This one is full of interventionist slant in places, but the selected analysis of what Obama is doing has been on my mind for a long time, so I put it up for discussion. And other parts of it are not bad.
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So let us get right to the essence: Does the President, and his Administration following him, know what he is doing—strategically speaking, whether in Syria or anywhere else—or not? If one judges by the official annual strategy documents mandated by the Congress, if one talks to refugees from the NSC, and if one matches up visible behavior against past models, the answer is “not really.” As I have argued before, the most likely reality that outsiders are trying to penetrate is one consisting of several impulses or biases in the President’s mind, festooned with some academic notions brought to his attention by advisers and other communicants, but that are not tightly tethered to a means-and-ends schema one could legitimately call a strategy. Over time, of course, the President’s fidelity to his own gut instincts sum post hoc to certain patterns that produce a cumulative outcome that is far from random. And the reappearance of certain issues over and over again tend to reify such patterns, at least selectively. So we see strong policy lines on issues where there have been lots of PC meetings over the past seven years—Iran, say—but only faint lines where PC meetings have been few and far between—India/Pakistan/Kashmir, say.
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Inconsistency and double standards, so much anathema to certain kinds of excessively well-ordered minds, are not necessarily liabilities in real life. That is because the world, too—or at least the human social aspects of it we care most about—gives off a distinctive aura of the inconsistent and the multi-measured. So it matters what gut instincts and predilections lie behind the chaos to insinuate into policy whatever order it comes to have. Even short of an actual strategy, then, what are Barack Obama’s gut instincts, and how have they applied to Syria?
If we were to put the most formal face on an answer to this question, it would go like this: Obama is sold on offshore balancing. He thinks the United States is overinvested in the Middle East—a term he and several advisers have used—and underinvested in Asia. He thinks that if the United States stops acting like a control freak with a Cold War hangover, and just gets out of the way in several parts of the world, we’ll end up with a foreign policy that is less dangerous (no chain-ganging via obsolete alliances into wars in which we have no vital interests), less expensive (no need for that vast foreign basing footprint or hugely expensive defense budget), and less a distraction from vital needs for reform here at home. He thinks that other countries take us for an adversary because we support their adversaries, so if we distance ourselves from traditional friends and allies, then we’ll be able to engage them productively. The President has let slip for example—in reference to being reminded by Jeffrey Goldberg about Saudi discomforts in this case—that “change can be difficult” for those grown used to open-ended American protection.
The result overall has been a severe ratcheting down of what constitutes a threat to U.S. vital interests. Threats of mass-casualty terrorism, particularly if joined to weapons-of-mass destruction proliferation, constitute a category of vital interest like no other in this President’s view. Managing the rise of China is a structural concern, also deserving of concerted attention. But Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Eurozone distempers and all the other headline soaks that pop into view from time to time are no longer vital interests, and only by “leading from behind” or not leading at all will responsible governments come to own up to their own security obligations. This is, in other words, a whole new way of thinking about burden sharing. Yes, the interregnum can be messy—it is messy, for revisionist powers are trying to fill the vacuum. But Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Japan, India, Nigeria perhaps, and several other states are slowly but surely passing the test of stepping up to the plate, so what we need is patience and a little bit of luck.
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/10/03/putin-obama-and-the-middle-east/
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