“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known,” read former CIA Director John Brennan’s melodramatic warning to President Trump, “you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.” Brennan sought to convey his righteous confidence in history’s inevitable verdict on the Trump administration, but his hollow posturing is betrayed by how he and the rest of the Obama administration-in-exile have never stopped trying to influence the jury.
Well in excess of their predecessors, the last administration’s chief national security and foreign policy officials have spent their years in the wilderness aggressively inserting themselves into the national conversation. They are ubiquitous fixtures on cable news, regular features on the nation’s op-ed pages, and have even formed a rapid response organization dedicated, in the words of Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan, to helping “shape the public debate on foreign policy and national security, holding Trump accountable, and lifting up an alternative, affirmative vision.”
If that were truly the Obama foreign policy team’s aim, it would be unremarkable, even unobjectionable. But their goal is less to critique the Trump administration where it is warranted than it is to defend their own dubious records in office.
Take, for example, the Trump administration’s policy toward Iran, the rogue theocracy that consumed so much of the Obama administration’s diplomatic energies. The last administration is perturbed that the Trump administration did exactly what Senate Republicans said a Republican administration would do to a presidential agreement with a foreign nation that was not ratified as a treaty. But Team Obama’s frustration over the jettisoning of the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, often manifests not in the correction of the record but its distortion.
In May 2018, the Trump administration partially withdrew from the Iran deal, introducing an escalating series of sanctions on the Iranian economy and eventually listing the politically and economically muscular Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization. The Iranian political economy destabilized. Protests rocked Iranian cities, and the theocracy began to feel the heat. “Trump has done the unthinkable,” declared former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power, “isolated the US & rallied the world around Iran.” To the contrary, the world followed the Trump administration’s lead.
Then, in May of this year, Trump deployed a series of deterrent assets to the Middle East amid reports that Iran was preparing military provocations. That month, four ships, including two Saudi oil tankers, were attacked in the Persian Gulf. A month later, another brazen daylight raid targeted two more tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Ultimately, this series of attacks culminated in Iran taking credit for the downing of a nine-figure American reconnaissance drone surveilling the strait.
For Team Obama, this was evidence not of the threat posed by Iran but of Trump’s recklessness. Former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes deployed passive voice to obfuscate the incidents, saying that the attacked vessels were “getting fired” in strategic shipping lanes. According to Rhodes, because Trump pulled out of the Iran deal “even though Iran was complying,” the Trump administration was not credible when it pointed fingers at Iran. “What this means is, if you want to pin the blame on Iran, you’re going to have to do extra due diligence and have some kind of international investigation. You’re going to have to present this evidence at forum like the United Nations,” he warned on June 17. Of course, the victims of these attacks had done precisely that ten days earlier, blaming a “state actor” for the sophisticated attack on ships involving precision divers and advanced ordnance.
For her part, former national security adviser Susan Rice accepted Iranian complicity in these attacks but appeared to view this aggression as an opportunity for the president to retreat unilaterally. In the New York Times, Rice advised Trump to halt the buildup of deterrent forces in the Middle East, suspend America’s withdrawal from the Iran deal, and assign Obama-era civil servants to reengage in negotiations with the rogue state.
Animating these critiques of the president is a straw-man argument over the nature of the Iran deal itself. Its proponents insist that the accords were working as designed until Trump violated them. But the deal’s opponents agree that the deal was working as designed. That’s why Iran could hide a voluminous cache of documents related to its nuclear weapons program without surrendering it to international inspectors, without consequences. That’s why Iran could breach the nuclear deal’s caps on uranium enrichment levels with little forewarning because the deal left intact the technology that it needs to race toward a bomb.
“Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon today, let’s be clear, than when Trump came into office,” said Obama-era National Security Council adviser Samantha Vinograd upon Iran’s warning that it would begin re-enriching uranium. She could say this despite the U.N.’s repeated assurances that Iran was abiding by the terms of the nuclear accords. She appeared to see her assessment as an attack on the Iran deal’s critics, not as vindication of their core argument. Team Obama seems to believe that the abrogation of the deal left Tehran with no option but to engage in brinkmanship to bring the U.S. and Europe back to the negotiating table. But that would come as news to the U.S. sailors who were captured in 2016 on Obama’s watch by the Revolutionary Guards and paraded before cameras, in violation of Geneva Convention protocols.
So many of the Obama administration’s dubious legacy achievements are attributable to its desire to cement a deal, any deal, with Iran. That objective led the administration to look the other way as Iranian forces streamed into Syria as early as 2012. It compelled them to soft pedal Russian and Iranian complicity in grotesque crimes against Syrian civilians, and to mute their response to Iranian provocations on American soil. “Sadly,” State Department veteran and former Obama adviser Frederic Hof confessed, “the Obama administration sacrificed Syrian civilians and American credibility for the mistaken notion that Iran required appeasement in Syria as the price for a nuclear agreement.”
As New York Times reporters David Sanger and David Kirkpatrick observed, Obama “regarded Iran as potentially a more natural ally” of the U.S. than the region’s Sunni states. The regularization of contacts between Tehran and Washington, the rise of Iranian influence in Iraq, and a fig leaf of a nuclear deal forced U.S. allies in Cairo, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh to rethink their positions. So, too, did the Obama administration’s ideological hostility toward Israel, which culminated in a strategically purblind decision to abstain from a U.N. vote declaring Israeli construction in the eastern side of the united city of Jerusalem “illegal.” The Sunni states and Israel’s new anxiety over America’s shifting alliances catalyzed a previously unthinkable détente between these old adversaries, all but neutralizing the Palestinian question that had once weighed so heavily on the region. This unintended consequence of the Obama administration’s policy would be cause for unqualified celebration if it hadn’t come at such a high, if temporary, cost to U.S. influence over its traditional allies.
The shadow of the Obama administration’s improvidence is even more evident in its members’ contradictory assessment of how the Trump White House has handled Russia. They are right to note that the president himself has a sordid habit of heaping praise upon and deferring to Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. But the Trump administration’s Russia policy has been admirably hawkish — a stance the Obama advisers ostensibly support.
How does the 44th president’s foreign policy team members reconcile this discrepancy? They don’t.
By the end of his first year in office, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper insisted that Trump acted as though he were an “asset” of the Russian president. By the following summer, Rice asserted that Trump’s Russia policy “served Vladimir Putin’s interests,” so his “motivations” were a “legitimate question.” Power agreed in June 2018. “He doesn’t even try not to seem like the Manchurian Candidate,” she lamented. For Brennan, Trump’s disastrous press conference alongside Putin in Helsinki, in which the president dismissed Russian complicity in the 2016 cyber attacks on Democratic interests, was nothing short of “treasonous.”
If the Obama administration’s goal has been to goad the Trump administration into treating Moscow like the revisionist threat to American interests that it is, they should be happy with the results. Within his first year in office, the Trump administration expanded sanctions on Moscow well before Congress imposed new proscriptions on Russian economic activity. The White House seized Russian diplomatic property in America and expelled its diplomats. This administration targeted Putin’s close allies with Magnitsky Act sanctions, the very sanctions Kremlin cutout Natalia Veselnitskaya lobbied the Trump campaign to abandon during the infamous Trump Tower meeting. Trump has since provided lethal arms to Ukraine, which is struggling to roll back a Russian proxy force occupying its east. It has sold liquid natural gas and missile interceptor technology to Poland. Trump has presided over the expansion of NATO even as Russia engaged in covert activities to thwart that outcome. American armed forces have even engaged in set-piece battles with Russian mercenary forces in Syria.
By contrast, Obama’s foreign policy team has a far more dovish record on Russia. Obama’s administration opposed the Magnitsky Act. His administration denied Ukraine’s request for lethal aid. Obama reneged on American commitments to provide former Warsaw Pact states with radar and anti-missile interceptor technology. He withdrew the last of America’s armored combat units in Europe less than a year before Russia became the first European power to invade and annex neighboring territory since 1945. The Obama White House allowed Russia to pretend as though it had disarmed its Syrian ally of its chemical weaponry, paving the way for a Russian expeditionary force to intervene in the conflict in the most dangerous escalation of Russian-NATO tensions since the end of the Cold War.
Rice has been similarly critical of the Trump administration’s hostile approach toward relations with Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro. In another Times op-ed, Obama’s former national security adviser said the Trump administration’s efforts to isolate Maduro and their chief financial and military benefactors in Communist Cuba were “not tied to coherent strategies.” Therefore, they must not be efforts to advance American interests in the Western Hemisphere, but a shameful campaign to ingratiate himself to voters in Florida ahead of 2020. Rhodes, too, has been particularly critical of the Trump administration’s Venezuela “regime change policy” and the people leading it. “They tried to go to the oil sanctions,” he said. “All that did was deepen the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.” It is a remarkable display of moral gymnastics to pin any of the blame for Venezuelan hardship on sanctions targeting the state-owned oil sector, sanctions which have only been in place since January.
In February 2014, long simmering antipathy toward the products of Venezuela’s socialist economy erupted in street protests, and those protests were violently dispatched. But it was only in July of that year, well after the demonstrations were quelled and Congress began considering legislative sanctions against the regime, that the reluctant State Department issued travel restrictions on Venezuelan officials. By contrast, the Trump Treasury Department acted in the president’s first month to sanction, among others, Tareck El Aissami, then Venezuela’s vice president and a notorious drug trafficker. According to the Miami Herald, Obama’s team was reluctant to broaden Venezuelan sanctions for fear of destabilizing the regime and hindering diplomatic negotiations.
There are some points of agreement among Obama’s foreign policy exiles and the Trump administration. Both the Obama and Trump administrations have reluctantly concluded that the only way to extricate Americans from Afghanistan is to reintegrate the Taliban into the country’s political life, terrorist attacks on U.S. soldiers notwithstanding. Likewise, Trump officials once scolded Rice for recommending that the U.S. find a way to “tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea,” though it now seems some in the administration are comfortable recognizing North Korea as a de facto nuclear state. But even here, the last administration appears confused.
“This is the pull-out, walk-away presidency, and it is not enhancing the interest of the United States of America,” former Secretary of State John Kerry told David Axelrod in January in an attack on Trump’s failed negotiations with foreign adversaries and allies alike. Less than a month later, Trump proved Kerry right by cutting short his second summit with North Korean despot Kim Jong-un. “Did he make the right move in walking away?” NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked Rice. “Yes, he did,” she replied.
Every administration faces its share of crises and setbacks abroad. The anarchic international environment does not cooperate. Promising agendas and far-reaching objectives are dashed against unforeseen events, and ideology can blind foreign policy practitioners to the folly of their ways. The Trump administration is no more immune to these circumstances than their predecessors. But it takes a special conviction to trust in the sober judgment of posterity. That’s a conviction that Barack Obama’s foreign policy officials lack. Judging from the record, it’s hard to blame them.
Noah Rothman is the associate editor of Commentary Magazine.
