If Republicans make major gains in Congress in November at least in part because of President Obama’s perceived weakness on foreign policy, it won’t be easy for Obama to respond with a major shake-up of his national security team.
Obama has no Donald Rumsfeld to get rid of, and no Robert Gates to bring in.
Just two months before critical midterms Obama’s approval rating is exactly where President George W. Bush’s was at the same time in 2006, dipping just below 40 percent, according to the latest Gallup figures.
After Republicans suffered heavy losses in the 2006 elections, mainly because of the failures in Iraq, Bush tried to save his second term by ditching Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld had a tempestuous relationship with the press, and Bush’s decision to replace him with the respected, softer-spoken Gates gave him a chance to say he was trying to change course.
But Obama has far fewer options.
Rather than close confidantes that influence the direction of his foreign policy, Dan Mahaffee, policy director for the Center of the Study of the Presidency and Congress, said Obama is using the top players on his national security team in an “envoy style,” with Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Vice President Joe Biden traveling around, speaking on the president’s behalf.
“At least for the president, there’s almost an executive chairman-type role — that he’s handling the management but the action items are being handled by subordinates,” he said.
Still, he argued, “voters, the shareholders in this case, are still going to look to him alone” to determine whether his policies — both foreign and domestic — are successful or not.
Most presidents show a preference for seeking the advice and counsel of West Wing officials over far-flung Cabinet secretaries, but critics say Obama has taken the practice to the extreme.
Gates, a Republican Obama persuaded to stay on and join his administration, left in mid-2011 and wrote a book about his outrage over being forced to take a back seat to White House staff he characterized as meddling and inexperienced.
Just this month former senior Defense and State Department officials have increasingly made the argument that the growing number of conflicts in the world should force the White House to start delegating more.
“It is hard to handle the volume of what the world is throwing at the U.S. right now if everything has to go up to the most senior levels,” Michele Flournoy told DefenseOne in early August. Flournoy was Obama’s former under secretary of defense for policy and is now the CEO of the Center for a New American Security.
In tough budgetary times, Hagel has devoted significant energy to defense spending cuts, not broad foreign policy goals or missions. Meanwhile Kerry is still too new, and his willingness to push for more U.S. intervention than Obama has authorized means he is not closely identified with Obama’s foreign policy even though he holds the top diplomatic post.
“Certainly with Hagel and Kerry, who has been in for a much more limited time frame, there is less pressure and less of a clamor to replace them at this point because it would be far too mid-crises,” Mahaffee said, referring to the rapid rise of the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
CIA Director John Brennan is already under a cloud after an internal inspector general’s report found that agents had spied on Senate staffers working on the investigation into CIA interrogation and rendition practices in the years following the Sept. 11 attacks.
Obama could dump Brennan, and possibly National Intelligence Director James Clapper, as concessions to critics on the Left and the Right still stewing over the Senate spying and *National Security Agency surveillance revelations. But their ousters wouldn’t likely have a major impact on the public’s perceptions of Obama’s foreign policy because they don’t embody what critics describe as his overly cautious approach.
Some presidential scholars argue that any shake-up of Obama’s national security team wouldn’t have anywhere near the impact of Bush ousting Rumsfeld, namely because Bush’s problem was largely the opposite of Obama’s.
Instead of failing to elevate key Cabinet members, Bush’s critics accused him of being a puppet, of giving them, and Vice President Dick Cheney, far too much power and influence.
And even after Rumsfeld was gone, they argue, the public perceptions of Bush’s foreign policy only started improving — albeit marginally — when he started making decisions affecting the ground game in Iraq.
In early 2007, Bush pushed out the top general in Iraq at the time, Gen. George Casey, and installed then-Gen. David Petraeus, a counter-terrorism strategist and the main advocate for the surge of U.S. troops that helped stabilize the country and suppress mass Sunni revolts. (Petraeus would go on to become Obama’s CIA director, only to resign over an extra-marital affair in late 2012.)
“I don’t think that there is any clear person in Obama’s administration that if he was pushed out, would make any difference in the polls,” said Meena Bose, the Peter S. Kalikow Chair in Presidential Studies at Hofstra University. “It’s the actual foreign policy decisions he is or is not making that will have an impact.”
Mahaffee agrees and believes Obama lately seems to have gotten the message that he needs to more directly and aggressively confront the ISIS threat, as well as Russian aggression in Ukraine.
In a little more than one week, Obama went from saying he had “no strategy” to deal with ISIS in Syria to declaring Friday at the NATO summit that the U.S. and its allies are determined to degrade and dismantle the extremist terrorist group to announcing a major address before the nation scheduled for Wednesday in which he will lay out his plans to confront the extremist Islamic group.
Last week Obama also announced a NATO rapid-response force of 4,000 that could be easily deployed to Ukraine or other Eastern European countries threatened by Russia.
“We’ve seen it already … that he’s assembling coalition and he’s using language that ISIS should no longer just be contained but destroyed,” he said.
Now the American people will closely evaluate how Obama follows up, Bose argues.
“The problem with scapegoats — blaming someone else for problems with the administration — it means the president wasn’t addressing the situation earlier enough or they didn’t realize how extensive it is,” she said. “Those are never good answers.”
