The
International Herald Tribune, October 27, 2011 Thursday, BY THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Barack
Kissinger Obama
Why President
Obama has been more successful at implementing George W. Bush's antiterrorism
policy than his own foreign policy.
Who would
have predicted it? Barack Obama has turned out to be so much more
adept at implementing George W. Bush's foreign policy than Bush was,
but he is less adept at implementing his own. The reasons,
though, are obvious.
In his own
way, President Obama has brought the
United States to the right strategy
for Bush's ''war on terrorism.'' It is a serious, focused combination of (1) global
intelligence coordination, (2) targeted killing of known terrorists
and (3) limited interventions - like Libya - that leverage popular
forces on the ground and allies, as well as a judicious use of U.S. power, so
that we keep the costs and risks down. In Libya, Obama saved lives and gave
Libyans a chance to build a decent society. What they do with this opportunity
is now up to them. I am still wary, but Obama
handled his role exceedingly well.
No doubt George
Bush and Dick Cheney thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be
precisely such focused, limited operations. Instead, they each turned out to be
like a bad subprime mortgage - a small down payment with a huge balloon five
years down the road. They thought they would be able to ''flip'' the
house before the balloon came due. But partly because of their
incompetence and lack of planning, it took much longer to flip the house to new
owners and the price America paid was huge. Iraq may still have a decent outcome - I hope so, and it would be
important - but even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.
So let's be
clear: Up to now, as a commander in chief in the war on terrorism, Obama and
his national security team have been so much smarter, tougher and
cost-efficient in keeping the country safe than the ''adults'' they replaced.
It isn't even close, which is why the G.O.P.'s elders have such a hard time
admitting it.
But while
Obama has been deft at implementing Bush's antiterrorism policy, he has been less
successful with his own foreign policy. His (1) Arab-Israeli diplomacy has been a mess. His hopes
of engaging (2) Iran
foundered on the rocks of, well, Iran. He's made little effort to pull together
a multilateral coalition to buttress the (3)
Arab Awakening, in places like Egypt, to handle the post-revolution
challenges. His ill-considered decision to double down on (4) Afghanistan could prove fatal. He is in a war of
words with (5) Pakistan.
His global (6) climate
policy is an invisible embarrassment. And the coolly calculating (7) Chinese and Russians,
while occasionally throwing him a bone, pursue their interests with scant
regard to Obama's preferences. Why is that?
Here I come
to defend Obama not to condemn him. True, he was naïve about how much his star
power, or that of his secretary of state, would get others to swoon in behind
us. But Obama's
frustrations
in bagging a big, nonmilitary foreign policy achievement
are rooted in a much broader structural problem - one that also explains why
we have not
produced a history-changing secretary of state since
the titans Henry
Kissinger, George Shultz and James Baker.
The reason: the world has gotten messier
and America has lost
leverage. When Kissinger
was negotiating in the Middle East in the 1970s, he had to persuade just three people to make a deal: an all-powerful Syrian dictator, Hafez
al-Assad; an Egyptian pharaoh, Anwar Sadat; and an Israeli prime minister with
a huge majority, Golda Meir.
To make
history, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by contrast, need to
extract a deal from a crumbling Syrian regime, a crumbled Egyptian regime, a
fractious and weak Israeli coalition and a Palestinian movement broken into two
parts.
We don't even
bother anymore to negotiate with the flimsy civilian government in Pakistan. We
just go right to its military, which only wants to perpetuate the conflict with
India - and exploit Afghanistan as a chip in that war - to justify the
Pakistani Army's endless consumption of so many state resources.
Making
history through diplomacy ''depends on making deals with other governments,''
says Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert
(and co-author with me on ''That Used to Be Us''). ''But now, to make such deals, we actually have to build the governments we want to negotiate with - and
we can't do that.'' Indeed, in so many hot spots today, we have to do
nation-building before we can do diplomacy. So many states propped up by the
Cold War are failing.
And where
states are stronger - like Russia, China and Iran - we have less leverage because leverage is ultimately a function of economic strength.
And while many of America's companies are still strong, our government is mired
in debt. When a nation is in debt as deep as we are - with severe defense cuts
inevitable - its bark is always bigger
than its bite.
The best way
for us to gain leverage on Russia and Iran would be with an energy
policy that reduced the price and significance of oil. The only way to gain
more leverage on China is if we increase our savings and graduation
rates - and export more and consume less. That isn't in the cards.
So, Mama,
tell your children not to grow up to be secretary of state or a foreign policy
president - not until others have done more nation-building abroad and we've
done more nation-building at home.
