The decision not to respond militarily in Syria
However, despite British intelligence assessments that chemical weapons had been used in the incident on August 21 and that it was “highly likely” that the Assad regime had been responsible, on August 29 Parliament voted against endorsing Cameron’s call for military intervention in principle. The next day, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that the United States had “high certainty” that chemical weapons had been used and that government forces had carried out the attack. After indicating that U.S. military response would be forthcoming, even without British involvement, Obama shifted gears on August 31 and asked for congressional authorization for military action while awaiting the findings of UN weapons inspectors who had returned from Damascus after examining the site of the attack. Released on September 16, their report indicated that there was “clear and convincing evidence” that the nerve agent sarin had been delivered by surface-to-surface rockets; however, it did not attempt to assess responsibility for the attack. Two days earlier the United States and Russia, a key supporter of the Assad regime, had brokered an agreement on a framework under which Syria would accede to the international Chemical Weapons Convention and submit to the controls of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, provide a comprehensive listing of its chemical weapons arsenal within a week, destroy all of its chemical mixing and filling equipment by November, and eliminate all of its chemical weapons by mid-2014.
The 2013 government shutdown
After an October 1 deadline passed with the House and Senate failing to agree on a continuing resolution bill for the federal budget, the federal government partially shut down for the first time in 17 years, furloughing several hundred thousand federal employees and closing numerous government offices as well as national parks and other public lands. For weeks, most congressional Republicans, led by those associated with the Tea Party movement, had sought to include in the continuing resolution a one-year delay in funding of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA; referred to by both parties as Obamacare), many of the provisions of which took effect on October 1. At the final hour the House Republican majority continued to refuse to rescind that requirement, while the Senate Democratic majority was steadfast in its rejection of it, forcing the government shutdown. On October 16—with political brinkmanship again having brought the government to the limit of the national debt ceiling and with the United States facing the possibility of a default that some feared might spark a global economic crisis—moderate Republicans voted with Democrats in both houses of Congress to pass a bill that fully reopened the government by funding it through January 15, 2014, extended national borrowing until February 7, and set up a committee tasked with arriving at longer-term budgetary solutions. The only change to Obamacare contained in the bill was a minor alteration to the procedures for verifying incomes for some people obtaining subsidized insurance.
The Obamacare rollout
The government shutdown temporarily diverted attention from an early October rollout of Obamacare that went badly awry. HealthCare.gov—the Web site that was established as a clearinghouse of information, a marketplace for insurance plans, and the place to apply for health coverage for those in 36 states—initially performed miserably. During its first weeks it operated slowly, erratically, or simply crashed, and far fewer users were able to access the site, much less apply for insurance, than had been hoped. In late October the Obama administration ordered a “tech surge” to address those problems, but progress in overcoming the glitches was slow, providing Republicans, who had borne the brunt of public dissatisfaction with the government shutdown, the opportunity to lambast the Web site in particular as well as Obamacare and the Obama administration in general. As HealthCare.gov’s performance improved, Obama went on the offensive, encouraging Americans to sign up for coverage and seeking to bolster his plummeting approval ratings. At the beginning of April 2014, after the end of the first open enrollment period, he would be able to announce that 7.1 million Americans had signed up for private insurance plans through the marketplace, meeting the administration’s target.
HealthCare.govA screenshot of the federally run HealthCare.gov site as it appeared on November 29, 2013.Jon Elswick/AP Images
The Iran nuclear deal, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, and the Ukraine crisis
The world’s focus shifted in November 2013 to Geneva, where the United States, the other permanent members of the UN Security Council (Britain, France, China, and Russia), and Germany (collectively referred to as the P5+1) entered into an interim agreement with Iran that placed restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities for six months in exchange for a temporary reduction in the sanctions that had been imposed upon Iran by the international community. Meanwhile, negotiators worked toward a comprehensive final agreement.
Before the end of 2013, the House (by a vote of 332–94) and the Senate (64–36) passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, based on a compromise forged by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, the chairpersons of the House and Senate Budget Committees, respectively. The act replaced the bulk of the automatic spending cuts required by sequestration with targeted cuts, and it raised discretionary spending (split equally between military and nonmilitary funding). The resulting budget was intended to last through fiscal year 2014 and forestall another battle in January 2014, when the temporary budget agreement forged in October was due to expire (provided that the details of the budget could be worked out before then). A number of conservative congressional Republicans opposed the spending increases and called for the sequester-level cuts to remain in place, while many Democrats were disappointed because the act did not extend long-term unemployment benefits.
Among the foreign policy challenges faced by the United States in 2014 was how to respond to the upheaval in Ukraine that eventually resulted in the self-declared independence of the autonomous republic of Crimea, which was then annexed by Russia. The United States was one of many countries that condemned the involvement of Russia and Russian troops in the events in Crimea, and the United States also imposed sanctions on prominent individual Russians while joining the other members of the Group of Eight in suspending Russia from that organization.
The rise of ISIL (ISIS), the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap, and imposition of stricter carbon emission standards
In the summer of 2014, nearly three years after the last U.S. troops had left Iraq, events in that country prompted renewed U.S. intervention. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS])—an entity formed by al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Syrian Nusrah Front in April 2013—led a spreading uprising by Sunni militants that had begun taking control of Iraqi cities in January 2014. When the threat to the controversial regime of Prime Minister Nūrī al-Mālikī became dire in mid-June 2014, after ISIL fighters seized the northern city of Mosul (the second largest city in Iraq) and then Tikrīt (only about 100 miles [160 km] north of Baghdad), the United States took action. Obama—who was blamed for the uprising by some critics who claimed that he had removed U.S. forces too soon—sent some 300 U.S. Special Operations soldiers to Iraq as advisers, despite his desire not to return troops there.