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Barack Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy: the Limits of Engagement

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Barack Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy: the Limits of Engagement Singh, Robert. "Continuity We Can Believe In: Keep the Change." Barack Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy: The Limits of Engagement. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. 184–202. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 30 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781780931111.ch-009>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 30 September 2021, 22:07 UTC. Copyright © Robert Singh 2012. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 9 Keep the Change: Continuity We Can Believe In No matter how dark the day may seem, transformative change can be forged by those who choose to side with justice. And I pledge that America will always stand with those who stand up for their dignity and their rights ... the United States of America will never waver in our efforts to stand up for the right of people everywhere to determine their own destiny. —President Barack Obama, UN General Assembly, September 23, 2010 1 We need the suasion in argument of an Obama (or Clinton) and the simplicity in approach of a Bush (or Reagan). We need an intellectual case, brilliantly marshalled, combined with a hard-headed ability to confront. —Former United Kingdom Prime Minister, Tony Blair 2 Since I entered government 45 years ago, I’ve shifted my views and changed my mind on a good many things as circumstances, new information, or logic dictated. But I have yet to see evidence that would dissuade me from this fundamental belief: that America does have a special position and set of responsibilities on this planet ... More than any other secretary of defense, I have been a strong advocate of “soft” power – of the critical importance of diplomacy and development as fundamental components of our foreign policy and national security. [But] Make no mistake: the ultimate guarantee against the success of aggressors, dictators, and terrorists in the 21st century, as in the 20th, is “hard” power – the size, strength, and global reach of the United States military. —Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, May 20113 When I said, “Change we can believe in,” I didn’t say, “Change we can believe in tomorrow.” —President Barack Obama, Chicago, August 2011 4 184 KEEP THE CHANGE: CONTINUITY WE CAN BELIEVE IN 185 Introduction Barack Obama’s bold attempt to advance a “post-American” foreign policy represented a carefully crafted effort to adjust America to the combination of a rapidly changing world order, widespread doubts over US global leadership and his own domestic political ambitions for nation-building at home. Abroad as well as in America, President Obama employed his formidable charismatic authority to present himself as the cathartic “un-Bush”: articulate, mild- mannered, methodical, cool, intellectual, urbane, sophisticated, cosmopolitan and – like Bush’s father – un-doctrinaire, prudent, and pragmatic. Despite his inhospitable political inheritance, the poor economic fortunes of the US and limited foreign policy advances under his leadership, Obama continued to command widespread international admiration and respect, navigating a debt-ridden and war-weary United States through a tumultuous international environment at a time of profound and disconcerting global change. As Vice-President Joe Biden refl ected, “No president has had so many disparate but consequential foreign policy dilemmas to deal with all at once.” 5 Moreover, Obama appeared to many outside the United States not only to represent the “better angels” of contemporary America, but also to offer symbolic expression of a nation simultaneously changing demographically and evolving positively in its relations with the wider world under his presidency – embracing a mosaic of ever greater ethnic diversity, cosmopolitanism and pluralist tolerance at home while forging a carefully calibrated “smart power” diplomacy abroad. As the American political scientist, John Mueller, put it, “Under Barack Obama, the country has become more inclined to seek international cooperation, sometimes even showing perceptible, if occasional, signs of humility.” 6 To his many admirers within and outside the US, Obama – like Ronald Reagan previously – provided confi rmation of the adage of the nineteenth-century German philosopher, Georg Hegel, that “The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and essence of his age; he actualizes his age.” 7 But beyond the powerful symbolism, the stylistic departures and rhetorical “altitude” that he achieved, Obama’s concerted attempts to adapt America to a new and uncertain international environment faced powerful limits that impeded the hoped-for achievements of strategic engagement. As a result, in many ways what Obama ultimately offered as forty-fourth US president was less a completely post-American approach embracing the wholesale rejection of the controversial Bush Doctrine than a promise of its more competent execution – a promise that has been delivered in several important instances, from the unrelenting prosecution of the war on terror and improved relations with Russia to the strategic hedging over China and the selective embrace of regime change in the Middle East. In this, as Mark Twain reputedly 186 BARACK OBAMA’S POST-AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY said, history may not quite repeat itself but it does sometimes rhyme. By 2012, Obama resembled less a transformative successor to his unloved predecessor, but was more analogous to Dwight Eisenhower following the equally unpopular Harry Truman in 1953: criticizing his foreign policy on the stump with impressive vigor, pledging wholesale changes, but then trimming rather than transforming it in offi ce. As Stanley Renshon correctly predicted at the outset of the new president’s term, the pervasive national security tension within the Obama administration has been between Obama’s instinctive liberal internationalism and his more pragmatic, if reluctant, embrace of some of Bush’s more controversial policies. 8 Especially where vital US national interests exist, the much-anticipated transformative change has therefore been signifi cantly more limited and sometimes merely cosmetic. Ryan Crocker, former US ambassador to Iraq, rightly observed of America that strategic “patience is not our strong suit ...” But Crocker also commended, in relation to both Afghanistan and Iraq, the “welcome and extremely important” continuity in policy from Bush to Obama;9 a commendation “rewarded” by his taking over from Karl Eikenberry as US Ambassador to Afghanistan in June 2011. Across the daunting gamut of foreign policy challenges, but especially on the now undeclared but still functioning war on terror, such continuity was in marked supply. While, in his inaugural address, Obama boldly asserted that “the choice between our safety and our ideals”10 was “false,” as America’s forty-fourth president – like the forty-third – he made precisely those necessary and inevitable tradeoffs, from Guantanamo Bay and invocations of state secrets privileges through military commissions and renditions to special operations and drone strikes. And although the administration quickly abandoned the assertive language of the war on terror as overblown and counterproductive, Obama’s reversal of supposedly constitutionally suspect counter-terrorism policies was at best partial and halting. The “rooted cosmopolitanism” that his most admiring supporters hoped would reframe and revitalize US foreign policy has had notably limited reach and impact – though the clamor among Democrats against the “shredding” of the US Constitution under Bush had become a deafening silence under the similar policies of his supposedly constitutionally literate successor. Constitutional vandalism, evidently, is in the eye of the beholder. With the evolution of the major foreign policy problems facing Obama over 2009–12, it is therefore possible to discern an approach to international relations that – while seeking to adjust to a post-American era in which relative power is redistributed and the global order no longer belongs to the West – is ultimately not fundamentally at odds with that of his White House predecessors. At least, it has not been at odds in most substantive – as opposed to stylistic, declaratory, symbolic and rhetorical – terms. While Obama regularly appeared “fi red up and ready to go” on the campaign trail KEEP THE CHANGE: CONTINUITY WE CAN BELIEVE IN 187 to renew American leadership, in offi ce – from Washington’s relations with other great powers such as China and Russia, through the challenge of newly developing relations with rising powers such as Brazil and Turkey, to the hard cases of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Israel-Palestine – the extent and the pace of foreign policy shifts under Obama have been less all-encompassing and less fi ercely urgent than his strongest supporters might legitimately have anticipated, and his adversaries certainly feared, back in 2008. But a more sound and sober assessment of Obama’s administration, taking into account both the international and the domestic pressures constantly at work on, and in, Washington, would likely have cautioned against too sweeping or ambitious expectations of transformative change. As Obama himself sometimes noted, changing US foreign policy is more akin to re-routing a super-tanker than deftly steering a speedboat. Whatever their merits, extensive turnover in administration
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