At the October 2009 New York gala dinner of the International Crisis Group, former President Bill Clinton paid a moving tribute to the presidency of the man he had beaten, George H.W. Bush. Clinton said that two brave decisions Bush 41 made vastly eased the challenges of Clinton’s presidency. Clinton cited, first, Bush’s decision to strongly embrace and support Russia under Boris Yeltsin’s leadership and, second, Bush’s encouragement that Helmut Kohl’s reunified Germany become Russia’s best friend in Europe. Clinton remarked that these were difficult, courageous decisions that made the post-Cold War world a much safer place—but which at the time were complicated and risky undertakings.
Barack Obama, in contrast, received national security and economic portfolios from President George W. Bush riddled with crises of historic scale. When Bush entered office in January 2001, America was perceived to be in ascendance, riding the wave of American-led globalization and driving profound revolutions in information technology, biotechnology and more. But when Bush left office, the mystique of America’s superpower status had dissolved into the ether. The Bush Administration had exposed key military limits during the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. America—the bastion of high-octane capitalism—had exported toxic financial products to the rest of the world. Documented abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo undermined confidence in America’s moral leadership.
Obama’s presidency thus started in a deep hole, much deeper than faced by any U.S. presidency in modern times. Against that backdrop, Obama’s performance deserves applause for doing what needed to be done to avert global depression and for not tripping into any “new” back-breaking military deployments beyond those currently under way. But avoiding worse problems does not equal getting America back on a track where its power and global leverage are restored and where the United States is again the lead force in shaping the international system. On this front, Barack Obama and his team have generated mixed, often disappointing results.
Obama realized when taking office that world leaders had significant doubts about the ability of the United States to alter the trend lines of any of the great global challenges—from dealing with the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran to reversing climate change, reinvigorating a nuclear non-proliferation regime, dealing with the growing arc of instability and Islamic radicalism running from North Africa through the Middle East to South Asia, dealing with China’s rise and Russia’s increasingly provocative behavior, and dealing with human rights challenges in Africa and Southeast Asia. To alter their impression, Obama needed to surprise the international system with a globe-altering arrangement akin to Nixon’s opening to China, and he needed to do it despite the world’s deep doubts about American leadership and power.?
As it happened, a “Nixon to China” achievement was possible with only one nation of global significance: Iran. But to move Iran off a course that probably leads to acquisition of nuclear weapons, Obama had to move many other pieces of the global system simultaneously in order to reinforce and complement a new Iran track. Some of these needed global shifts have gone relatively well, but others have been disastrous.
First, the Obama team needed to rob the Iranian government of bragging rights as self-proclaimed defender of the Islamic faith. Ridiculing Saudi and Gulf State gestures toward Israel in King Abdullah’s Arab Peace Initiative, Iran’s leaders have threatened Israel in terms implying total destruction. Obama and many Middle East stakeholders believe that the establishment of a viable Palestinian state next to Israel would do much to remove the Palestine grievance from a narrative of humiliation by the West that many Muslims carry. Obama worked toward this goal by appointing former Senator George Mitchell to serve as an envoy to get Middle East peace negotiations moving again.
Things did not work out so well. Obama’s initial moves to get five Arab states to ante up with gestures favoring Israel in exchange for a settlements freeze fell completely apart. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed Obama’s demands back—thus becoming for the Obama Administration what Nikita Khrushchev was at the beginning of the John F. Kennedy Administration: a leader who defined the limits and weakness of the new U.S. President. Khrushchev was, of course, an enemy of U.S. interests—and Netanyahu an ally—but the Israeli Prime Minister’s actions and Obama’s acquiescence to him have had a devastating impact on the way nations around the world view Obama and his team.
Because of their permanent status in the UN Security Council, Russia and China also ranked high on Obama’s Iran action plan list. Obama has worked to redirect U.S. relations with Russia and China away from contentious problems like the Russia-Georgia military clash and East European deployments of U.S.-controlled ballistic missile defense systems, in the case of the former, and away from human rights-related issues, in the case of China, in order to secure the possibility of greater support for U.S. and European efforts to seduce or force Iran into dropping its nuclear weapons ambitions.?
Obama has successfully moved Russia and China relations onto less contentious paths. With Russia, Obama has launched a renewed effort to reinvigorate the nuclear non-proliferation regime and efforts at warhead and nuclear supplies reduction. With China, the United States has engaged in close coordination on global economic matters and collaborated in climate change policy planning. Nevertheless, neither China nor Russia has signed on to a tougher Iran sanctions strategy—and they have weakened America’s position as they resist.
Add to this mix Obama’s ownership of the “good war” in Afghanistan and the military’s call for greater troop deployments to forestall military disaster. From Iran’s perspective, the United States appears tied down in Afghanistan, pricked by withdrawal challenges in Iraq, beleaguered economically, unable to win a contest of wills with the Prime Minister of a small client state of the United States, and unable to push Russia and China to a harsher sanctions strategy. Despite Iran’s own internal drama after its election and its reduced stature in the Middle East after the crackdown on election protesters, Iran sees weakness in America—not resolve. Iran also sees a globally popular, charismatic American President working hard on a great number of issues—but ultimately unable to marshal the coalition of pressures and structural shifts that would allow him to engineer a credible “Nixon Goes to China” shift with Iran.
Thus in what Obama most needed to achieve early in his tenure, a new course with Iran, he has failed. There are many years left for Obama to keep working on this desired strategic leap for U.S. foreign policy. In the meantime, America keeps demonstrating, much to ill effect, that it cannot achieve the global goals it sets for itself and thus is, in the eyes of the world, on a track of slow decline.
At the October 2009 New York gala dinner of the International Crisis Group, former President Bill Clinton paid a moving tribute to the presidency of the man he had beaten, George H.W. Bush. Clinton said that two brave decisions Bush 41 made vastly eased the challenges of Clinton’s presidency. Clinton cited, first, Bush’s decision to strongly embrace and support Russia under Boris Yeltsin’s leadership and, second, Bush’s encouragement that Helmut Kohl’s reunified Germany become Russia’s best friend in Europe. Clinton remarked that these were difficult, courageous decisions that made the post-Cold War world a much safer place—but which at the time were complicated and risky undertakings.
Barack Obama, in contrast, received national security and economic portfolios from President George W. Bush riddled with crises of historic scale. When Bush entered office in January 2001, America was perceived to be in ascendance, riding the wave of American-led globalization and driving profound revolutions in information technology, biotechnology and more. But when Bush left office, the mystique of America’s superpower status had dissolved into the ether. The Bush Administration had exposed key military limits during the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. America—the bastion of high-octane capitalism—had exported toxic financial products to the rest of the world. Documented abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo undermined confidence in America’s moral leadership.