PLANK JULY 25, 2012
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Pundits and, for that matter, the Obama campaign were right to ding Mitt Romney’s foreign policy address Tuesday for banging the table instead of putting anything substantive on it. But what could Romney do? Obama has given him almost nothing to work with. Foreign affairs won’t decide the 2012 election, but, if it did, President Obama would win walking away.
Replying to Romney’s speech, Robert Gibbs, an Obama adviser, said this: “It’s widely accepted that President Obama has an exceptionally strong record on national security issues, and I think, quite frankly, Mitt Romney is having a hard time making an argument against President Obama on these issues.” It pains me, as a supposedly crankily skeptical journalist, to agree with a partisan spin doctor, but here goes: Gibbs is right.
I never drank the Obama Kool-Aid in 2008. The then-candidate’s promise of “a new kind of politics,” I wrote in National Journal at the time, “borders on chicanery.” Replace partisanship with pragmatism? Set aside ideology to take the best solutions from both parties and ease the country out of its mess? Fat chance, I said. Well, for the record, I hereby eat half a crow. Whatever you may think of Obama’s domestic and economic records (which we can debate some other time), on foreign policy he has delivered the post-partisan, pragmatic, and generally successful policy he promised.
Two major surprises have marked his presidency, one negative, one positive. On the downside, the silver-tongued orator who inspired millions as a candidate turned out to be a mediocre communicator as president. On the upside, the greenhorn candidate who had barely any experience of, or interest in, foreign policy has proved to be an impressively adept presidential diplomat. On almost every front internationally, he has improved the country’s position since 2008.
A surprising thing about the other two surprises is they are two aspects of the same phenomenon. The reason Obama exceeds expectations on international relations is the same reason he disappoints at domestic communication: his style is technocratic, undemonstrative, and patient—not so good for galvanizing the public in a time of economic crisis, but great for diplomacy.
Great? Well, at least very good. Greatness comes from winning cosmic conflicts like World War II and the Cold War, and at present we are fortunate not to be engaged in any and therefore not to need a great leader. (Remember, in this connection, the wisdom of Calvin Coolidge: “It is a great advantage to a president, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know he is not a great man.”) In ordinarily messy, disorganized times like these, success in foreign policy means navigating treacherous currents safely, avoiding major mistakes, leaving the country stronger than you found it, and hopefully nudging the world forward a little. By that measure, Obama has done well.
An exception was his naïvely conceived and clumsily executed run at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His rookie flailing set back the peace process (such as it was) and made him look like a doormat. But he learned from his mistakes. And consider the positive side of the ledger.
Ending two wars. He has closed out the war in Iraq on acceptable terms. He is on course to do the same thing in Afghanistan. Ending two wars is a big deal.
Stabilizing relations with Russia. Russia-U.S. relations were in a tailspin when Obama entered office. Thanks to the Russia “reset,” they are stable today. Russia could certainly be more cooperative on Iran and Syria, but it is quietly helping us in Afghanistan (where it could instead be a major irritant) and generally not putting bite behind its bark.
Stabilizing relations with China. The administration built enough capital with Beijing to smuggle a prominent dissident out of the country with barely a diplomatic ripple—an extraordinary thing, if you think about it. Hardly less extraordinary is that the administration’s “Asia pivot,” which is really a move to counterbalance China, is also clicking smoothly into place.
Isolating Iran. Partly thanks to Obama’s show of willingness to negotiate, Europe is joining with the U.S. in boycotting Iranian oil, a remarkable show of solidarity behind exceptionally tough sanctions. Sanctions may yet fail, but Obama’s patient approach has weakened Iran’s position and built a consensus that will make further steps more effective. Oh, and Israel hasn’t bombed Iran and Hezbollah hasn’t bombed Israel.
Strengthening America’s brand. In Europe and most of the rest of the world (Muslim countries being important exceptions), the United States is significantly more favorably regarded than when he took office. That is bankable soft power.
Prosecuting the war on terror. Obama has been so successful at continuing and refining the most effective elements of Bush’s counterterrorism policy, while taming its provocative excesses, that Republicans don’t even want to raise the issue. Pinch me.
No, everything is not hunky-dory. And, no, a short article like this one cannot provide anything close to a textured appraisal of foreign affairs in the Obama years. But I think even a long, detailed, textured article would come in the end to two questions and two fairly clear answers. First: in foreign affairs, are we better off than we were four years ago? Answer: yes. Second: on the geopolitical scene, have we experienced any grave crises or setbacks? Answer: no. And that is why Romney has so little to say.
Or, rather, it is one reason. The other is that Obama has planted himself and the Democrats exactly where Romney, by rights, ought to be: on the kind of pragmatic realism that Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush used to own.
Lawrence J. Haas, a senior fellow with the American Foreign Policy Council and the author of the excellent new book Sound the Trumpet: The United States and Human Rights Promotion, notes that Obama has expressed admiration for the elder Bush and exhibits a similar approach. Like Bush 41, Haas says, Obama “operates as a classic realist, not a human rights promoter.” Also in the realist vein, Obama “lacks a vision as to where he would like to take the country or the world. He operates from problem to problem.”
Two diplomatic officials, one current and one former, balk at calling Obama a realist; he is not coldly manipulative or indifferent to human rights. (For example: Obama has done more to stand up for gay rights internationally than any previous world leader.) But they concur that he is outcome-oriented, a pragmatist rather than an idealist or visionary. “He’s focused on the bottom line: what are our key equities and how do we protect them,” says the serving diplomat. At the Brookings Institution, Tamara Cofman Wittes, a former Obama State Department official, says Obama believes in bending the arc of history, but also believes you can’t bend it at right angles. “He’s playing a long game and doing it pretty well.”
The kind of realism Obama practices is founded not on Machiavellian amorality but on a theory about where peace comes from. For Republican hawks and neocons, peace comes from American strength and hegemony; for Democratic doves and internationalists, peace comes from international cooperation and transnational institutions. Obama’s realism, like that of Ike and Bush 41 holds that American strength and international cooperation both have their place, but that peace comes from equilibrium between contending forces. To realists, power may not be admirable, but it must always be dealt with; and, in dealing with it, conserving and effectively deploying America’s power, a scarce and precious commodity, is Priority One, for it is the commodity upon which human rights and U.S. hegemony alike ultimately depend.
A realist may choose to upset an equilibrium now and then, but never lightly. Power, like a floodtide surge, has its own hydraulics. Once equilibrium is gone, it can be very hard and costly to restore. For very different reasons, human rights activists and neocons deplore Obama’s slowness to jump into the fray when rotten and antagonistic old orders tremble in places like Iran, Libya, Egypt, and now Syria. Eisenhower and Bush, however, understood well the importance of looking before leaping, whether in Suez and eastern Europe in the 1950s or in Ukraine and the Balkans in the early 1990s. Obama is in their mold.
Obama’s quiet accomplishment, in foreign policy, has been to do just as he promised: take the best ideas from the other side, integrate them into his own party’s tradition, and put them to work to strengthen the country’s position. Being a dab hand at foreign affairs will not, it’s true, save him in 2012, any more than it saved Bush 41 from the soft economy 20 years ago. What it has done is kept him viable in a miserable environment, improved the Democrats’ credibility on national security, taken from the Republicans the foreign-policy real estate that they used to own—and left Mitt Romney standing in a puddle of his own shallow verbiage.
26 comments
Bravo! This is an excellent piece. Obama's is a constructivist, internationalist AND a realist without being naively committed to one paradigm. He has sought to synchronise American advantage with incremental norm entrepreneurship and international engagement through prudent use of hard and soft power and without being slavish to the empty moral bombast so often called for on these pages.
- Willf
July 25, 2012 at 8:48pm
Very well-written article. As Supreme Commander of the D-Day operation, Eisenhower was a skilled diplomat (keeping Monty from going off the rails was a diplomatic triumph in itself), and G.H.W. Bush headed the CIA at one time (where he was more diplomatic than aggressive). Obama is a master pragmatist, and it's logical that he would learn from these two pragmatic Republicans. And, of course, he has an effective Secretary of State in Hillary at his back. In foreign policy Obama is a wonderfully refreshing and effective successor to the caveman G.W. Bush. And, of course, the pea-brained Romney has suggested that Obama's foreign policy is "appeasement." Who woulda thunk?
- magboy47.
July 25, 2012 at 9:09pm
This, of course, is why Congressional Republicans, as unpatriotic as they are, took the cleverest angle in deciding to mount a prevent a prevent defence against Obama on domestic policy. Reading this, it only makes too much sense to a Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan that if Obama were given freer rein on shaping an economic or social policy that would please the median 60-70% of Americans, the economy would be recovering nicely, there would be increased domestic comity, and his bipartisan overtures would force them to reorganize their party to try to capture some of the territory they have been ceding to people like Obama over the past two decades. 2010 would have been closer to 1998 than 1934, but coming together as a country literally threatened the livelihoods of the most rabid Republicans.
- chaitless
July 25, 2012 at 9:19pm
Hillary Clinton. This guy never mentioned Hillary. And so it goes. She might be the best secretary of state since John Foster Dulles , or Marshall in the Truman days. But again she is a woman..rauch...rauch...rauch!!! rauch..grr..grr
- JAIMECHUCH
July 25, 2012 at 9:35pm
The idea that Liberals are weak on the international front is one of the greatest lies that has been spread by the right wing over the decades. Sure, most liberals hold a rather pusillanimous view when it comes to war and focus more on imaginary ideals, but in power Democrats have been every bit as tough on threats to America. Remember, it was a democrat who withstood the Great War, Pearl Harbor, and ordered bombs to be dropped on a pair of Japanese cities. I give Obama a solid A- grade on his foreign endeavors and it is one area of his that I am completely satisfied in.
- ARealHero
July 25, 2012 at 10:07pm
While your assessment of Obama's achievements in palace diplomacy are reasonably accurate, I'm not aware of any evidence that Obama has any priority on tribal and street diplomacy. As an example, AQAP's top priority is sustaining at least passive support from the Yemeni tribes. What does Obama do to counter AQAP: drone strikes, with no care as to what the tribes think of any collateral damage they might cause. Unless you set out to turn the Yemeni tribes against AQAP, which based on the Anbar Awakening would be the greatest possible strategic blow to AQAP, you are unlikely to achieve that. The only thing to say in Obama's favor regarding tribal diplomacy is that he offers no less than anyone in the Republican party.
- sighthnd
July 25, 2012 at 11:23pm
Rausch and Church ar both right. Foreign policy these days in the absense of a major international threat is quite well satisfied by a Chamberlain or a Hoover--- BHO AND Clinton deserve generally high marks (with the big exception of the Afghan surge that delayed the ending of THAT war... how did that work out, incidently??). But its domestic matters where the crisis has been for four years -- and in domestic policy BHO has been sorely lacking, those at tnr wishing otherwise notwithstanding. And four more years of BHO in office should scare thinking Dems who understand political strategy and who care about the future of the party and the country -- a rare combination.
- drofnats1
July 25, 2012 at 11:52pm
Are you kidding? Obammer is constantly trotting around with Saul Alinsky apologizing for America's past misdeeds. WTF are you smoking.
- subterra
July 25, 2012 at 11:54pm
This is an excellent article. One thing that I would add is that we "own" fewer of the of the Mid Eastern countries than we used to. We were seen as Mubarek's anchor, we were seen as complicit in Assad's rule through his intelligence cooperation, That is no longer the case. I'm not sure that most Americans realize how liberating such developments are to our foreign policy going forward.
- Attrill
July 26, 2012 at 12:06am
"Are you kidding? Obammer is constantly trotting around with Saul Alinsky apologizing for America's past misdeeds. WTF are you smoking." subterra, You've got Obama confused with Mitt Romney's dad, George. It was he who, as governor of Michigan, consulted with Alinsky after the 1967 riot in Detroit to find out why the city erupted. And since Mitt was involved in the political lives of his parents (campaigning, etc.), maybe he was on the scene, shaking Alinsky's hand and patting him on the back! You need to do more research, subterra. You've got the wrong person in your story.
- magboy47.
July 26, 2012 at 3:19am
Obama's Iran policy has been a failure. He looked the other way when Ahmadinejad and Co. bullied their way to power over the dead bodies of thousands of regime opponents. His sanctions are late, reluctant, and riddled with holes. He seems more interested in protecting the Iranian Islamic republic from Israel than in protecting Israel from Iran's nukes. So he's got the Israelis in a bear hug. Another consequence is that Iran is making dangerous mischief in Syria. This year, he and his surrogates are trying to bamboozle liberal friends of Israel by pretending friendship for Israel at election time. Yeah, he's just like Bush the First. Obama has gone out of his way to support the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and cognate Islamists in Turkey in confrontations with local secular liberals and military castes. The MB is a clerical fascist organization which means what it says: According to Wikipedia, the Brotherhood's credo was and is, "Allah is our objective; the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations." The MB is, however, very patient and tactically flexible. So people are fooled by their flashes of "moderation". Mitt Romney has two problems. One is that, for all his academic achievement and the advice he gets, he is conceptually incoherent and inarticulate. Second, the Republicans are in disarray about foreign policy, thus incapable of offering a coherent alternative to Obama.
- amidut
July 26, 2012 at 7:21am
Obama as a combination of Eisenhower and GHWB? The latter two are both very different from each other and from Obama in terms of personality and in terms of background (though the latter both served in the military during the Great War). All three are very similar, however, in terms of being confident in themselves and not having a need to prove their toughness to others. Someone not having confidence in herself and having a need to prove her toughness would be a disaster as president. At least if history is our guide. As we once again interview the candidates for president, we can be certain they will not be asked how they would respond if a nuclear weapon is detonated in a western city. And eventually one will be. Yet, we have no idea how our president would respond because nobody asks. Sure, this campaign we will hear tough talk about Iran and Israel (though little about Pakistan, which already has a nuclear bomb and scientists willing to sell the technology to the highest bidder and harbored the world's worst terrorist). But I suspect the risk of a nuclear detonation is far higher in the west than in the middle east. Why? Advice given to me many years ago on my first day in my new job: don't shit where you eat.
- rayward
July 26, 2012 at 7:36am
???????????? Iran? Lybia? Egypt? Afghanistan? Pakistan? North Korea? Saudi Arabia? Venezuela? Argentina? Hungary? Minor problems!
- sf4200
July 26, 2012 at 9:52am
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Obama is the best liberal Republican President we've ever had.
- timteeter
July 26, 2012 at 9:54am
Subterra: Saul Alinsky has been dead for 40 years.
- brokensq
July 26, 2012 at 10:23am
sf4200 - not sure what your point is. Shamlessly quoting Kagan but foreign affairs is much like baseball. Miss 77% of the time and you'll got to the hall of fame. The US is not omnipotent nor does it have unlimited resources to bend every single country in the world as it desires. I'm not sure what you preferred outcome in Libya or Egypt is, but the article did spend some time on what's been achieved with regards to Iran. As for the rest apart from North Korea - what?
- Nari224
July 26, 2012 at 10:41am
Nari. I need to quibble your baseball math a bit. Miss 70% and you have a good shot at the hall. One can agree that doing nothing can be every bit as consequential as doing something. Often enough the left will happily portray the US in terms of Hegemon. Particularly when there is a Republican president. I find this to be a propensity of political convenience. It is deceitful and dishonesty. By and large I'm well with Obama and his sensitivities to this bullshit capacity.
- jacko
July 26, 2012 at 11:06am
Sorry, my math is out today - "miss 67% of the time..." :)
- Nari224
July 26, 2012 at 11:12am
Brilliant piece. Sadly, the H.W. Bush "pulling out of Iraq because continuing would be too expensive/too ugly" was thrown away by his son. And I never did think the Republican Party was too happy with Eisenhower -- they wanted a fire-breathing anti-New Deal anti-Communist dogmatist. Instead they got an experienced General, a realist willing to maintain the New Deal, insuring it's survival for the next 50 years. But yes, this is one of the things Obama meant by "We Can Do Better". His middle-of-the-road pragmatic approach led to the no-fly zone in Libya, and prevented American boots on the ground.
- AllanL5
July 26, 2012 at 11:22am
Love this piece. Walking softly and carrying a big stick is a lot smarter than bragging about how powerful you are, especially since the whole planet knows how powerful we are and is justifiably terrified. Plus, people don't hate us because we're "free," they hate us because we bomb folks, take out their leaders, like Allende, if we don't like them, and are blind to the environmental damage we've done. Finally, there's nothing wrong with recognizing our past misdeeds. That's called "maturity," and it's time America grew up. That isn't being unpatriotic. It means you love your country enough to understand ALL our history just as a mature person can see himself clearly.
- Sophia
July 26, 2012 at 2:38pm
Ray, the "Great War" was WW1, which Dwight Eisenhower served in, but not GHWB.
- ironyroad
July 26, 2012 at 2:44pm
Glad to see ray and irony are still maintaining their long distance relationship. But maybe Ray could explain why no one would ask either man about a nuke detonating in the West? I'll guess we'll see if that question is ever posed, and I'm very interested in the responses from both men. But somehow I think navigating through Romney's answer would be a bit tortured, or at least somewhat taxing. (Sorry)
- mdichner
July 26, 2012 at 3:52pm
mdich -- it might go like this: Gov. Romney: Well, as I've said before, America is an exceptional nation, and other nations who bear us ill always try to test us. When I'm president there will be an end to the Obama administration's policy of inviting countries who oppose our values to detonate nuclear weapons on our territory.
- ironyroad
July 26, 2012 at 4:18pm
Yes, the Great War, the one Wilson promised not to enter. Of course, I don't expect anybody to ask Obama or Romney how he would respond to a nuclear detonation in the west. It would be about as ridiculous as asking FDR how he would respond if the Japanese attacked Hawaii. Or asking GWB how he would respond if a few highly motivated extremists attacked the WTC. We spend several years and billions electing our president and, when she takes office, we know almost nothing about how she will respond to an event that is likely to occur during her term. All we know is that she loves America and is tough. Ironyroad and mdichrner probably know more about the laxatives they use than the we know about the presidential candidates we vote for. Maybe its because the laxatives are more predictable than our presidents.
- rayward
July 26, 2012 at 4:28pm
A nuke in the west is always a possibility, but beware of always preparing for the last war. For example, suppose some ULTRA hacker brings down the Internet, the controls over power systems, computerized medicine, etc.? Or...we've barely scraped the surface of genetic modification. Accidental plagues have almost destroyed humanity a few times; imagine a bin Ladin with a doctorate in biology who specializes in tinkering with genes. Sleep well.
- skahn
July 26, 2012 at 4:55pm
When I read the first several comments, full of admiration for article and of accord with each other, I began to worry. However, after trawling through sniping by the end of the comments, I began to relax. The world is still safe for discord and and conflict, at least TNR world. And I always learn something with my subscription. Who knew Alinsky was dead? Next, you will tell me that Henry George has left this world as well.
- skahn
July 26, 2012 at 4:59pm