President Obama’s foreign policy is increasingly being hit by friendly fire from Democrats and nonpartisan members of the establishment who once supported and advised him.
The president has been on the defensive from Republicans for months. Policies that he touted as foreign policy successes instead have contributed to new headaches in a world that experts of all stripes agree becomes more chaotic, as the old international order crumbles and the U.S. retreats from leadership.
The most recent criticism came on Monday, when a report by a panel of former diplomats, Pentagon officials and the alliance’s former supreme commander in Europe said it is time to arm Ukraine against Russian aggression, which Obama has resisted doing.
“Russia’s actions in and against Ukraine pose the gravest threat to European security in more than 30 years,” wrote the report’s authors, who included three former top Obama administration officials. “The West has the capacity to stop Russia. The question is whether it has the will.”
Previous criticism has spanned the globe, from concerns among Asian allies that the U.S. strategic “pivot” to the Pacific is more rhetoric than reality, to worries about the future of Afghanistan after U.S. troops leave, to the persistence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria after months of U.S.-led bombardment, and fears that Obama is willing to let Iran get away with too much in talks over its nuclear ambitions.
There is also the renewed specter of Islamist terrorism after deadly attacks in Paris and the resurgence of al Qaeda and its allies in countries across the Middle East, while administration officials refuse to link the problem to the radical ideology that fuels it.
“So long as we lack the intellectual clarity to accurately define our enemies we will also not have the necessary capacity to defeat them. You cannot defeat an enemy you do not admit exists,” retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in a speech last week to a conference in Washington.
As former officials air their concerns, members of the foreign policy establishment who once supported Obama are pointing fingers directly at him.
“In the end, making the national security system work comes down to one factor, one man: Barack Obama. He’s the key problem, and he’s the only one who can bring about a solution,” Council on Foreign Relations Chairman Leslie H. Gelb wrote Jan. 14 in the Daily Beast, calling for a top-to-bottom shakeup of the president’s foreign policy team.
Nowhere is the president’s loss of credibility more evident than on Iran, where a bipartisan effort to impose new sanctions in the event nuclear talks breakdown is likely to pass in Congress by a wide margin despite Obama’s veto threat, because lawmakers from both parties mistrust the administration’s negotiating strategy.
“I have to be honest with you, the more I hear from the administration and its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran,” one of the authors of the sanctions bill, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., told administration officials on Jan. 21.
Others have questioned whether the administration even has a foreign policy. Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, former head of Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that the United States needs to get out of its “reactive crouch.”
“America needs a refreshed national strategy,” he said. “There is an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and more problems for us.”
Mattis’ comments came in one of a series of congressional hearings designed by the new GOP majority to put the president’s foreign policy under greater scrutiny. On Tuesday, the House Armed Services Committee will take its turn, hearing from current Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart; Mark Chandler, acting director of intelligence for the Joint Staff; and the Joint Staff’s director of operations, Lt. Gen. William Mayville.
“From the continued modernization of nuclear programs to conventional and unconventional aggressiveness by rival competitors, from the global spread of terrorist ideology to new domains of warfare, a clear-eyed look around the world is sobering,” said House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas.
Obama, in an interview with NBC on Monday, insisted that his policies have made the nation safer, echoing what he said in his State of the Union address on Jan. 20.
Referring specifically to U.S. efforts against the Islamic State, which critics say are too passive and not sufficiently resourced, Obama insisted his approach is the right one.
“The truth of the matter is that we are doing exactly what we should be doing to make sure that while we’re pushing back [the Islamic State] we are not creating another situation in which we’re deploying massive numbers of U.S. troops,” Obama said.
“Those who want us to shoot first and aim later typically get this country into really bad situations.”
