Obama needs a strategy

Understanding Obama’s foreign policy flops

Last November, Foreign Policy published an article about George W Bush’s failed approaches to Vladimir Putin when he was the president from 2001 to 2009. The article chronicles how Bush 43 tried to woo Putin and treat Russia as a friend only to give up exasperated. In one place, Bush even tells Tony Blair, the British prime minister, that talking to Putin is like talking to a high school student and was a whole series of juvenile arguments. Much of what was said in the piece is not new. Bush himself has written about his dismay and disappointment with Putin in his book Decision Points and the incidents surrounding the Bush-Putin dialogues have been well chronicled. So there was nothing surprising about the article. What is surprising however is the fact the Obama foreign policy team did not seem to have digested all of this when they embarked on the now-infamous reset policy. Or may be they did and thought they could do one better than the Toxic Texan. Given the shambles that is the US-Russian relations now, it is probably instructive to look back and analyse how the Obama team got things so wrong. Many experts have blamed Putin for the problem while others, like conservatives, have termed Obama’s foreign policy approach as naive. The answer, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. Yes, Putin is partly to blame for the mess but it is also true that when a big superpower does not go with its eyes closed when dealing with a truculent, former adversary still smarting from losing 20th century’s biggest idealogical conflict and the loss of empire and prestige. Bush learnt to his cost that Putin and Russia are nowhere like what the western countries have imagined them to be. Obama’s team should have learned from their experience. They thought however they could do better and went rushing in with a badly designed `reset’ policy and spent years wondering why Putin was not responding. The Russian president can be criticised for a number of things but the blame in this case belongs to the Obama administration. Foreign policy is not a morals classroom where the best heaved, best mannered student wins. It is often a high-stakes, brutal game of power where it is important to understand your opponent’s intentions and devise a strategy accordingly. Leaders don’t win because they have best intentions. They win because they are better at outsmarting their opponents. The trick is to do this without letting them know that they have been outsmarted. John F Kennedy did this when at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he forced Khruschev to back down but not before giving him a graceful way out by agreeing to remove missiles that America did not need from Turkey. The fact that this did not help Khrushchev in the Kremlin power struggle is another matter. Secondly, Obama needs a strategy, a vision. It is not enough being the anti-George W Bush. True, the last thing America and the world needed was another doctrine but look at it this way. Whether you like it or not, a lot of countries look to America for leadership. They don’t want to be serenaded by platitudes and promises of best behaviour. The problem for Obama administration was that they thought just being `not George Bush’ was enough. No more cowboy antics, shoot-from-the-hip rhetoric and hey presto! the world would start to love America. Sorry, that is not how it works. You need to define your role, your purpose and your stance on issues. Obama admin did that, but gave the wrong impression, about an America that is timid, unwilling to go to war, fight for its beliefs and stand up for its friends. Friends and allies were rightly dismayed and suspicious while opponents chucked with delight and plotted aggressive moves. The 2009 Cairo speech was another example of Obama naivete. If he wanted to reach out to Muslims, he could have done it in a number of ways. He could have increased aid, pushed for Turkey’s inclusion in the EU or done something to help impoverished African Muslim nations. Instead he chose to make an expansive speech in an important Muslim city which also happens to be the birthplace of Muslim Brotherhood and appeared to tick off Israelis for their hardline stance. No wonder the Israelis are miffed. An irate Israel is as much an impediment to peace as squabbling Palestinians. This kind of behaviour is repeated in other instances like the Hosni Mubarak overthrow and the Iran nuclear stand-off. The Obama admin is so eager to compromise, so eager to appear conciliatory and that it forgets that the world is neatly divided into rival camps. If you turn your back on friends, your enemies rejoice and your friends become wary. It is difficult to do a deal in such a circumstances. More than anybody else, Obama had a great chance to make an impact on the world stage. He was a fresh face, and appeared to eager to find smart, technocratic solutions to global problems. It is a pity that his secretary of state could not find a proper translation for the reset word in Russian in 2009 when she first met with the Russians. Things have gone steadily downhill since then.