Obama, US Foreign Policy and the Dilemmas of Intervention

D. Fitzgerald, D. Ryan

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137428561
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This timely study analyses the ways in which competing ideologies and cultural narratives have influenced the Obama administration's decision-making on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, situating these decisions within the broader history of American foreign policy.

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Good, Safe, Strong: Obama and the Impossible Reconciliation

Abstract: The cultural narratives that have animated US foreign policy coalesce around a constellation of the US desire to feel safe, to feel good, and to feel strong. The conflation of the discourses on national security, liberal democratic internationalism, and a powerful desire to lead has frequently vitiated US foreign policy. Using the metaphor of landscape the chapter distinguishes between the US view of the world which frequently constructs an impressionistic depiction of the issues that they ‘look at’. The frame of reference locates US policy within the ‘lessons’ of Vietnam, intervention since, and comfortable paradigms written in the United States. Constrained by domestic desires and agendas, the United States does not always ‘see’ issues clearly.

Keywords: benevolence; economy; history; intervention; landscape; lessons; liberalism; military strength, Obama; realism; security; strategy

Fitzgerald, David and David Ryan. Obama, US Foreign Policy and the Dilemmas of Intervention. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137428561.0003.

Narratives on US benevolence and exception are well known – Americans, whether they admit it or not, want to feel good, safe, and strong. These deep-seated desires have coalesced into a benign metanarrative underpinning US national identity and in turn, constructing a nation.¹ Carefully crafted within US culture, this narrative is near silent on the conquest, displacement, death, and destruction that accompanied the US path to power.² So much that Barack Obama, on the night of his 2008 electoral victory, claimed that the greatest strength of the United States is ‘the enduring power of our ideals’. Yet even for Obama, growing inequality at home and misguided adventures abroad had seriously compromised these ideals. His belief in US rejuvenation was rooted in his understanding of US complexity and his conviction that solutions would be found in debate and deliberation, in ‘open-ended experimentation’ rather than a reverence for the ideals as static symbols.³

Despite this, Obama operates within a cultural milieu that frequently renders these ideals as unchanging, uncontested, and unproblematic, with policymakers and cultural commentators linking narratives of US exceptionalism with American military might during the twentieth century. Whether it was Wilson’s desire to make the word safe for democracy, Roosevelt’s arsenal for democracy, Kennedy’s pledge to pay any price for the support of liberty, or Reagan’s revived ‘city on the hill’, the narratives reverberate through cultural performance. Americans like to feel good.

They also like to feel safe. As shown by the central place of security – both as a concept and as a symbol – within US rhetoric during and after the Cold War. This discourse is rooted in George Kennan’s 1946 proposals on how to manage the threat posed by an expansive Soviet Union. In doing so, his ‘Long Telegram’ created the framework for US involvement in the Cold War – containment – although its author would ultimately regret the idea. But in 1946 and 1947 it seemed to both explain Soviet actions while providing the United States with a way to portray, if not understand its enemy. His words were grafted to other ideas and transformed into a much simpler concept associated with the Truman Doctrine, Truman’s articulation of two ways of life in the world and the demand that peoples and nations make a choice. The discourse of containment became a trap; it provided a frame from which policy makers lacked the imagination or the political and cultural power to extract themselves from it. By 1966, Senator J. William Fulbright invited Kennan to provide testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in which Kennan observed that containment was not designed for Asia; he intended something much more particular, predicated on a place: Europe. As authors and protagonists cast around to attribute blame for the failures of the Vietnam War, Leslie Gelb and Raymond Betts argued in the Irony of Vietnam that the system worked. Given all that they had learned through the framework of containment and the associated Cold War outlook why would policy makers choose to act differently at the outset of the Vietnam War? The key lesson for Betts and others was that the United States should spurn doctrine and frameworks; but the casualties of Vietnam were a high price to pay to arrive at that conclusion.

Still, the pragmatism and realism associated with subsequent administrations provided no signposts for US foreign policy; they lacked purpose, direction. Realism was not attractive to American audiences; it seemed to spurn the values, which they liked to associate with US power, such as democracy and liberty, over and above the national interest. After Carter’s hesitancy, Reagan could convincingly ride his horse into the sunset – here was the trail, the direction, the movement west, the destiny that was manifest. His simple narrative on the Soviet Union and the ‘evil empire’ and his promise to confine it to the ‘ash heap of history’ resonated with audiences that sought bearing. Here was a narrative that seemed to call forth a process of Soviet collapse that had, in fact, begun sometime before, notwithstanding Gorbachev’s attempts at resuscitation. 9/11 reinforced and extended the security paradigm, albeit in different form. The Bush administration considered a response, particularly in Afghanistan, mandatory. Americans liked to feel safe.

The economic foundation, the military strength and the credibility of US power have been increasingly questioned since the end of the Vietnam Wars, despite victory in the Cold War, despite overwhelming victory in the Gulf War and the search for ‘strategic depth’ in the ‘unipolar moment’ that followed. The endurance of American strength is a constant reference point in presidential rhetoric. American strength, resolve, commitment, and capability have also been the frequent subject of internal memoranda and minutes in the White House and Congress; the need to demonstrate US power or to symbolically assert it, engage in military build-up, or maintain a robust defense expenditure and its use of force have been frequently evident. That the Bush administration chose war in Iraq in 2003 was in part motivated by the demonstration effect it might have.⁴ He knew Americans liked to feel strong; in 2003 they supported his decision.

Even in 2014, Obama asserted that the United States remained strong; it had ‘rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world’. It was not in decline, its leadership had not slipped away. The odds of a direct threat to the United States were low, nothing compared to the Cold War, he argued. He pointed out that when a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in the Ukraine, the world, he rightly observed, looks to America. He did not mention the obvious: that the world also looked in his direction on Syria.⁵ His speech predated by days the brutal advances made by ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [sometimes Levant]) in Iraq in June 2014. Of course a US response was on the cards. And immediately, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Obama’s director for policy planning at the State Department between 2009 and 2011, questioned why he would respond to ISIS in Iraq, but continue to reject the use of force in Syria.⁶

Over recent decades, US military intervention has been tempered by an inability to calibrate US force to the environment and conditions in which it operates. The wars of the recent decades have seen some success among a number of failures; few question the awesome might of US force; the failures often result from responses that are inappropriate to the situation – responses that begin with narratives and expectations generated within Washington, DC and the ‘beltway’. Even Obama applied the concept of the ‘surge’ to Afghanistan based on the lessons and narratives of success generated from Iraq in 2007. The intellectual reference points here were very much centered on US politics and expectations rather than a deep reading of the situation in Afghanistan and their considerable differences from Iraq. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Eric Edelman, cautioned against attempts at replication of the surge in Afghanistan. The countries, terrain, people, politics, and state (or lack of it) were very different; he acknowledged there were lessons from Iraq, but added: ‘I would really counsel against sort of a one-size-fits-all [solution].’⁷ US politics pushed the appeal of the surge as a likely success – it had been done before; it worked.

Despite World War II and the ‘good war’ storyline, military intervention has also undermined narratives of US benevolence. The United States was severely criticized on the conduct of the Vietnam War – a war that has evaded trials or Truth Commissions. There was vocal support for the Sandinistas from governments throughout Latin America, Europe, and Asia, their revolution attracted support from ‘brigidistas’ or ‘sandalistas’ from around the world. Obama himself was drawn to the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, which opposed US intervention in Central America.⁸ Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Fallujah, and Marja remain as negative symbols of the consequences of the use of military power.⁹ Interventions in these areas have not necessarily enhanced US security. Obama clearly understood the attractions of war in US politics: ‘tough talk often draws headlines, but war rarely conforms to slogans’, he told his West Point audience in 2014. He cited Eisenhower from 1947 to the effect that ‘War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men’. He acknowledged that some of the most costly mistakes since World War II, came ‘not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures’ without thought for...