In the first pages of his account of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, Derek Chollet likens Barack Obama to Warren Buffett. Just as the renowned businessman is a “proudly pragmatic value investor” who pays little mind to “the whims of the moment” and focuses on “solid investments,” Obama aims for “persistent and steady progress” in foreign affairs, ignoring “over-the-top rhetoric and concocted drama” in favor of restoring “balance,” “restraint,” and “sustainability.”
Obama speaks of hitting “singles and doubles” and “steer[ing] the ocean liner two degrees north or south” so often that Chollet’s comparison seems to reflect the president’s self-conception, if not the reality of his failures. But by the end of The Long Game, the Buffett analogy ends up revealing more in its vivid contrast to what Obama truly intended to accomplish.
Many readers of this book will have already parsed Obama’s major foreign policy speeches and myriad magazine profiles. Chollet, a self-described “card-carrying member” of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, and former senior official in the Obama administration, thoroughly mines the president’s own plentiful words to explain “the intellectual foundations of Obama’s foreign policy.” The approach can wear, but The Long Game usefully synthesizes these many strands into a concise, coherent narrative of Obama’s worldview.
Chollet seems most interested in beating back critics who claim that the Obama administration didn’t know what it was doing. In that, he succeeds. The Long Game exhaustively demonstrates that Obama entered office with a strategy, telegraphed it repeatedly, and followed it throughout. From the Syria red-line debacle to Russia’s resurgence, he shows this strategy play out through the major global issues confronting the administration over the past seven-and-a-half years. In each case, he explains the policymaking process, addresses criticisms, and largely concludes that Obama hewed to his grand strategic aims.
What were those aims? According to Chollet, they emerged out of the Iraq war, which came to define Obama’s approach to American foreign policy. In 2007, candidate Obama promised to “challenge” the “conventional thinking” that produced the war, which fueled “a media that too often reported spin instead of facts” and a foreign policy elite “that largely boarded the bandwagon” for the conflict and perpetuated bad habits and “outdated assumptions.” Obama, Chollet argues, sought to swat down this dangerous hype to “do something” and, instead, play “the Long Game.”
Chollet never precisely defines this “Long Game,” but the tropes are familiar enough. Obama’s strategy, like any good strategy, “reflects the totality of American interests.” The president seeks to “project global leadership in an era of seemingly infinite demands and finite resources,” and focuses on “bring[ing] countries together to shape outcomes, set agendas,” and address problems “in a sustainable way.” Chollet argues that by adhering to a “checklist” of principles, such as balance, restraint, patience, and fallibility Obama rescued the United States from “strategic insolvency.” The result, without a hint of irony: “in 2016, America is great again.”
For evidence of such success, Chollet mostly cites the existence of the strategy alone. If the president “largely remained true to the policies he outlined before taking office,” he wonders, “why has Obama’s foreign policy performance proven so controversial?” The many fires burning, or near ignition, across the globe might offer some clues. Yet where many see American incompetence and irresolution, Chollet sees limitations—and a president who sagely recognized them and did the best he could.
This perspective helps explain the logic behind Chollet’s argument that America’s intervention in Libya, as stunning a disaster as they come, “does not undermine Obama’s Long Game approach.” Balancing European clamor for action with perennial concerns about (in Obama’s words) “getting sucked into another war,” the president proposed an “innovative hybrid approach”—or, in English, “split the difference.” Obama, of course, “came up with the idea himself.” As Chollet recalls, the president “later observed that he was not entirely surprised” that his primitive, Washington playbook-enslaved advisers “had failed to come up with this option.”
The imperious, weary sigh wafts off the page.
Chollet is more circumspect than his former employer about Libya, but ultimately sides with the president: “By letting others share or dominate the spotlight,” he contends, Obama embodied “the definition of strength—to bring the world together to solve a specific problem, achieving goals that the United States could not—or should not—get done alone.” In Chollet’s view, the fact that the Europeans, Arabs, and Libyans themselves did not shine is beyond American control. For Chollet, these “limits” make Libya “more of a tragedy than a policy failure.”
This abdication of responsibility is notable less for its unselfconsciousness than for the definition of strength that informs it. Under that definition, results matter less than process. Libya may be a catastrophe; yet the White House nobly bucked the foreign policy consensus and beat its own “innovative hybrid” path based on nostrums of cooperation and sustainability—the modern meaning of strength.
That same definition informs Chollet’s analysis of Russia’s interventions in Ukraine and Syria. “Yes,” he concedes, “Russia has occupied Crimea and holds sway over seven percent of Ukraine’s territory,” and it “put some points on the scoreboard” by saving Bashar al-Assad. But he approvingly quotes Obama declaring the fact that Putin “invades Crimea or is trying to prop up Assad doesn’t suddenly make him a player.” Unfortunately, Chollet excludes the next, revealing portion of Obama’s comments: “You don’t see [Putin] in any of these meetings out here helping to shape the agenda. . . . [T]here’s not a G20 meeting where the Russians set the agenda around any of the issues that are important.” Since Russia isn’t setting sustainable agendas at global confabs it can only lose in the long run. Chollet sees a Russia facing sanctions in Europe and isolation in the Middle East from its “open alliance with Iran, Hezbollah, and Assad” and scratches his head. Putin’s endgame, he says, “is hard to discern.”
It is not so hard to discern for Jerusalem, Cairo, and Riyadh, who dispatch emissaries to Putin frequently enough these days to keep the seat warm for their archnemesis, Qassem Suleimani. Nor is it hard to see from Poland and Romania, whom Putin recently warned were in Russia’s “crosshairs.” These nations recognize that there remains more to international relations than G20 conferences, economic interests, and objective comparisons of military might. There’s perception—and preserving strength often depends on a state’s ability to shape it. States need more than superior power alone; they must also convince their adversaries of their will to use it. They must earn credibility. A state’s capabilities may remain objectively the same. A state’s power, however, waxes and wanes based on perceptions of its willingness to use it.
Hence the frequent flier miles accruing on trips to Moscow.
It’s not that Obama doesn’t recognize this more traditional “perception of what it means to be strong.” As Chollet happily reports, he simply rejects it. Obama, he says, is “deeply skeptical of the Washington establishment’s obsession with credibility,” demonstrating “little tolerance” for what he sees as mere “posturing.” In today’s world, Chollet declares, the game has changed. Or as Obama put it, “you cannot be a 21st-century power and act like a 20th-century dictatorship.” According to Chollet, the president believes “the way you measure strength is by actually being strong, not just boasting that you are strong.” The greatest threat isn’t an inferior adversary; it’s a “trap” set by concerns for credibility.
Under this rubric, Russian, Iranian, or Chinese aggression seems illogical. It sinks economies and risks quagmire for the sake of winning temporary gains in outmoded, irrational realms. To borrow an Obama favorite that Chollet surprisingly fails to cite, these nations are ultimately on the “wrong side of history.”
The Long Game boils down to a defense of this view. Barack Obama believes that the 21st century represents a quantum leap in human history and that the concept of strength is far more evolved than that which prevailed for thousands of years. The administration’s actions in Syria, Libya, and elsewhere had as much to do with the events themselves as with enlightening the unreconstructed about the new nature of geopolitics.
Chollet describes this notion of strength as a return to humility and proportion. But Obama’s grand strategy attempts to edit out honor and perception, two of the most enduring elements of statecraft from time immemorial. That’s less Buffett than Bonaparte, and a very long game indeed.
Jordan Chandler Hirsch, a former editor at Foreign Affairs, is a visiting fellow at the Columbia Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.
