President Obama’s closing remarks at the Countering Violent Extremism Summit Thursday perfectly captured his awkward balancing act when it comes to talking about Islamic terrorist groups and his policies aimed at stopping their deadly goals.
While Obama studiously avoided words like “Islamic” and “Muslim,” he made no bones about the need to confront the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, mentioning the terrorist group nine times.
In the end, the summit was more symbolism than substance, say foreign policy experts across the political spectrum.
It gave Obama the opportunity to bring together representatives of more than 60 countries to discuss their individual and combined efforts to fight the Islamic State and other extremist groups, but there were few concrete takeaways from the three days of meetings and speeches.
“I think it was a bit of a sleeper summit, and on balance it doesn’t do much good,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution.
“No big new ideas, no big visibility — the only clips I’ve heard have been of President Barack Obama, leader of the United States and a Christian, speaking about the need for moderation in Islam,” he continued. “I don’t think that message is all that new or all that resonant. That said, I don’t see how it did that any harm, either.”
The Atlantic Council’s Richard LeBaron served as U.S. ambassador to Kuwait from 2007 to 2010 and helped set up the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications in 2010.
Originally, LeBaron said the goal of the conference was to “reinforce international will to take on the difficult issues posed by radicalization.”
Asked Thursday whether the White House had accomplished what it set out to do, LeBaron was more circumspect.
“It certainly drew attention to it,” he said. “It’s a topic that is new for some people but it’s been around since before 9/11 — how to deal with terrorism before it becomes terrorism and try to convince people not to pursue violent means of expressing themselves.”
At first the summit was focused on solely on countering homegrown extremism, but after the attacks in Paris in January, the White House decided to broaden it into an international forum to discuss techniques for addressing radicalization with partners from around the world.
That made it a little “disjointed,” LeBaron argued, noting that efforts to try to stop domestic threats and international efforts to stop the Islamic State are vastly different.
Labeling the three-day series of meetings a summit also raised expectations about what it might produce.
“I don’t like to call things ‘summits’ that aren’t summits,” he said. “In my day, summits were meetings like those between [Soviet Premier Nikita] Khrushchev and [President] Nixon, with high expectations of results. This was closer to a workshop than it was to a summit, so if you use that word, you raise expectations on something that is unlikely to be fulfilled.”
Some of the summit participants who generally support Obama’s careful avoidance of deeming the fight against the Islamic State and other extremist groups as a war against Islam gave the president high marks for demonstrating leadership and tackling the issue by convening a group of officials representing 60 countries from around the world.
“The Obama administration is demonstrating some much-needed international initiative by hosting this summit,” said John Dana Stuster, a policy analyst for the National Security Network. “It reflects an important recognition that, even as the United States and its allies fight terrorist groups by military means, we also have to prevent terrorism by addressing the societal issues that facilitate and propagate it.”
Others, such Rabbi Jack Moline, director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, agreed but said its effectiveness “is something we won’t know for a long time.”
The agenda included presentations from community-based pilot programs to combat homegrown radicalization in the cities of Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Boston, and a new partnership between the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates to create an online hub to combat the proliferation of terrorist messages and recruiting on social media.
While Moline said the agenda focused too much on Islamic extremism despite Obama’s avoidance of the term, he praised the president for stressing what he considered an important point during his two speeches Wednesday and Thursday.
“The president made the most important point of the summit — that if we describe this violence as Islamic, we hand the victory to the terrorists who want to define Islam incorrectly,” he said.
But those Obama assertions only further frustrated conservatives who assailed the summit as a politically correct exercise full of platitudes that have little chance of helping to win the war against the Islamic State.
“It’s a glorified photo op,” said Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s useful to have the debate, but President Obama is trying to be all things to all people, and you can’t be. You need to call out the radicals and that’s going to be uncomfortable.”
Obama’s remarks Thursday also stoked conservative ire when he appeared to double down on controversial comments State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf made early this week that the U.S. can’t kill its way out of the Islamic State problem and must find a way to blunt the terrorist group’s recruiting efforts by helping create jobs in poor Middle East countries.
“Poverty alone does not cause someone to become a terrorist, just like poverty alone doesn’t cause people to become criminals,” he said. “But when especially young people feel entirely trapped in impoverished communities where there is no path for advancement … no escape from injustice and the humiliations of corruption, that feeds instability and disorder.”
If world leaders are serious about confronting violent extremism, Obama said, then wealthier countries must start providing more education and economic opportunities in poorer regions of the world, as well as commit to free and open societies where human rights are protected and people are free to practice the religion of their choice.
The president also argued that “what’s most needed today is more dialogues within countries and within faiths.
“Violent extremists and terrorists thrive when people pull away from each other and label [groups] ‘them’ as opposed to ‘us’ — something separate and apart,” he said.
Those comments earned a swift rebuke from Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“Barbarians who cut children in half and burn people alive are not about to cease those activities in exchange for an opportunity to enter into a dialogue with their neighbors or even with President Obama regarding economic and political grievances,” the Wisconsin Republican said.
Other foreign policy experts were more even-handed in their assessment.
On the positive side, Obama reintroduced a bottom-up, community-based grassroots approach to fighting homegrown terrorism, said Jonathan Schanzer, a foreign policy analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
But the idea of working with community leaders and local imams is not new, he said, noting that the federal government has been engaged in similar efforts since the Sept. 11 attacks.
“This feels a lot like reinventing the wheel,” he said. “This is a president who rejected democracy promotion around the world as a [Bush] overreach, and tried to pivot away” from the issue of fighting a global war on terrorism.
“Now we’ve got a resurgence of the problem,” he said.
