Barack Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy

The Limits of Engagement

Robert Singh

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781780930374
• eBook ISBN: 9781780931135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. After one of the most controversial and divisive periods in the history of American foreign policy under President George W. Bush, the Obama administration was expected to make changes for the better in US relations with the wider world. Now, international problems confronting Obama appear more intractable, and there seems to be a marked continuity in policies between Obama and his predecessor. Robert Singh argues that Obama's approach of 'strategic engagement' was appropriate for a new era of constrained internationalism, but it has yielded modest results. Obama's search for the pragmatic middle has cost him political support at home and abroad, whilst failing to make decisive gains. Singh suggests by calibrating his foreign policies to the emergence of a 'post-American'world, the president has yet to preside over a renaissance of US global leadership. Ironically, Obama's policies have instead hastened the arrival of a post-American world.

1

A Post-American Foreign Policy for the Post-American World

The day I take the oath of office, the world will look at
us differently.
—US Senator Barack Obama, 2006¹

If there’s just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with
a brandy, that’s an easier negotiation. But that’s not the
world we live in.
—President Barack Obama, 2009²

Whether intellect is the crucial attribute for a leader; whether less
cerebral traits, such as courage or honesty or diligence, are more
important; and whether brains can get in the way of these – these
are ancient arguments all republics face. Richard Nixon had the
best raw intellect of any president since Woodrow Wilson and
look where it got him. The former editor of the Harvard
Law Review who sits in the White House shows signs of
being in over his head.
—Christopher Caldwell³

If he goes down in history as a poor leader, it will be a sad outcome
for a man deemed to be a transformational figure at the start.
Obama began his presidency intending to set the agenda and so
much more. He was, by definition, a historic president – the first
African-American, vanquisher of a hapless and aging opponent.
Some saw him as the next FDR, and he seemed to buy into his
own press when he promoted ambitious plans to stimulate the
economy and remake health care. Now we’re left to contemplate
one of the enduring mysteries of this presidency: how a man who
came from nowhere in 2008 to dominate the national agenda –
much as Reagan did – lost control of it so completely once he
entered the Oval Office.
—Michael Hirsh, “The Decider?”⁴

Introduction

Four years after a momentous victory in the 2008 presidential election that was celebrated around the world, Barack Obama’s foreign policy excites little of the passionate intensity or global animosity of his controversial and polarizing predecessor, George W. Bush. Instead, as President Obama seeks a second term in the White House in 2012, domestic matters dominate the American public’s evaluation of his stewardship of the United States. Popular attentions remain resolutely focused on the Great Recession and the multiple manifestations of a seemingly precipitous national decline since the financial crash of 2008: a fragile and faltering economy, a projected budget deficit for 2011–12 of $1,580 billion, a $14.6 trillion (and increasing) sovereign national debt, a downgraded national credit rating, and a myriad of disconcerting domestic discontents from a stubbornly persistent 9 percent unemployment rate (and near 20 percent “underemployment”⁵) to home foreclosures, mortgages in negative equity and 46.2 million Americans – one in six – with incomes below the official poverty line.⁶

Since President Obama took office in January 2009, the US unemployment rate has risen from 7.6 percent to 9.1 percent (by August 2011), the number of people out of work has grown from 11.6 million to 14 million, the national debt has soared from $10.6 trillion to $14.6 trillion, and the number of Americans without health insurance has increased to 49.9 million.⁷ Amid such a plethora of dismal economic indicators, both a double-dip recession and a “new normal” of high unemployment, falling incomes and long-term economic stagnation appeared a real and disturbing possibility for a United States unaccustomed to economic dystopia – the rudest of awakenings from the American Dream. So much, apparently, for the once potent promise of “Obamanonics” to spread the wealth and replace trickle-down economics with “bottom-up economic prosperity.”⁸

Over the same time-frame, the president’s job approval ratings have fallen precipitously, from 65 percent after his first 100 days in office to an all-time low of 40 percent in opinion polls taken during the autumn of 2011.⁹ By then, no less than 43 percent of Americans strongly disapproved of the role Obama was performing as president,¹⁰ 62 percent disapproving of his handling of the economy¹¹ and 77 percent thinking that things generally in the US were moving in the wrong direction under his leadership.¹² Obama still has good reason for confidence that he can yet, Lazarus-like, triumph over his Republican Party opponent in 2012 despite such ominous economic indicators. But no US president with unemployment above 7.2 percent and job approval ratings as low as 40 percent has been re-elected since World War Two. What was once inconceivable a few short years previously is now eminently conceivable: Barack Obama as a one-term American president, his presidency assessed not as an historically “great” or “near-great” transformative one but instead an ignominious and ineffective failure. Obama appears to be teetering on the precipice of an early retirement – denied his preference to be a great one-term president, rather than a mediocre two-term one; with a mediocre (or worse) one-term presidency becoming his premature political obituary.¹³

With the economy front and center for Americans, international affairs appear to be forcefully eclipsed as a major presidential election concern for 2012. Although an international crisis, war or “October Surprise” could yet re-focus voter attentions on foreign affairs, this seems improbable, given the breadth and depth of America’s economic malaise. Still, to the extent that they impinge positively on his re-election ambitions – even at the margins – Obama’s central foreign policy achievements strongly underscore his claims to have been a successful Commander-in-Chief: the killing of al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden; the final withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq; the overthrow of Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi without a single American casualty; the beginning of the end of the protracted campaign against al Qaeda in Afghanistan – America’s longest war; and the emphatic restoration of American prestige and respect around the world. After being handed a metaphorical shovel rather than a magic wand to dig America out of its various deep global holes in January 2009, Obama can seek re-election on the basis of having set out carefully defined international commitments that he mostly delivered – and having clearly passed what his one-time opponent, Hillary Clinton, famously dubbed the “3am test” of successful crisis management.

But, to survey the voluminous outpourings of US foreign policy observers over Obama’s leadership since 2009, one could be forgiven for believing that Obama’s foreign policy remains less a methodical, prudent and effective grand strategy for America than an on-going, ad hoc and tentative work in uncertain progress – not so much the audacity as the opacity of hope. In the commentariat sweepstakes to identify an “Obama Doctrine” to replace and repudiate that of his Republican predecessor – the much-dissected, misunderstood and mis-underestimated “Bush Doctrine” – no analyst has yet succeeded in attributing a definitive worldview to America’s forty-fourth president. While some on the American right continue to bitterly excoriate Obama as at best a weak, naive and feckless Commander-in-Chief, others on the left appear to exhibit a disheartened “buyer’s remorse” about a president whose once great appeal to enlist hope in order to effect transformative change (“yes we can”) instead seems to have foundered on the rocks of international resistance or – even worse – to have been cynically abandoned for the sake of short-term domestic electoral politics. After all, who now – beyond his immediate family and the president’s more light-headed partisan supporters – continues to herald Obama’s arrival in the White House as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”?¹⁴

In relation to foreign affairs, the central question this book seeks to answer is whether such widespread expectations of transformation proved correct, and why. To address this core question, three subsidiary themes are explored in the chapters that follow:

i. What was/is Barack Obama’s view of America’s appropriate role and influence in the world?

ii. To what extent has the president successfully implemented this strategic vision and, thereby, departed from the foreign policies of his immediate predecessor (and perhaps prior US presidents as well)?

iii. How effective has Obama been in terms of securing the ultimate policy results that his strategy sought to achieve, and what best explains this?

The book’s core argument is that the widespread expectations of transformative change associated with Obama’s election have not been realized – despite the administration’s best efforts to do so.

As the following pages contend, the divisions and dissensus about Obama that have marked his meteoric rise from community organizing in Chicago’s South Side through the Illinois state legislature to the US Senate and the Oval Office are part and parcel of his unique historic achievement, distinctive personal character and particular political time as US president. Yet, arguably, although observers may differ sharply on the details, a reasonably clear framework to Obama’s approach to international affairs is identifiable.

Obama’s foreign policy can best be understood as adhering strongly to a “post-American” conception of world order – one in which American primacy is steadily but inexorably ebbing, with the US president’s task being not to stem and reverse, but rather to gracefully manage, that obvious and inevitable decline. Contrary to those American conservatives who – inaccurately and sometimes irresponsibly – depict Obama as a dangerous, unpatriotic and even un-American radical, Obama’s belief in a post-American approach stems not from some Third Worldist, socialist, or anti-colonial identity. Rather, it emerges from a careful and judicious – though not necessarily correct¹⁵ – assessment of America’s commitments, resources and limits in an increasingly interdependent, networked and globalized international order.

In essence, Obama shares the influential analysis offered by Fareed Zakaria: that after the two major power shifts of the past 500 years – the rise of the West from the fifteenth century and the United States from the end of the nineteenth century – the “rise of the rest” represents the third great epochal change in the global distribution of power. The onset of once unimaginable economic growth, centered on but not confined to Asia, has given birth to a truly global order in which countries on every continent are now influential players in the international system, not just passive observers or objects. Combined with the diffusion of power from states to other, non-state actors, a new and multi-layered international system is emerging that is quite unlike those of prior centuries. In such a system, while the US still remains for the time being the sole superpower, the distribution of global power – industrial, financial, educational, social, cultural – is steadily shifting away from American dominance into a post-, if not necessarily an anti-, American world; one “defined and directed from many places and by many people”:

Functions that were once controlled by governments are now shared with international bodies like the World Trade Organization and the European Union. Non-governmental groups are mushrooming every day on every issue in every country. Corporations and capital are moving from place to place, finding the best location in which to do business, rewarding some governments while punishing others. Terrorists like al Qaeda, drug cartels, insurgents, and militias of all kinds are finding space to operate within the nooks and crannies of the international system. Power is shifting away from nation-states, up, down, and sideways. In such an atmosphere, the traditional applications of national power, both economic and military, have become less effective.¹⁶

With the world inexorably returning to something akin to its condition at the end of the nineteenth century, where no single country or economy is predominant, how should the United States respond to this disconcerting new order and the rise of the rest? While it would be politically suicidal publicly to declare a foreign policy of American renewal premised on a core assumption of “managed decline,” as both presidential candidate and as president, Obama has sought consistently to alert Americans to the realities of a changing world order – while at the same time sustaining the notion that America can nonetheless maintain its leading position in that order. From his 2011 State of the Union speech declaring that, “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,”¹⁷ to his address to a joint session of Congress on September 8, 2011 – “Building a world-class transportation system is part of what made us an economic superpower. And now we’re going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads? At a time when millions of unemployed construction workers could build them right here in America?”¹⁸ – Obama has held America up to unflattering international comparisons in order to proclaim the continuing imperative of change.

While they may not represent irreconcilable impulses, squaring the circle of preserving Washington’s primacy in a post-American era – adapting to an international order in transition while renewing America’s leading role within that order – has been the abiding predicament of Obama’s foreign policy since January 2009. The watchwords of America’s emerging role and place within this shifting order – retrenchment, lowered ambitions, restraint, balance, prudence, patience – at once reflect and reinforce Obama’s post-American approach. Rather than merely reconfiguring the deckchairs, as “captain of a shrinking ship,” the president has instead attempted to perfect “the art of declining politely” in order to navigate the American ship of state into less turbulent waters and narrower straits.¹⁹

But however reasonable the Obama diagnosis of a changing international order, the prescriptive elements informing his foreign and national security policies have proved highly problematic in achieving the ambitious goals that the president has set out to accomplish. Central to Obama’s approach to international affairs have been two particular tensions that the president has thus far been unable fully to resolve. The result has been that, much as his domestic presidency has encountered intense opposition and obstruction, so profound limits have circumscribed the Obama administration’s ability genuinely to exert effective, meaningful or sustained international leadership: strategically, to set a global agenda; and tactically, to persuade, cajole and coerce other actors into implementing that agenda.

The first tension, as Stanley Renshon anticipated, is between the international problems and foreign and national security policies that Obama inherited, on the one hand, and, on the other, the key premises of the president’s own worldview – a tension that ultimately cannot endure if Obama is fully (or even substantially) to succeed on the world stage.²⁰ On the one hand, while repeating the standard liberal internationalist mantra about shared interests, mutual respect and common humanity that have characterized mainstream Democrats for at least three decades, Obama has adopted not so much a quintessentially realist statecraft (in the international relatio...

Table of contents

• Barack Obama’s Post-American Foreign Policy
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 A Post-American Foreign Policy for the Post-American World
• 2 The “Human Ink-Blot”: Obama, Foreign Policy and the 2008 Election
• 3 The Obama Doctrine: “Leading From Behind”
• 4 Afghanistan, Pakistan and the War on Terror
• 5 Iran
• 6 Israel, Palestine and the Arab Spring
• 7 China
• 8 Russia
• 9 Keep the Change: Continuity We Can Believe In
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index