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something to be desired.
“It’s a case for interventionism but not overreach,” says Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, Ben Rhodes, in an attempt to clarify the muddle that characterizes the administration’s approach.
Nice try. The truth is, even when the administration’s words and stated principles sound clear, its policies are inconsistent and frequently incoherent. President Obama’s America is a passive, confused, and ineffective superpower. Some years ago, one administration insider tried to describe Obama’s approach as “leading from behind.” But America isn’t leading at all.
America is in retreat internationally, just as the need for U.S. leadership is greater than at any time since the end of the Cold War. It bears repeating: The world’s superpower has no foreign-policy vision or strategy—unless one believes that Obama’s doctrine of “Don’t do stupid stuff” is visionary or that his resolute selling of his policies as anti-Bush and anti-war is a workable framework for dealing with a dangerous world.32 Even when we do determine to pursue something, we lack will and follow-through. Our abdications know no borders: We’re being kicked off the International Space Station by the Russians, and the administration has even urged us to surrender control of the Internet to a shadowy global consortium. The U.S. presence in the world has become so passive that the thuggish, brutal leader of Nigeria’s Boko Haram, flaunting the group’s monstrous abduction in April 2014 of hundreds of schoolgirls, released a video in which he dared Americans to retaliate. Any American force, even a small team of Marines, would make quick work of these Islamist fanatics. But like Vladimir Putin—and like Xi Jinping and Bashar al-Assad and Hassan Rouhani and Kim Jong Un—Abubakar Shekau knows that the Americans aren’t coming for him.
In short, President Obama has manifestly failed to provide effective foreign-policy leadership—and this failure is due in large part to the president’s own inclinations to de-emphasize American primacy and then expect the world to follow his vision for it.
“Obama’s surprisability about history, which is why he is always (as almost everyone now recognizes) ‘playing catch-up,’ is owed to certain sanguine and unknowledgeable expectations that he brought with him to the presidency,” Leon Wieseltier wrote in the New Republic.33 Indeed, Obama seemed to crave a world in which American power is no longer essential, but the world doesn’t share that wish. “There are many places in the world where we are despised not for taking action but for not taking action,” Wieseltier observed. “Our allies do not trust us. Our enemies do not fear us. What if American preeminence is good for the world and good for America? Let’s talk about that.”34
General Wanquan’s warning to Chuck Hagel about American inability to “contain” China was unfortunately correct—especially because, even as the international situation becomes less stable, America is slashing its defense budget. The Army is projected to shrink to its smallest size since before World War II. As the Brookings Institute’s Robert Kagan argued at a recent Council on Foreign Relations meeting, our budgetary challenges don’t require such extreme cuts.35 “For diplomacy to succeed, it must be supported by a strong and credible defense,” former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Now is not the time to weaken our military, but that is exactly what’s happening.”36 Indeed, we will always need enough troops to fight wars; it’s absurd to argue otherwise and fall back on Predator drones and our expertise in cyber warfare.
This military retrenchment is all the more baffling in light of what Russia and China are doing militarily (explored at length in Chapter 4). Russian defense spending is set to rise 44 percent over the next three years,37 and its naval budget, barely 10 percent of America’s just a few years ago, is now approaching 50 percent of the American outlay.38 In June 2014, four Russian strategic bombers conducted practice runs near Alaska; two of the bombers triggered U.S. air-defense-system warnings after they came within 50 miles of the California coast. A retired American Air Force general, Thomas McInerney, who served as Alaska commander for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said that he couldn’t remember a time when Russian strategic bombers had come that close to the American coast, and he blamed the episode on America’s “unilateral disarmament, inviting adventurism by the Russians.”39
China, meanwhile, will spend more on defense by the end of 2015 than Britain, France, and Germany combined,40 and Beijing is set to overtake the U.S. in its number of naval “major combatant vessels” by 2020.41 Hawkish officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) call for “short, sharp wars” to assert Chinese interests.42 The hawks seem to be winning the policy debate: Whereas in the past, China’s policies in the South China Sea have been erratic, leaving neighbors guessing as to when the next provocation would come, more recently, as we’ve seen, China has pursued an unyielding approach to its territorial claims, provoking high-profile clashes with Vietnam, the Philippines, and others. Beijing appears determined to pursue a strategy of hardline aggression in the Asia Pacific.43
The Chinese buildup comes in the context of Beijing’s efforts to redefine the alliance system in Asia—loosening the grip of the U.S. on its Asian neighbors and asserting its primacy over the region. Xi Jinping made this explicit in May 2014 in a speech in Shanghai, in which he outlined a “new regional security cooperation architecture” that excluded the U.S. Admiral Sun Jianguo, the PLA general staff’s deputy chief, was more blunt: According to the New York Times, he described the American alliance system in the region as “an antiquated relic of the Cold War.”44 And at the Shangri La security dialogue in Singapore, Major General Zhu Chengdu openly criticized American hegemony in the Pacific, warning ominously: “If you take China as an enemy, China will absolutely become the enemy of the U.S.”45 The simple conclusion is inescapable: Asia is for Asians—and Russians. American defense cutbacks aren’t confined to conventional armed forces. We are also rolling back our nuclear armaments under the leadership of a president who has made no secret of his goal of someday reaching nuclear zero. That’s a goal not shared, needless to say, by adversaries of America and the West.
Obama’s high-minded yet strangely aloof and out-of-touch approach is evident in his reaction to Vladimir Putin, as it is in his foreign policy generally. Obama regards Putin’s behavior with a combination of condescension and naiveté: “Mr. Putin’s decisions aren’t just bad for Ukraine,” he says. “Over the long term, they’re going to be bad for Russia.”46 He fails to consider that from Putin’s perspective, aggression in Ukraine makes good strategic sense. In seizing Crimea, Putin has “acquired not just the Crimean landmass but also a maritime zone more than three times its size with the rights to underwater resources potentially worth trillions of dollars,” William J. Broad detailed in the New York Times.47 Obama also conveniently overlooks Russian success in turning more nations in Eurasia against the open, democratic Western model. According to a new report from Freedom House: “Ten years ago, one in five people in Eurasia lived under Consolidated Authoritarian rule, as defined in the report. Today, it’s nearly four in five, and the trend is accelerating.”48
Set against those real-world gains, why would Putin lose any sleep over Obama’s haughty disapproval? Indeed, as Putin himself said of Obama recently: “Who is he to judge, seriously?”49
Obama’s detachment has long distressed champions of American power, who often reside right of center on the political spectrum. The president’s supporters dismiss those critiques, but it’s not so easy to shrug off the criticism coming from two former Obama defense secretaries: Panetta (who also served as CIA chief) and Robert Gates.
“When the president of the United States draws a red line, the credibility of this country is dependent on him backing up his word,” Panetta said last year, after Obama had backed down from confronting Syria at the 11th hour.50 In his memoir, published early in 2014, Gates harshly criticized the commander in chief, particularly for what he saw as Obama’s failed leadership and commitment to the war in Afghanistan. Obama, “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Gates wrote. “For him, it’s all about getting out.”51
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