In 2008 and today there are wheeling-and-dealing capitalists and nationalists running the Kremlin and China’s National People’s Congress instead of Communist ideologues. They do not represent the existential threats faced by Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Reagan. And yet Obama is still reluctant to confront the enemies of democracy to defend the values he touts so convincingly in his speeches. The Cold War ended and democracy became the global standard not because Western leaders merely defended their values but because they projected them aggressively.
On September 11, 1858, another Illinois politician soon to run for president, Abraham Lincoln, said, “Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere.” Not where it’s convenient. Not in countries lacking large energy reserves and nuclear weapons. Everywhere.
Obama’s biggest applause in Berlin came when he suggested that the unilateralism and military adventurism of the Bush 43 era would come to an end under his presidency. By that point in the campaign no one doubted Obama could deliver a great speech. But the reactions of the Berlin audience, and the US electorate, made it clear it was as much an anti-Bush rally as anything else. In 2008, Americans and the rest of the world were exhausted after two long military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq; campaigns without clear goals or visible finish lines.
To be fair, Obama was representing his constituents. Even the firmest supporters of the Bush 43 freedom agenda understood that their cause was severely damaged by the extraordinary cost and duration of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the never-ending nation building and security operations that followed. America’s human and financial capital had been spent, but even more importantly, so had its political capital.
The deepening catastrophe in Iraq distracted the world’s sole superpower from its wider goals and weakened the United States politically as well as militarily. With US congressional leadership threatening to make the same mistake by failing to see Iraq as only one piece of the puzzle, it was time to return to the basics of strategic planning.
Thirty years as a chess player ingrained in me the importance of never losing sight of the big picture. Paying too much attention to one area of the chessboard can quickly lead to the collapse of your entire position. America and its allies were so focused on Iraq that they were ceding territory all over the map. North Korea got nukes, an arms race erupted in Latin America, and the petro-dictatorships of Russia, Venezuela, and Iran were riding high on the surging price of oil. By 2006, even the vague goals of President Bush’s ambiguous war on terror had been pushed aside by the crisis in Baghdad.
It was time to recognize the failure of America’s post-9/11 foreign policy. Preemptive strikes and deposing dictators may or may not have been a good plan, but at least it was a plan. If you attack Iraq, the potential to go after Iran and Syria must also be on the table. Inconsistency is a strategic deficiency that is nearly always impossible to overcome. The United States found itself supervising a civil war while helplessly making concessions elsewhere. This dire situation was a result of the only thing worse than a failed strategy: the inability to recognize, or to admit to yourself, that a strategy has failed.
Within four years after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon. Iran was openly boasting of its uranium enrichment program while pouring money into Hezbollah and Hamas. A resurgent Taliban was on the rise in Afghanistan. Nearly off the radar, Somalia was becoming an al-Qaeda haven. Worst of all, America was failing at its basic mission, the mission at the root of all these engagements: to make its people safer than they were before.
As is often the case, the seeds for this widespread catastrophe were sown in the one real success the West had. The attack on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan had succeeded so well in its original goal of routing al-Qaeda and its Taliban sponsors that the United States and its allies failed to understand all the reasons why. Almost every player on the world stage benefited from the attack on Afghanistan. The rout of the Sunni Taliban delighted Iran. Russia and China had no love for religious extremism near their borders. India was happy to see the US launch a direct attack on Muslim terrorists.
Only Pakistan was put under uncomfortable pressure, although even there President Musharraf was able to play both sides well enough to appear to be an essential ally to the West while terrorists and arms crossed his borders freely. Musharraf perfected the formula of holding himself up as the last defense against the extremists in order to gain immunity for his dictatorship, a ploy used by many Arab autocrats as well.
Not only was there a confluence of world opinion aided by sympathy for the United States after 9/11, but the proverbial bad guys were undoubtedly bad, and we knew where they were. As subsequent events showed, effectively bombing terrorists is a rare opportunity.
The allies fell victim to what I call the gravity of past success. Learning from our defeats is obvious, but too often we fail to appreciate the reasons for our successes; we take them for granted. The US charged into Iraq without appreciating the far greater difficulty of the postwar task there and how it would be complicated by the increasingly hostile global opinion of America’s military adventures. What would have been relatively easy in 1991-1992 was much harder twelve years later without united global support.
This is the lesson of the initiative. The saying in chess is that if the side that has the initiative—the attacking momentum in the position-fails to use it, then the other side’s counterattack is inevitable and will be very strong. The free world had overwhelming momentum after the fall of the USSR in every conceivable way, especially psychologically. Had the freedom promotion agenda of George W. Bush existed from 1992 to 1999, when the bad guys were already in disarray, it would have had a tremendous positive effect.
By 2008, Obama’s promises to bring the troops home, and keep them home, was only telling the American people (a majority of them, anyway) what they wanted to hear. This of course is a small part of a politician’s job description, but these days it is actually the only relevant part of a candidate’s job description.
There is no doubt the election of Barack Obama as the new president of the United States had a real impact on how many in the rest of the world perceived America. Obama represented a new generation of leadership and he both sounded and looked very different from his predecessors.
In Russia, Obama’s appearance—he became the first black leader of any world power, not just America—got the most attention. His victory marked the end of the view of America still promoted by many in Russia, a line used in the Soviets’ patented what-aboutism to counter accusations of repression. “Ah, but in the US they lynch Negros!” It is practically conventional wisdom, and not just in Russia, that “in America the rich WASPs and Jews exploit the poor Blacks and Latinos.” Suddenly it was as if everyone could see that the world was undeniably round.
The window of opportunity Obama had to take advantage of the world’s curiosity and goodwill was very small. The crises we faced in 2008 were too big to give the new president much of a grace period.
Obama’s other advantage was simply not being George W. Bush who, rightly in some cases and wrongly in others, had come to symbolize every problem anyone had ever had with America, Americans, and American power in the world. The clichés about Bush personally were a bouquet of American stereotypes, the ones much of the world loved to hate: rich, inarticulate, uninterested in the world, stridently religious, and hasty to act. Obama exploded these stereotypes, but as I wrote the day after his victory over McCain, “The world’s multitude of grievances with Bush will quickly be laid on Obama’s doorstep if he fails to back up his inspiring rhetoric with decisive action.”