me). Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, statement, and also published Clinton’s too can put the world at greater risk.” intelligence, that Assad would fall without his toasted the leaders of China shortly after the assessment that “great nations need Ninety minutes later, at the White House, help.

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