Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Another Poorly Thought Out Obama Doctrine

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9-11, Ali Khamenei, Carter Doctrine, Congress, Cuba, F. Scott Fitzgerald, foreign policy, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Iran, Iran deal, Jimmy Carter, New York Times, nucler weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Persian Gulf, preemption, Putin, Russia, sanctions, stupid stuff, Thomas Friedman

Well, it seems that the previous Obama foreign policy doctrine sure didn’t last long. Starting last summer, the president’s diplomatic thinking made waves when a series of Mainstream Media reports, plus his own former Secretary of State, all seemed to agree that Mr. Obama’s strategic lodestar was “Don’t do stupid stuff” overseas. (You can read my critique here.) This week, however, the president appeared to unveil a strikingly new approach, which could be summarized as “Take Big Risks.” In addition, in an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Mr. Obama displayed other signs of greater foreign policy ambition, along with some incoherence, that didn’t attract nearly enough attention.

Friedman writes that the president’s own description of a new “Obama Doctrine”

“emerged when I asked if there was a common denominator to his decisions to break free from longstanding United States policies isolating Burma, Cuba and now Iran. Obama said his view was that ‘engagement,’ combined with meeting core strategic needs, could serve American interests vis-à-vis these three countries far better than endless sanctions and isolation. He added that America, with its overwhelming power, needs to have the self-confidence to take some calculated risks to open important new possibilities — like trying to forge a diplomatic deal with Iran that, while permitting it to keep some of its nuclear infrastructure, forestalls its ability to build a nuclear bomb for at least a decade, if not longer.”

This view, however, lumps together some risk-reward ratios that don’t seem to belong in the same category. It makes perfect sense to argue, as per the president, that

“You take a country like Cuba. For us to test the possibility that engagement leads to a better outcome for the Cuban people, there aren’t that many risks for us. It’s a tiny little country. It’s not one that threatens our core security interests, and so [there’s no reason not] to test the proposition. And if it turns out that it doesn’t lead to better outcomes, we can adjust our policies.”

But to contend that “The same is true with respect to Iran” is worrisome. Mr. Obama allowed that Iran is

“a larger country, a dangerous country, one that has engaged in activities that resulted in the death of U.S. citizens, but the truth of the matter is: Iran’s defense budget is $30 billion. Our defense budget is closer to $600 billion. Iran understands that they cannot fight us. … You asked about an Obama doctrine. The doctrine is: We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.”

This assessment, however, is coming from a president avowedly supremely aware of the difficulties America ran into in the last decade fighting in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq in post-9-11 Afghanistan. As with Vietnam decades before, these interventions show that crude indicators of military strength like budget levels can be dangerously misleading – all the more so when the adversary is halfway around the world, and convinced that it’s fighting for survival or for a fanatical cause. In addition, of course, the consequences of getting Cuba or Myanmar wrong are indeed negligible. Even if Washington avoids a new war, the consequences of getting Iran wrong could be catastrophic, not least because it could result in the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a government with expansionist aims in a region still crucial to the world’s energy supplies.

An Obama miscalculation on Iran becomes even scarier upon realizing that the president seems to have greatly expanded America’s defense commitments in the Persian Gulf. In 1980, President Carter’s doctrine declared that the United States would defend Gulf states from aggressors from outside the region – meaning the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of 9-11, George W. Bush’s administration signaled a determination to respond with force preemptively – before being attacked – to eliminate the threat of weapons-of-mass-destruction use by rogue states. In 200x, the president turned words into deeds with the invasion of Iraq.

Now, Mr. Obama states that he’s willing “to make the kinds of commitments that would give everybody in the neighborhood, including Iran, a clarity that if Israel were to be attacked by any state, that we would stand by them.”  

That could be a perfectly legitimate decision to make. But as a major ramp up of U.S. foreign defense obligations, it needs a thorough examination by Congress and the public. Intensive debate is all the more important given the squeeze on America’s defense budget, and given the crucial lesson that the president should have learned from dealing with Vladimir Putin: The line between the internal and external threats faced by states are anything but clear-cut. And Iran has been at least as active as Russia in using various non-state proxy groups to advance its interests.

Finally, the president’s views of what’s motivating Iran remain confusing.  On the one hand, Mr. Obama repeated his conviction that “that the sanctions regime that we put together was weakening Iran over the long term,” stated that the country’s supreme leader agreed; and claimed that Ayatollah ali Khamenei believed that “if in fact he wanted to see Iran re-enter the community of nations, then there were going to have to be changes.” On the other hand, he described Iran as “a country that withstood an eight-year war and a million people dead, they’ve shown themselves willing, I think, to endure hardship when they considered a point of national pride or, in some cases, national survival.”

In other words, President Obama views Iran both as a country that would not allow stronger sanctions to “stop its nuclear program” (as he said in announcing the deal last week), and as one that was so anxious for sanctions relief that the prospect led to talks that have rendered it toothless (by his account) for many years.

It’s true that F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” At the same time, he made this point in an essay titled “The Crack-Up.”

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Initial Thoughts on the “Torture Report”

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"Torture Report", 9-11, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, CIA, Dianne Feinstein, George W. Bush, Iraq, ISIS, Leon Panetta, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Saddam Hussein, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Syria, Taliban, terrorism, torture

I admit it: My views on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Democratic staff’s new “torture report” are biased by my views on the Iraq War and the use of so-called harsh interrogation techniques themselves (whether they fall under some legal definition of torture or not). I was and still am in favor of the former and support the latter. I’m hoping that others who analyze and comment on it will be just as honest.

I can’t yet comment on any of the details or substance of the report, since I have not read either the Majority publication or the Republican staff response. (Hats off to you if you have already.) But I do feel able to write usefully about Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein’s decision to release itself, although admittedly the procedures and the content are not entirely separate issues. And I consider it to be a huge mistake.

The two preceding paragraphs may surprise many who know me either personally or through my writings. Re the former, yes, indeed, I was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War, and strongly supported the media’s publication of the Pentagon Papers and Congress’ exposure of CIA wrongdoing during the Cold War. Re the latter, I remain strongly opposed to most of America’s post-Cold War interventions abroad, including attacking Syria to punish its use of chemical weapons.

But I oppose publication of the new Senate report, and have supported the Iraq War and the torturing (from this point I’ll use this term for convenience’s sake, not as a moral or legal judgment) of prisoners in the war on terrorism for a reason that’s straightforward analytically: I never viewed preserving the western orientation of Vietnam or most of the other developing countries that became Cold War battlegrounds to have been vital interests of the United States, or even close. Because it never mattered who controlled Cuba or Vietnam or Guatemala or other poor and weak countries lacking important resources or any other assets, CIA assassination attempts and other misdeeds that supported broader such Cold War policies were in my view completely unnecessary.

By contrast, I consider the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the destruction of Al Qaeda to have been decidedly vital interests. You can read my Iraq views here. Regarding the anti-terror campaign, it involves preventing another 9-11 – a threat that’s also raised by the prospect of ISIS consolidating control over large chunks of Iraq and Syria, and turning this territory into the kind of terrorist haven that the Taliban offered Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. If keeping the American homeland safe from attack isn’t a vital interest, I don’t know what is.

So it shouldn’t be too surprising that I support extreme means of achieving this goal, including those used by the CIA to extract information from “detainees.” Would I back even harsher techniques? I still need to think this through – just as their opponents need to think through whether they would forego water-boarding etc to save American lives (or, more pointedly, to save the life of one of their own loved ones).

The empirical evidence would certainly and properly bear on my final judgment. A least according to President Obama’s former CIA director, Leon Panetta, no one’s idea of a Republican or neocon whacko, it’s far more supportive of torture than the Majority report apparently contends.

I’d also be influenced by the unavoidable reality that war inevitably entails agonizing moral dilemmas, tragic misjudgments, and the deaths of innocents. And don’t forget the frequent need to make life-and-death decisions in real time, without remotely perfect knowledge. (Can you imagine the pressure decision-makers felt in those early hours, days, and weeks following 9-11?) The outrage so strongly expressed by torture opponents indicates an equally strong determination to define these complications out of existence.

Lastly, on the matter of substance, I would need to know whether torture had been authorized by both the President and Congress. No representative system of government is worthy of the name unless elected authorities determine overarching policy and guidelines in an area like national security. In immediate post-crisis circumstances, as with 9-11, the executive branch needs to take the lead. But the legislature must be brought in before too long. Of course, in this case whether the CIA ignored or breached guidelines laid down by U.S. leaders is still being hotly debated.

Which brings us to the procedural question presented by the release, and here I don’t see much room for reasonable debate. Whether you agree with it or not, the United States is indisputably engaged in a global campaign against terrorism that’s been prosecuted vigorously now by two American presidents (including Mr. Obama). As a result, it’s been ratified by repeated presidential elections. This conflict is highly unconventional conflict, it’s waged against genuinely shadowy opponents, and American forces are serving in any manner of dangerous positions on many kinds of front lines.

As a result, the prospect that the report’s release at this time could expose them to further risk – as acknowledged by the Obama administration – makes Senator Feinstein’s green light completely unacceptable. When those dangers are past, America can air linen that was dirtied years ago, not smack in the middle of what is very much a shooting war.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: On Fighting Terrorism Here, There, or Everywhere

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9-11, Afghanistan, allies, border security, Cold War, deterrence, energy, geopolitics, Iraq, ISIS, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Syria, terrorism

As the Washington Post‘s Michael Gerson and his fellow pundits have no doubt learned, they’ve got the greatest jobs in the world. They can write the most vapidly unoriginal – and indeed downright foolish – columns and still not only get handsomely paid, but serve the socially useful purpose of pithily summarizing the conventional wisdom of the (FILL IN DESIRED TIME PERIOD).

That’s why the former George W. Bush speechwriter’s September 8 article is so important, especially in the run up to President Obama’s scheduled speech tonight on defeating (I assume) the threat of ISIS terrorists. Gerson’s contribution? Reminding readers that whatever military measures the president decides on, they will be totally consistent with the principle that has shaped American foreign policy since Pearl Harbor: “We fight ’em there, so we don’t face ’em here.”

Gerson no doubt views the merits of this approach as glaringly obvious – as does the rest of the thoroughly bipartisan American foreign policy establishment. And the nation’s experience over the last seven decades, along with simple common sense, does seem to vindicate the wisdom of engaging America’s enemies far from U.S soil rather than on it. Strangely, however, the real lessons of U.S. foreign policy during and after the Cold War are much more complicated.

For example, escalating the Vietnam War was universally justified with the Domino Theory, which also held that if we didn’t fight ‘em there, we’d face ‘em here. Nowadays, almost everyone realizes that the Vietnamese communists were never interested in coming here.

The story of U.S. alliances, especially NATO, shows how the “fight ‘em there” rationale could boomerang disastrously, at least in theory. American NATO strategy during the Cold War was to indeed fight the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies in Europe, to prevent them from launching an attack on the United States – at some point. But there was always a big problem: The European allies were never keen on having their homelands devastated in yet another massive conventional military conflict. They greatly preferred that a war literally be fought over their heads – by the United States and Soviet Union lobbing intercontinental nuclear missiles at each other.

As a result, however, the allies also continually reminded Washington that a way was needed to deter a Soviet attack in the first place by convincing Moscow that the United States really would sacrifice New York to save Paris. The solution U.S. leaders came up with was creating a tripwire – whose setting off would automatically bring Armageddon. The “device” chosen was the stationing not only of several U.S. troops, but their families, in harm’s way.

The plan made the most sense when the United States held clearcut nuclear superiority over the Soviets – even though Washington never told the public that alliance policy was based on denying America any choice in the matter of waging all-out nuclear war (i.e., of “facing ‘em here”). When this nuclear superiority was lost, the plan made a lot less sense from the American standpoint, and the United States and NATO’s European members spent literally decades trying to square the deterrence/warfighting circle.

And even though the Cold War is long over, the United States has been maintaining the same kind of tripwire in South Korea – greatly increasing the odds that American territory will feel the effects of “fighting ‘em there” despite the complete absence of any other threat from Pyongyang to the United States itself.

The successful campaign fought after 9-11 by the United States to oust the Taliban from power in Afghanistan seems a classic example of the need to “fight ‘em there” to prevent them from coming here in the form of a new terror strike. Deprived of its Afghan sanctuary and hounded by American and allied forces, Al Qaeda has lost for the time being its ability to mount anything like this operation. Even though U.S. efforts to nation-build in Afghanistan predictably flopped, the rout of the Taliban, and its successful harassment campaign so far, constitute a major military victory.

But the (continuing) need for combat operations in Afghanistan also makes clear that the “fight ‘em there” — and everywhere they might pop up — strategy suffers from major shortcomings. And its flaws become all the more important upon recognizing that, although the U.S. foreign policy establishment seems completely clueless on this point, the nation has vastly superior alternatives, at least in principle.

For “fighting ‘em there” is a strategy that depends on much over which the U.S. government has little control, and cannot hope to have significantly greater control: for starters, public opinion in a region that is deeply hostile to America and the West, as well as economically and socially backward; the byzantine and typically cutthroat domestic politics of prospective regional allies; their equally byzantine and cutthroat external rivalries. And let’s not forget that the Middle East is halfway around the world from the American homeland. Ditto for whatever other failed states might generate or host a large-scale terrorist threat.

Geography in particular is telling American leaders that a much better strategy would focus on variables over which Washington unmistakably has much greater control: for example, the security of its own borders, which could and should be tightened substantially to deny terrorists access. In other words, whatever successes these forces achieve “there” would matter much less to Americans if they’re simply not able to come “here.” If we’re worried about extremists gaining more control over Middle East oil supplies – as we should be – our own energy policy should be much easier to control that waging war thousands of miles from our shores. And if we fear that these challenges are still too difficult to meet in the near future, we should become that much more determined to start rising to them ASAP.

In the meantime, some form of military response to ISIS is essential. (I presented a brief description on Monday.) But over the longer-term, American leaders need to realize that “degree of control” matters at least as much for Middle East success as “fighting ‘em there” — and everywhere. I strongly doubt that President Obama will even mention this point in passing tonight. Therefore, I strongly doubt that he’ll be able to avoid plunging the nation into another Middle East quagmire.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Obama’s Dangerous Strategic Confusion on Iraq

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9-11, Hagel, international law, Iraq, ISIS, national interests, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, terrorism

The disconnect just keeps getting bigger and bigger between the President Obama’s view of the U.S. interests endangered by in ISIS extremists’ startling military advances in Iraq, and his proposed response.

Thus at a press conference yesterday in Australia, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel – whose record on Iraq-related matters is anything but hawkish – told reporters that “the barbaric ideology that these extremists embrace is…a threat to our way of life.” Later that day, back in San Diego, he called ISIS “a force and a dimension that the world has never seen before like we have seen it now.” And yet he also reminded his military audience that “As the president has made very clear, we’re not going back into Iraq in any of the same combat mission dimensions that we once were in, in Iraq. Very specifically, this is not a combat boots-on-the-ground operation.”

Nonetheless, the President urgently needs to do a much better job explaining the ISIS threat. In particular, he has to specify that the jihadists’ creation of the caliphate they keep talking about would confront the United States with a new, and possibly more violent, version of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and the Al Qaeda base if provided. It’s not like 9-11 happened so long ago, or that most Americans who lived through it have forgotten.

Instead, the administration’s portrayal of ISIS sounds a lot like its confusing portrayal of Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in that county’s civil war – a development supposedly dangerous mainly because it violated international law, and would weaken current curbs on acquiring and using these and other weapons of mass destruction.

It’s true that Mr. Obama added in his climactic White House speech last September 10, “As the ban against these weapons erodes, other tyrants will have no reason to think twice about acquiring poison gas, and using them. Over time, our troops would again face the prospect of chemical warfare on the battlefield. And it could be easier for terrorist organizations to obtain these weapons, and to use them to attack civilians. “ But critics rightly noted that those terrible cats were essentially out of the bag already, and that punishing Syria was unlikely to deter other rogue states – much less non-state terrorists.

The President’s failure to convince Congress or the public that America needed to strike Assad was surely undermined by the gauzy, muddled conception of national interests he tried to sell. Luckily this failure proved to be tolerable – not fundamentally because of the agreement eventually reached that seems to have stripped Syria of at least most of its chemical arsenal, but because, as Mr. Obama had admitted scant days before, “Assad’s use of chemical weapons on innocent civilians and women and children posed [no] imminent, direct threat to the United States.”

An ISIS state might not threaten American security imminently. But history teaches that a direct threat is likely to emerge. If and when it does, the President’s undisciplined thinking about national interests will have exacted a fearsome – but entirely avoidable – price.