Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the president’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.”
— Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker, May 2 issue
To be precise, leading from behind is a style, not a doctrine. Doctrines involve ideas, but since there are no discernible ones that make sense of Obama’s foreign policy — Lizza’s painstaking two-year chronicle shows it to be as ad hoc, erratic, and confused as it appears — this will have to do.
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And it surely is an accurate description, from President Obama’s shocking passivity during Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution to his dithering on Libya — acting at the very last moment, then handing off to a bickering coalition, yielding the current bloody stalemate. It’s been a foreign policy of hesitation, delay, and indecision, marked by plaintive appeals to the (fictional) “international community” to do what only America can.
But underlying that style, assures this Obama adviser, there really are ideas. Indeed, “two unspoken beliefs,” explains Lizza. “That the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world.”
Amazing. This is why Obama is deliberately diminishing American presence, standing, and leadership in the world?
Take proposition one: We must “lead from behind” because U.S. relative power is declining. Even if you accept the premise, it’s a complete non sequitur. What does China’s rising GDP have to do with American buck-passing on Libya, misjudging Iran, appeasing Syria?
True, China is rising. But first, it is the only power of any significance rising militarily relative to us. Russia is recovering from levels of military strength so low that it barely registers globally. And European power is in true decline (see their performance — except for the British — in Afghanistan and their current misadventures in Libya).
And second, the challenge of a rising Chinese military is still exclusively regional. It would affect a war over Taiwan. It has zero effect on anything significantly beyond China’s coast. China has no blue-water navy. It has no foreign bases. It cannot project power globally. It might in the future — but by what logic should that paralyze us today?
Proposition two: We must lead from behind because we are reviled. Pray tell, when were we not? During Vietnam? Or earlier, under Eisenhower? When his vice president was sent on a good-will trip to Latin America, he was spat upon and so threatened by the crowds that he had to cut short his trip. Or maybe later, under the blessed Reagan? The Reagan years were marked by vast demonstrations in the capitals of our closest allies denouncing America as a warmongering menace taking the world into nuclear winter.
“Obama came of age politically,” explains Lizza, “during the post–Cold War era, a time when America’s unmatched power created widespread resentment.” But the world did not begin with the coming to consciousness of Barack Obama. Cold War resentments ran just as deep.
It is the fate of any assertive superpower to be envied, denounced, and blamed for everything under the sun. Nothing has changed. Moreover, for a country so deeply reviled, why during the massive unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, and Syria have anti-American demonstrations been such a rarity?
Who truly reviles America the hegemon? The world that Obama lived in and that shaped him intellectually: the elite universities; his Hyde Park milieu (including his not-to-be-mentioned friends, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn); the church he attended for two decades, ringing with sermons more virulently anti-American than anything heard in today’s full-throated uprising of the Arab Street.
It is the liberal elites who revile the American colossus and devoutly wish to see it cut down to size. Leading from behind — diminishing America’s global standing and assertiveness — is a reaction to their view of America, not the world’s.
Other presidents take anti-Americanism as a given, rather than evidence of American malignancy, believing — as do most Americans — in the rightness of our cause and the nobility of our intentions. Obama thinks anti-Americanism is a verdict on America’s fitness for leadership. I would suggest that “leading from behind” is a verdict on Obama’s fitness for leadership.
Leading from behind is not leading. It is abdicating. It is also an oxymoron. Yet a sympathetic journalist, channeling an Obama adviser, elevates it to a doctrine. The president is no doubt flattered. The rest of us are merely stunned.
Mr K, "Obama is deliberately diminishing American presence, standing, and leadership in the world" because he wants to destroy America as a capitalist, free-enterprise republic. Has he not made this clear?
President Obama's reaction to the Arab Spring could be expressed, packaged, and sold more felicitously -- *any* quantity of articulation and salesmanship would be greater than his total score of zero thus far -- but his choices have been correct. The fact is that there is nothing that President Obama could have done which would have changed the result in any of the affected countries.
In particular, to contend that the President's approach to Libya has "yielded" the present bloody stalemate is unfair and untrue. Only an Iraqi style invasion could have changed the result. Given that anything less a full-on shock and awe invasion would have had any effect in any of the Arab Spring events thus far, the most likely result of any response lying between the invasion option at one end and the hands off option at the other would be to earn the enmity of the participants, not to mention the Muslim ummah as a whole. Say it again: any middling effort at intervention on the part of President Obama could do America no good, and would be likely to create yet more enmity toward us. Therefore, hands off is the correct policy.
On a more global level, it is also the correct choice for America to throttle back on playing the world's policeman. We can't afford it, for one thing. The primary purpose of American military primacy is to advance American commercial interests. We have long since passed the tipping point where the cost of funding military primacy exceeds the value of the economic benefits.
Therefore, going forward, let Europe fund its own defense. Make a power sharing arrangement with China. Engender a Special Relationship with China, such as we have with the UK. Devote the same effort to securing natural resources around the world as we presently expend on military strength. Stop fighting the last war, survey the horizon, and plan for the future. It is not apparent that these conclusions match President Obama's conclusions. But they are certainly not inconsistent with what he's doing so far. Carry on, is the correct advice.
Finally, saber rattlers: be fair. Admit that, with respect to most things you favor -- Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, drone missile attacks, the Patriot Act, military spending, undercover and special operations -- this Administration has been the third term of the Bush Administration.
Mr. Krauthhammer claims, "The rest of us are merely stunned."
Just as U.S. Troops were poised to depose the ruthless menance Saddam Hussein in March of 2003, President Bill Clinton gave a rousing speech to the his Party's faithful in New York City. America "needs to be," Mr. Clinton demanded, "creating a world that we would like to live in when we're not the biggest power on the block."
This 'America is a bully' has been standard Democrat Party dogma since 1972. For pundits, such as Krauthhammer, to be suddenly "stunned" nearly forty years later tells us more about said pundits than it does those who embrace this childish 'America is the problem' belief.
Uh, glad to see you're finally up to speed, Charles.
Spot on, Charles. The left will make any excuse for their vessel to have the public view him through the same view finder he views himself. There is no limit to their contortions.
We are now seeing what happens to a nation and a globe when there is no moral compass. Where the only interests that are served are those that serve to keep social justice profiteers in positions of power and influence.
Leading from behind has made Obama look weak among our allies and enemies alike. Take the recent trip to Brazil with Obama praising the Brazilian's and offering financial support, yet when Obama needed a vote for the no fly zone in Libya, Brazil looked the other way. Brazilian protesters to Obama's visit were so vocal they managed to alter the scheduled outdoor speech Obama was to present.
Leading from behind is the sure way to be reviled among our allies and laughed upon of our adversaries.
180_Out: Had Obama did what he did, only 3 weeks earlier, it is quite likely that Khaddafy would be in exile now, or dead. It was the dithering, waiting for others to take the lead, that allowed a bad situation to become so much worse that only boots on the ground would help.
As to your other point. Reagan helped the Polish revolution defeat the Soviet backed puppet govt without sending in a single soldier or military advisor. He just supplied them with moral support, and material aid where possible.
The problem with ignoring the rest of the world, as so many would have us do, is that we live in the same world. Chaos elsewhere, will eventually reach our shores.
This is not an argument in favor of intervening everywhere, everytime.
But the flip side of that, never intevening, at all, is equally absurd.
Each situation must be evaluated on its own. What are the chances of success? What are the probable costs? What good/bad things might result from our interventions? What good/bad things might result from our failure to intervene?
A working definition of liberalism is group-motivated morality. Conservatives tend to be more individually-motivated. Obama's "Lead from Behind" doctrine stems from him waiting for the group to define what is morally right. Being group-motivated, the Left is also more likely to buy into other nations' criticisms of the United States.
There are other examples of the Left/Right external/internal moral compass in business, entrepreneurship, invention, and other risk-taking enterprises. The Left seeks Big Government because they are incapable of finding their own moral compass, and seek comfort and safety in numbers.
@A Regular Guy: So you buy into Dana Millbank's notion that we're all too stupid to understand Obama's complex mental process...that he is simply too smart to be our President.
If that theory holds water then the corollary is that FDR, JFK, LBJ, and Clinton were all blustering morons incapable of rubbing two brain cells together in order to gin up ideas and policies. Do you agree with that too?
Bottom line: No one can point to any issue Obama has been out front on. At every juncture he's been late, he's been reactionary, he's been diffident, and more often than not he's been woefully inadequate. Even his much lauded (by the left) healthcare plan he turned over to Pelosi and Reid and after they rammed it through Congress Obama delayed enacting it into law so he could go on a date with Michelle.
It seems to me that the Repub nominee who hammers the President with these 2 notions of America is going to win. It may be close, but whenever a politician has publicly rebuked his country, success hasn't followed. This one (supposedly friendly!) article may be Obama's undoing.
Further to Andy D's premise, nobody can point to any situation that has actually been improved by the application of President Obama's preferred "solution", whether applied early, late or at any time in between.
It would be much easier to accept his positioning, posturing and piddling of himself and the timing therof, if any of it actually solved the particular problem it attempted to address or ignore, would it not?
I am not naive enough to believe the US has always behaved altruistically, but does anyone in their right mind believe if China or Russia or the French for that matter, were the sole superpower in the world, their foreign policy would be more benevolent than that of the US over the same time period?
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