There has been much head scratching over the years about the essence of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Now with another member of Obama’s cabinet, former defense secretary as well as CIA director Leon Panetta, offering up a memoir of disagreement and disenchantment, it’s clear that the consternation is no longer limited to conservative skeptics.
Is this president who was supposed to usher in a new age of U.S. policy-making actually just an isolationist who abjures international entanglements as a matter of principle? Or is he a politician too preoccupied with great domestic challenges to pay attention to all those squabbling foreigners? In fact, Obama is best understood as a throwback to the mid-1970s, equal parts George McGovern and Henry Kissinger.
Today’s debates are, after all, eerily similar to those of the mid-1970s. After a divisive and draining war in Vietnam, the Democratic party, captured by McGovern and his protégés, insisted that America had to come home, for it could only do harm abroad. This was not simply isolationism but was surely an indictment of what was considered overly aggressive interventionism.
At the same time, the Republican party under the banner of Henry Kissinger’s realism saw America as a declining power that had to accommodate rivals such as the Soviet Union and China. Democrats did not emphasize values, for they were suspicious of American power, while the Republicans avoided them, for they had no place in their balance of power diplomacy.
Fast forward to Obama’s first presidential campaign. In 2008, as the American public struggled with
the burdens of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, retrenchment was in the air. The country had its share of economic problems, as well as a need to rebuild crumbling infrastructure. The call was for self-rehabilitation, and candidate Obama captured this mood and offered it up as a seemingly coherent philosophy of governance.
The McGovern streak was obvious, as Obama and many around him held that America had to limit its horizons since too often its interventions had caused the problem in the first place. Human rights and democracy promotion had to take a backseat. A United States that had invaded Iraq on a questionable premise had no right to hector other nations about the conduct of their domestic affairs. America had to accept the fact that it was not an exceptional country but just another member of the community of nations that had made its share of mistakes.
The Middle East was the place where Obama most disengaged. For the Obama team, it was America’s wars that had deformed the politics of the region and disturbed its natural order. It was best to leave the Arab world to the Arabs themselves. As such, the White House was caught flatfooted during the Arab Spring of 2011 and had no plans for a region that was coming undone. The need to propitiate domestic critics may have propelled Obama to draw various red lines, but personal inhibitions prevented him from enforcing them.
Realism is the natural companion of this sense of retrenchment. Obama was channeling his inner Henry Kissinger when he sensed that the best means of preserving stability was to take into consideration adversarial nations’ interests. Thus came the resetting of relations with Vladimir Putin and arms control diplomacy with Ali Khamenei. America’s nemeses were supposed to cast aside their ambitions and settle their accounts with a more humble Washington.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Iran’s persistent defiance at the negotiating table are a stark reminder that dictators’ hostility to the West is intrinsic, ideologically driven, and undeterred by gestures of accommodation. It was finally a radical Sunni insurgency, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, galloping across the heart of the Middle East that compelled the president to emerge from his torpor, sort of.
If Obama sounded prescient in 2008, today he seems anachronistic and stale. The tedium of Obama’s retrenchment is proving ill-suited for a nation that has historically sought an idealistic imprint on global affairs. As Hil-lary Clinton recently argued, implicitly criticizing the president she served as secretary of state, America has to stand for something bigger than avoiding mistakes. We seem, then, to be in the process of a course correction, as Americans are once more looking abroad for missions of redemption.
As America enters the last two years of Obama’s presidency, some basic principles have to be considered.
First, autocracies are bound to be attracted to extremist ideologies and they will always require an external enemy to justify their hegemony of power. This is as true for the Russian Federation as it is for the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Second, America should insist on its values. The long-term cure to international conflict is not the preservation of some tenuous balance of power but proliferation of liberal polities. The best means of arresting aggression is to come together in a concert of democracies as opposed to relying on international organizations that are too often vulnerable to procedural manipulations by the likes of Russia and China. Moral axioms cannot be the sole foundation of a great power’s foreign policy, but America can never do without such guidelines.
As often in the past, the American public seems ahead of the establishment that rules in its name. The phrase “war weariness” is casually tossed around, suggesting a nation averse to international engagement. It’s true the public is unlikely to countenance a vast military enterprise for amorphous purposes. However, this does not mean that Americans are ready to turn their backs on their ideals or vacate their global responsibilities.
Although Republican lawmakers and presidential aspirants are often enjoined to summon the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the moment may actually summon the spirit of Jimmy Carter—the Carter of 1976. It may seem paradoxical given his reputation as a weak actor on the world stage, but it was Carter who seemed ready to lead American foreign policy out of the morass of the 1970s. History has rightly cast a dark shadow on much of Carter’s legacy, but he understood that Americans needed a sense of purpose, and rode to the White House on a platform of human rights and democratic empowerment. The Georgian beckoned America to a higher calling. The pendulum is once more swinging.
The question is: Who is the next Jimmy Carter—one trusts a more successful Jimmy Carter—who will take advantage of our new mood?
Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
