The mind-meld between President Obama and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel couldn’t survive a disastrous midterm election colored by voter dissatisfaction with the administration’s foreign policy.
Hagel, a former Republican senator who burned his bridges with his former colleagues as he drew close to Obama, was ousted Monday, less than two years after he was chosen to lead the Pentagon as Obama’s kindred spirit.
“They needed to get rid of somebody because there was a sense that they needed to make a shakeup,” said Danielle Pletka, senior vice president for foreign and defense studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Obama “threw him under the bus because he could,” she said. “The whole thing is a masterpiece of Washington irony.”
Hagel’s resignation announcement came at a scripted White House event where both he and Obama made it seem like it was a mutual decision. But sources told reporters he was forced out.
“Make no mistake, Secretary Hagel was fired,” a senior U.S. official with close knowledge of the situation told Fox News.
The relationship started off strong. In the Senate, Hagel drew close to Obama, who shared his views about ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and reining in Pentagon spending. The two men traveled together to both countries even as Obama sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. Though Hagel declined to endorse him, he withheld his support from the GOP nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who would return the favor by opposing Hagel’s confirmation in February 2013.
After he was re-elected in 2012, Obama chose Hagel to replace outgoing Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, a former Democratic lawmaker with an independent streak whose rhetoric about Pentagon budget cuts rubbed fellow Democrats the wrong way. Panetta’s predecessor, Robert Gates, was a GOP holdover from the George W. Bush administration, and the White House was looking for someone more in tune with Obama’s views.
But he was dogged by concerns about his competence from the start, especially after a lackluster performance during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was barely confirmed in a 58-41 vote, with only four Republicans voting yes.
The concerns about his competence continued while in office. Though a former Army sergeant and Vietnam veteran whose enlisted background endeared him to the troops — and was a major selling point in the administration’s push to confirm him — Hagel was not seen as strong on policy and was perceived as not being a forceful enough advocate for the military’s interests in a White House that kept a close hold on national security decisions.
That left him even more vulnerable when the White House, under fire for its handling of the crisis in Ukraine, a strategic “pivot” to the Pacific that many allies and observers worried was illusory, and especially its lackluster and passive response to the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, needed a scapegoat.
It didn’t help that Hagel reportedly had differed with the administration’s Syria policy, sending a “a sharply critical two-page memo” warning that the policy was in danger of unraveling because of a failure to clarify U.S. intentions toward President Bashar Assad, according to the New York Times.
Hagel sidestepped questions about the memo and later insisted to lawmakers that the administration’s Syria policy had not changed in spite of reports that it was under review.
But blaming Hagel for the problems with administration policy isn’t going to solve them, since the White House keeps such tight control on decision-making, said Jed Babbin, who served as deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration.
“Obama will not allow anybody in that job who’s a forceful policymaker,” he said.
That was also the message from Republican lawmakers in the wake of the administration’s announcement.
“The Obama administration is now in the market for their fourth secretary of defense. When the president goes through three secretaries, he should ask ‘is it them, or is it me?'” said outgoing House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon, R-Calif.
McKeon later called “appalling” the unnamed senior U.S. official’s comment to Fox News that “you don’t send a sergeant to do a secretary’s job.”
McCain’s response was even more biting, noting that Hagel, like Panetta and Gates, had been frustrated by excessive White House micromanagement of national security.
“But ultimately, the president needs to realize that the real source of his current failures on national security more often lie with his administration’s misguided policies and the role played by his White House in devising and implementing them,” McCain said. “That is the real change we need right now.”
