Candid on many levels, always interesting to listen to a president when they'll
soon be departing. There was a bit of it I found disingenuous but when it comes
to Israeli policy US presidents are less than forthright...that's pretty much what
I expect from any US president.

The hawk forces from within his circle and what is revealed is telling, in short, this
OP reaffirms the best of the choices for Democrats back in 2008 was Obama,
no doubt about it. I wonder if he would agree with me that he has laid the
ground work for the next president to continue to be cautious as he has...Sanders for
POTUS.

I know he unofficially endorsed Hillary, twice..that's how great she was doing. lol
I get how he wants TPP and she is likely to continue that, but I suspect he
will continue to wince at her foreign policy propensities for military action.

You have to give Goldberg credit. Fair as can be.

I was quibbling and griping in my head reading it.

And I do wait with much anticipation to see what the reactions are as this gets around.

He really laid about him there, the scorn, and as usual his timing is perfect.

Who has the stature now to contradict him?

But you know they will.

"Obama Unchained"

Without disparaging his legacy it is what it is..reputable historians will
write it out eventually and the best ones will do so within the context
of all the obstacles that he inherited, were thrown at him and so forth.
Our election system will be discussed and the blatant racism, all of it.
I am convinced the Iran deal would never and I do mean never would
have happened under a Clinton administration. There is a great deal
to admire under his two terms.

Goldberg's OP gives a very good view and comes across honest.
Obama's blind spot/denial if you will was clear to me in this piece
I read yesterday. It happens to the best of them and he is no different
in that regard. I did not post it as an OP, it could be construed as
offensive and right now is not the time.

Why Is Obama Convinced His Wall Street Reforms Work?
He accuses critics of cynicism, without recognizing that he bears blame.
By David Dayen
March 8, 2016

https://newrepublic.com/article/131258/obama-convinced-wall-street-reforms-work

A bit too defensive for Spock, now and then.

And too dismissive of difficulties and people now and then. But I thought he was sending messages there, too. Such overt candor is unusual for him, very. I doubt it is done casually (assuming Goldberg in some sense got permission, which I do).

I can relate to a lot of it, so I have to watch my own bias, like I said, he's an Eisenhower Republican is what he is, and I'm not.

I meant to add earlier, one of my favorite moments from the Goldberg piece
was Obama telling Power to back off.

"Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he once snapped. LOL

Perfect response.

Last edited Thu Mar 10, 2016, 06:17 PM - Edit history (1)

I've been wanting to yell that at him for about four years.

But on the other hand, the crisis of Capitalism, the brutal search for returns on inflated valuations that is going on now against diminshing returns available from an over-exploited environment and society, that is still a bit much to swallow.

But Climate Change is going to get us there anyway, if we survive.

The Bibi moment was excellent too, as you say:

. In one of Netanyahu’s meetings with the president, the Israeli prime minister launched into something of a lecture about the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives, and Obama felt that Netanyahu was behaving in a condescending fashion, and was also avoiding the subject at hand: peace negotiations. Finally, the president interrupted the prime minister: “Bibi, you have to understand something,” he said. “I’m the African American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”

Bibi the asshole, never fails to fail. Erdogan too, another jerk.



I'm not sure Bernie will use this one, but I would. lol

Biden, who is acerbic about Clinton’s foreign-policy judgment, has said privately, “Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir.”)

But he also thinks rhetoric should be weaponized sparingly, if at all, in today’s more ambiguous and complicated international arena.

Bullshit will only take you so far.

“If you were to say, for instance, tmhat we’re going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise”

“Shouldn’t we finish up the two wars we have before we look for another?” (That's Gates)

Obama flipped this plea on its head. “When you have a professional army,” he once told me, “that is well armed and sponsored by two large states”—Iran and Russia—“who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict …” He paused. “The notion that we could have—in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces—changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”

You don't win wars just because you are the good guy, or because you are more sincere.

“Don’t do stupid shit.”

Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’?”

I think this is hilarious.

“dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.”

“I had come into office with the strong belief that the scope of executive power in national-security issues is very broad, but not limitless.”

Take that, Cheney.

Obama pulled Putin aside, he recalled to me, and told the Russian president “that if he forced Assad to get rid of the chemical weapons, that that would eliminate the need for us taking a military strike.”

His initiative, one of the questions I had. It was presented as Putin's idea at the time, like it was a trick.

“I suppose you could call me a realist in believing we can’t, at any given moment, relieve all the world’s misery,” he said. “We have to choose where we can make a real impact.”

This seems obvious to me.

That’s a weird argument to me, the notion that if we use our moral authority to say ‘This is a brutal regime, and this is not how a leader should treat his people,’ once you do that, you are obliged to invade the country and install a government you prefer.”

It is a weird argument.

“I also believe that the world is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place, and full of hardship and tragedy. And in order to advance both our security interests and those ideals and values that we care about, we’ve got to be hardheaded at the same time as we’re bighearted, and pick and choose our spots, and recognize that there are going to be times where the best that we can do is to shine a spotlight on something that’s terrible, but not believe that we can automatically solve it. There are going to be times where our security interests conflict with our concerns about human rights. There are going to be times where we can do something about innocent people being killed, but there are going to be times where we can’t.”

“One of the reasons I am so focused on taking action multilaterally where our direct interests are not at stake is that multilateralism regulates hubris"

Trying to fence the War Party in.

“We have history,” he said. “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people’s suspicions.”

He knows.

Given Goldberg's hawkish background, the article was an interesting read in contrasts, particularly coming out during primary. Biden comes out pretty favorable in the whole article for those of us on the left who haven't favored Regime Change. This snip:

The President gets to have his say, one has to assume the quotes are real, etc. It reflects extraordinary access. So I think Obama consented to it, at least. Which is "unusual". And that he would pick Goldberg seems Obama-like to me.

It's not hard to interpret it as a defense of various policies and episodes he is criticized for ...

a hit piece at all. I just found it curious that Goldberg released the article now since he had been interviewing Obama for awhile. Obama must have wanted the article published now to explain his views and my question was: Why Now? And, given Goldberg's interesting background it was especially intriguing to me. It was a very interesting read. I just got to read your and Jefferson 23's insightful comments about the article.

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/goldberg_jeffrey

Since the summer of 2013, when President Obama walked up to the red line over the use of chemical weapons in Syria and then pivoted away from it, it’s become something of a truism among Washington hawks that this bit of cowardice paved the way for Russia’s Vladimir Putin to take Crimea and invade eastern Ukraine some six months later. “When President Obama declared Friday that ‘there will be costs’ for any Russian intervention in Ukraine,” Marc Thiessen, the former George W. Bush speechwriter and American Enterprise Institute fellow, wrote in 2014, “you could hear the laughter emanating from the Kremlin—followed by the sound of Russian military vehicles roaring into Crimea and seizing control of the peninsula. ‘Costs?’ Vladimir Putin must have thought. Just like the ‘costs’ Obama imposed on the Assad regime in Syria?”

But did Obama’s refusal to bomb Syria in 2013 really give Putin the green light in Ukraine? It is a question Jeffrey Goldberg poses to Obama, who, of course, swats it away. “Look, this theory is so easily disposed of that I’m always puzzled by how people make the argument,” Obama says. “I don’t think anybody thought that George W. Bush was overly rational or cautious in his use of military force. And as I recall, because apparently nobody in this town does, Putin went into Georgia [in 2008] on Bush’s watch, right smack dab in the middle of us having over 100,000 troops deployed in Iraq.” Obama repudiates the “crazy Nixon” thesis, which says, essentially: Be crazy, be unpredictably harsh, and geopolitics are your oyster. (Ironically, this is the approach Putin’s domestic critics accuse their president of using: How do you get back at the West for blacklisting Russian officials involved in the killing of the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky? Ban American adoptions of Russian orphans! They’ll never know what hit ‘em!)

---

“After the Syria deal, Putin was flying high, he was ecstatic, he expected a lot from relations with the U.S.,” Pavlovsky recalled. “The Ukrainian crisis changed a lot.” An accord mediated by Russia and the West that would have left Yanukovych in power dissolved soon after it was struck in February 2014, as Yanukovych fled Kiev in response to threats of violence. “The accord ... was forgotten, and it was seen as betrayal,” Pavlovsky said. “And Putin decided that if that’s how you’re going to play, I’ll play that way, too. There’s a connection, but it’s not the one you paint.” If anything, in Putin’s view, it was American actions in Kiev, rather than its inaction in Syria, that prompted Putin to grab Crimea and invade east Ukraine.

Another interesting point: By the summer of 2013, Obama had already been president for four and a half years, and no one in the Kremlin had any illusions about how he saw the world. His decision in Syria was not exactly shocking or out of character for the Russians, especially after the hesitation he showed in Libya. “For Putin to understand that it’s not Bush and not Reagan, you didn’t need to wait for Syria to happen,” said Lukyanov. “To see that Obama is a totally different type of leader, that he’s different from Bush and Reagan and Clinton, you didn’t need to wait for Syria. It was apparent from the beginning.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/russia-syria-red-line-obama-doctrine-goldberg/473319/

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/russia-syria-red-line-obama-doctrine-goldberg/473319/

It's infantile. You are weak or you are not weak, it's not some performance you do, it's the state or your affairs. You work to make the state of your affairs stronger, and that makes you stronger, it's not a question of new drapes. That is the thinking of weak people, to be worried about how they look, whether they look vulnerable.

On the one hand you have the media having a lovefest with Obama and Trudeau over climate change. Nice to see.

On the other hand you have the British media and the War Party media going all huffy over what was published yesterday.

By Kevin Drum

I've long believed that the attack on Libya was something of a watershed for President Obama. Before that, he may have been more skeptical of using American military power than most people, but he was still basically on board the consensus train. After that, he finally felt in his gut what he had long believed in his mind: American intervention, especially in the Middle East, just doesn't work very well.

---

No wonder I like this guy so much. I'm going to miss him no matter who wins the election in November.

Goldberg's entire piece is long, but well worth a read—and I might have more to say about it later. But I found the Syria episode especially interesting. A couple of years ago I wrote that maintaining "credibility" was "perhaps the cause of more dumb wars than anything else in history," and that fighting back against this notion was a "rare sign of wisdom in a president." Basically, Obama made a mistake in setting out the red line in the first place, and eventually figured out that it was unwise to let our foreign policy be dictated by a brief, intemperate remark. That's especially true when all the loudest hawks in Congress turn out to be a bunch of gutless armchair generals when you ask them to put their hawkishness to a roll-call vote.

In any case: good for Obama. He's correct that this decision cost him politically. He's also correct that it was the right decision to make. Frankly, the mere fact that it pissed off so many of our Middle East allies—who plainly care about little except having America fight their tribal battles for them—is enough to convince me. American intervention in the Middle East has generally been pretty disastrous, and it's long past time for everyone to figure that out. That very definitely includes all the folks who are actually in the Middle East.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/obama-im-very-proud-backing-bombing-syria

I had lost the link to Atlantic's "Obama Doctrine" and had to do a quick search--and look at what turned up, by accident. This is almost creepy in how Obama has followed what he originally intended. The part about "dignity" and a more positive view of Samantha Power (than I would have) is all I could find that was different from the policy he has followed since elected. And, now we have Hillary/Bill as candidates again and an unknown on the Repub side.
Worth a quick scan read of the whole thing, when you have time, because it goes so well with Goldberg's article and yet is from 2008.

-------------------------

For him to make a move.

I remember that and other things, not that piece but the story, and Ackerman.

And other occasions when he has spoken out.

But mostly he doesn't bother, as he said at the end there in Goldberg's report. I remember back then there was a lot of discussion of him as a pragmatic minimalist, which still fits.

But with international affairs you can't rely on that sort of thing, statements, so you have to wait for confirmation, see what they do. Now I feel a little more comfortable that I know how he thinks. He's being consistent.

The comment on Putin was interesting too, who was that aimed at? "doesn't keep me waiting for two hours, unlike some people"

Pragmatic Minimalist. I got the impression at the end of article that he's ready to move on with another life. Sort of a "What Will Be...Will Be" feeling. Which is why maybe the Neocons have their hair on fire, since he thinks the US should be out of the ME, entirely in the future. I wonder if Obama is the last President to think that. I can't think of any candidate, except Bernie, who might favor Obama's path. But, then, it would probably depend on who he was allowed to choose as foreign policy advisers.

Goldberg and Obama didn't discuss Africom, Yemen. Yet how can one promote "Dignity" (as part of a policy) when thousands of refugees have had their towns and cities destroyed, there's nothing to go back to and no place else to go unless they have the top skills that European countries have need of. What happens to those people? No dignity left for them. Does Obama listen to Samantha Power, anymore?

He has certainly followed the original plan of eliminating terrorists with his reliance on strategic drone strikes. But, did those drone strikes create more terrorists or just keep eliminating those identified, (by whom), as leaders while newer leaders still keep emerging.

I felt the Goldberg article was odd in not mentioning Kerry's hard work with Lavrov to get the Iran Deal done. I had thought that Kerry had turned heavily towards diplomacy, after his hysteria over the Red Line and urging bombing Assad, but Goldberg seems to paint him as very hawkish still wanting to lob missiles at night into Syria

About Putin: MSNBC had a very short interview yesterday morning with Goldberg about the article and was asked about the Putin comment. Goldberg said that "Putin keeps everyone waiting but not Obama." But, what you say is what I think I remember reading in the article.

Pragmatic minimlist, ready to leave: I think he is thinking in terms of his endgame, so to speak, which is wise, you don't want to leave to the last moment to think about. So I think he wants to make things clear, in the way he mentions he has not in the past. He pretty much blew the Noecons out of the water, shelled below the waterline, and most of what he says is vanilla conventional wisdom in international affairs, he basically attacked the exceptionalism claim.

That's the Hobbesian part.

I tend to view the drones as a bone thrown to the Pentagon and the War Party in place of a real invasion. "See? We're doing something. I got bin Laden, What did you do?" Etc. I don't believe he expects it to work, and he as much as says so in the piece when he gets into what he calls tribalism.

I thought it was unfair to Kerry, and yet showed him in a good light, loyal, serious, magnanimous. A diplomat. I think he has "grown" a lot in service.

Putin: I think that's the point, Putin wants to get along. Obama doesn't see why not, particularly. He doesn't expect much to begin with. He doesn't think Putin is a big threat to us. Goldberg doesn't like that, but restrains himself, There are several instances of that, it's why I think he had consent to publish.

I think there may have been an expectation that this would cause an uproar, but I don't see it yet. It's more like people are gobsmacked.

By Kevin Drum

I mentioned earlier that I'd probably write a few more posts about Jeffrey Goldberg's essay on President Obama's approach to foreign affairs. Here's the first. It's all about how Obama views Saudi Arabia:

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/obama-has-refreshingly-clear-eyed-view-allies-saudi-arabia

So to the settling of scores. One year from leaving office Barack Obama has, in an epochal interview with the Atlantic, spelt out what he thinks of his European allies. The terms are not generous.

Much has been made of Obama’s comments about David Cameron having been “distracted” away from the focus Libya deserved, post-intervention; and of his remark about Nicolas Sarkozy wanting to “trumpet” French military action over the skies of Benghazi in 2011. But these are small twists, minute irritants – expect PR officers to smooth them over. The key message was elsewhere, and it was much more powerful. It came when Obama spoke of Europeans as “free riders” of the global order and of American might.

The president describes his European allies as powers unable or unwilling to match fine words with resources; prone to asking the US to act but incapable of committing themselves to the efforts required for a sustainable outcome. The lesson is clear: an era has passed, and Europe must now become an effective autonomous actor on major security issues if it is to survive as a stable, liberal, democratic, rules-based entity.

That is not to say that the US role within Nato, as a security guarantor to Europe, will altogether disappear. Obama has never wanted that and neither, one suspects, would his successor. But a page has been turned and the US can no longer be relied upon to address the chaos that is spilling out of the Arab world, and weakening the central tenets of Europe’s liberal order.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/12/obama-right-europe-free-riders-syria-britain-france-germany

So Barack Obama thinks Britain in 2011 left Libya in chaos – and besides it does not pull its weight in the world. Britain thinks that a bit rich, given the shambles America left in Iraq. Then both sides say sorry. They did not mean to be rude.

Thus do we wander across the ethical wasteland of the west’s wars of intervention. We blame and we name-call. We turn deaf ears to the cries of those whose lives we have destroyed. Then we kiss and make up – to each other.

Obama was right first time round about Libya’s civil war. He wanted to keep out. As he recalls to the Atlantic magazine, Libya was “not so at the core of US interests that it makes sense for us to unilaterally strike against the Gaddafi regime”. He cooperated with Britain and France, but on the assumption that David Cameron would clear up the resulting mess. That did not happen because Cameron had won his Falklands war and could go home crowing.

Obama is here describing all the recent “wars of choice”.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/11/libya-barack-obama-imperialism-lite-david-cameron

are used to in the Oval Office

The gargantuan long-read on the “Obama doctrine” that the Atlantic published earlier this week is full of revealing (and at times vaguely “Bulworth”-y) quotes from the president. You should read it if you haven’t already; in terms of illustrating how this allegedly remote and distant man understands the world, only David Remnick’s (similarly mammoth) 2014 piece in the New Yorker comes close.

Yet although Obama spends most of his time defending his foreign policy against those who describe it as a defeatist break from America’s postwar tradition — the piece is clearly intended to be the opening salvo of a campaign to write the first draft of his legacy — it was the president’s explanation of why he’s “controversial” that interested me the most. The “source,” he argues, is his disdain for “the Washington playbook.”

Here’s how he puts it:


http://www.salon.com/2016/03/12/forget_the_washington_playbook_how_the_obama_doctrine_is_so_vastly_different_from_what_americans_are_used_to_in_the_oval_office/

Ronald Dworkin, the legal philosopher who died in 2013, famously used a metaphor once to explain the core of his thinking on the philosophy of law. In the context of American common law and constitutional interpretation, Dworkin analogized the role of judges as the writers of a “chain novel.” The law, per Dworkin, was a collective novel, composed by a sequence of jurists. In his words: “In this enterprise a group of novelists writes a novel seriatim; each novelist in the chain interprets the chapter he has been given in order to write a new chapter, which is then added to what the next novelist receives, and so on.”

When reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s new article in the April 2016 issue of the Atlantic, which seems to have opened the doors to a public debate measuring the legacy of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, I was reminded of Dworkin’s metaphor and wondered if it might be a useful way to think about assessing the foreign policy records of U.S. presidents. Critical to Dworkin’s metaphor wasn’t merely the idea of continuity in the “novel” of law, but jurists had to preserve what he called “narrative coherence” – the idea that law, as interpreted by contemporary judges, had to effectively make sense given what had come before it. The core narrative had to persist, binding judges to interpret and reason about the law within certain bounds, proscribed by their predecessors and, ultimately, the constitution.

American presidents have a similar task when it comes to foreign policy. Even though the challenges they’ll face will appear discrete and episodic, there is a fundamental task that has guided the exercise of American power abroad since 1945, which is making sure that the liberal international order that was set up after the Second World War persists unchanged. This is the “narrative” to the story of why American power has mattered.

Whatever a president’s failings and regrets regarding how specific crises were handled and mishandled, as long as this fundamental objective isn’t lost, we can say that their presidency wasn’t a “disaster.” In particular, with the prospect of an outsider like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, neither of whom has shown much interest in preserving the liberal international order, potentially on the doorstep of the White House, it may be an opportune moment to take stock of just how critical it has been to have U.S. presidents who recognize the fundamental importance of preserving that order.

http://thediplomat.com/2016/03/why-obama-got-the-fundamentals-of-american-foreign-policy-right/

Please note, this is NOT sarcasm here.

---

Obama raises valid points, but the about-face was a pivotal foreign policy moment which served as a key test of whether he would back up his words with military action. Because he did not, the reversal has become a prime example of the US losing its credibility.

---

In his first term, he came to believe that only a handful of threats in the Middle East conceivably warranted direct US military intervention. These included the threat posed by Al‑Qaeda and a nuclear-armed Iran. The danger to the US posed by the Al-Assad regime did not rise to the level of these challenges.

But the gas attack was to have changed the dynamics. In its attempt to put down what was then a two-year-old rebellion, the Syrian regime in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta killed more than 1,400 civilians with sarin gas. The red line had been crossed. But an attack on Syria was unsanctioned by international law or by Congress and the American people and most big powers seemed unenthusiastic about a Syria intervention. Two things then happened. Al-Assad got away with murder. And the failure to help build a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against him left a big vacuum which the likes of Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) have now filled.

Obama might not have been bluffing. However, he badly miscalculated when he drew a red line on chemical weapons but was not ready or willing to enforce it. The U-turn directly affected America’s credibility and whether autocrats would still believe the US when it said it would do something. The world watched to see if Al-Assad could get away with it. He did.

http://saudigazette.com.sa/opinion/editorial/obama-is-proud/

how to manipulate it to their advantage going forward. I am speaking not only of allies abroad
but here at home.

I have bookmarked the thread, I like the compilation..will serve well to compare/contrast
in the near future and beyond.

To defend against it is to mention it.

And everybody is already busy.

There will be a couple later today, with that in mind, the reactions, but you are right, so far pretty subdued.

And I think that's why. I picked that Saudi one because it shows so obviously how difficult it is to talk about. All those disappointed autocrats.

Edit: and its everybody, no snark at all, mostly take offs on particular points and the War Party, which has tried to be savage but been merely annoyed.

---

The former ambassador was dismayed to read Goldberg write that "Some of [Obama's] deepest disappointments concern Middle Eastern leaders themselves," among whom "Benjamin Netanyahu is in his own category," because he deemed him "too fearful and politically paralyzed" to bring about a two-state solution.

"Bibi is in a category by himself?" Oren asked. "More than [the late Lybian leader Muammar] Gaddafi, [Syrian dictator Bashar] Assad, [former Eyptian president Hosni] Mubarak, and [former Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad?" Oren complained that Obama did not give credit to Netanyahu for steps he took toward the Palestinians or hold accountable Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who he did not mention in the interview, for rejecting repeated American peace initiatives.

"The article is missing the faintest reference to Abbas," Oren said. "This shows prejudice against Arabs, as if they have no role to play and are mere two dimensional props for receiving Israeli concessions. Abbas walked away from the negotiating table. Why don't Palestinians ever bear responsibility for a failed peace process? Why is it only on Netanyahu's shoulders?" When Goldberg asked Obama what he had hoped to accomplish with his controversial June 2009 speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, he said “My argument was this: Let’s all stop pretending that the cause of the Middle East’s problems is Israel.”

But Oren said everything he was told by Obama and his advisers during his tenure in Washington proved that Obama indeed thought Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians was the core conflict and responsible for all the region's problems.

http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Oren-Obama-has-selective-memory-on-Middle-East-447782

No, Mr. Obama. We are not “free riders.” We shared with you our intelligence that prevented deadly terrorist attacks on America.

We initiated the meetings that led to the coalition that is fighting Fahish (ISIL), and we train and fund the Syrian freedom fighters, who fight the biggest terrorist, Bashar Assad and the other terrorists, Al-Nusrah and Fahish (ISIL). We offered boots on the ground to make that coalition more effective in eliminating the terrorists.

We initiated the support — military, political and humanitarian — that is helping the Yemeni people reclaim their country from the murderous militia, the Houthis, who, with the support of the Iranian leadership, tried to occupy Yemen; without calling for American forces. We established a coalition of more than thirty Muslim countries to fight all shades of terrorism in the world.

We are the biggest contributors to the humanitarian relief efforts to help refugees from Syria, Yemen and Iraq. We combat extremist ideology that attempts to hijack our religion, on all levels. We are the sole funders of the United Nations Counter-terrorism Center, which pools intelligence, political, economic, and human resources, worldwide. We buy US treasury bonds, with small interest returns, that help your country’s economy.

http://www.arabnews.com/columns/news/894826

I listen to the current crop of presidential candidates outline what they would do in the Middle East: carpet bomb the Islamic State, tear up the Iran accord,; create a Sunni army, move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, or in the case of Hillary Clinton set up a no-fly zone in Syria, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. What’s outlined seems alternately reckless or not feasible; already being done, or not likely to make much of a difference.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent interview in the Atlantic with Barack Obama has led to a tsunami of criticism of the president’s ill-advised combination of risk aversion and aspirational words–a very bad combination in a region that now loathes the first and disdains the second.

Yet the president is right to be skeptical about American intervention in the region. The painful reality is that America is stuck in a broken and dysfunctional Middle East, trapped by its own lofty rhetoric and illusions, and tied up and befriended or opposed by tiny tribes and larger powers whose interests are not its own. We may degrade, contain, even roll back the Islamic State’s gains in Iraq and Syria, but we won’t destroy or defeat it or the forces of global jihad without filling the vacuum they exploit with Arab polities that are cohesive, well-governed and inclusive, and a Muslim world that is willing to delegitimize the extremists in its midst; we might stabilize Syria to some extent, but we won’t put either the Syrian or Iraqi Humpty Dumpties back together again on our terms; we might find a way to keep the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from exploding, but we won’t resolve it without Israeli and Palestinian leaders being willing and able to do so. We can push a freedom and democracy agenda on the Arabs all day long; but they will determine how to govern themselves—well, badly, or not at all.

I get it that we diplomats are supposed to try. Teenagers Snapchat; beavers build dams; and U.S. secretaries of state use diplomacy to fix things. That’s what John Kerry has recently been doing in Geneva, trying to pull together a fragile cease-fire in Syria. It’s certainly better than rushing first to deploy and shoot. And as we’ve seen in the U.S.-Iranian nuclear agreement, diplomacy can actually work, however imperfectly.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/us-foreign-policy-middle-east-213723

Barack Obama has been likened on more than one occasion to Mr. Spock, the famously cold, logical Star Trek character. And in a wide-ranging, unintentionally devastating assessment of the “Obama Doctrine” for the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg uses the analogy more than once. But Obama is no Spock. Spock is logical; Obama is not. Spock is moved by tragedy; Obama is coldly indifferent.

The Obama that emerges from the Atlantic interview is preternaturally icy, contemptuous of both his adversaries and his own staff, thin-skinned, angry, and oddly self-satisfied. That character portrait aside, it would have been nice if the article had shed light on the worldview that governs Obama’s decisions. Rather, it illuminated the fact that he doesn’t have a worldview. Instead, the president of the United States has opinions, and lots of them. And people he really doesn’t like, and lots of them. And countries he thinks don’t count, like those that make up the Sunni Middle East.

The commander of the world’s most powerful military reveals that he is skeptical that military power is a solution to what ails the world. Obama, in Goldberg’s words, “believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq.” Obama clearly fancies himself as an anti-Winston Churchill or, alternatively, a more successful Neville Chamberlain, a calm, dispassionate peacemaker. And seven years into his presidency, Obama clearly also still defines himself as the anti-George W. Bush. One thread that emerges in this portrait of the president is that seven years in, when confronted with a challenge, he still silently asks himself, “What would Bush do?” — and then does the opposite.

He has thought long and hard about being the un-Bush and realizes that he strayed from that mantra twice: Once in aiding in the ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi, and once in threatening military action against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for his use of chemical weapons. In the first case, the president clearly blames both Hillary Clinton and America’s much-disdained allies in Europe: “[The intervention in Libya] didn’t work,” Obama complains. “When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong, there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up.”

http://www.aei.org/publication/confessions-of-barack-obama-confidence-man/

It is most amusing to have these people criticize Obama for indifference to suffering.

The Barack Obama show is in town again. The president likes nothing so much as to demonstrate how profound and thoughtful he is, and he recently decided to do it by granting an interview to one of his favorite journalists, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, to whom he explained his thinking and legacy on foreign policy. The long interview is full of great nuggets and quotes and has been the talk of DC. One cannot help but read it and feel that the biggest problem with U.S. foreign policy in the Obama era has been what can only be called Obama's preening self-regard.

Let's get some things out of the way first. I've always tried to shy away from the character attacks that so many of my fellow conservatives engage in when it comes to Obama. Although I disagree with him on many, many issues of policy, he has always seemed like a smart, likeable, well-intentioned guy, which is already saying a lot for a politician. And it's certainly the case that some conservatives haven't had a very good critique of the Obama era, seeing everything through the lens of a worldview that sees force and confrontation as the answer to every problem.

But it really is the case that the character of presidents shape their policy. And when you read the interview a second time, you realize that the driving force isn't Obama's worldview on foreign policy. It's Obama himself. And in particular, there's one consistent theme, whatever issue or trouble spot you're talking about: It's somebody else's fault.

Why has Libya been such a disaster? Because the Europeans didn't pull their weight.

http://theweek.com/articles/612128/biggest-problem-foreign-policy-obamas-preening-selfregard

A more coherent critique.

There is much to unpack in Barack Obama’s remark to Jeffrey Goldberg that Saudi Arabia needs to “share” the Middle East with Iran. Note that he makes little distinction between the claims of an American ally and a state sponsor of terrorism, or their respective methods. It is the progressive’s equivalence, akin to Apple’s insistence that it cannot grant “backdoors” to the U.S. government even with a court order because then it would have to permit even the most repressive governments access to the data on people’s phones. President Obama has done a creditable job of engaging with American adversaries, creating opportunities for cooperation. Whether that is enough to balance the erosion of the international order caused by his policies—an erosion Obama would surely say is not his fault, and instead attributable to titanic, uncontrollable global trends—may prove the essential question surrounding his foreign-policy legacy.

Goldberg’s article begins with Obama weighing whether to intervene in Syria’s civil war, the defining choice of his time in office. In my judgment, though, the reviews of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan that Obama undertook in the first year of his presidency provide the template for understanding the failures of his administration. During the presidential campaign, Obama had criticized George W. Bush for under-resourcing the Afghan War, creating an expectation in the State and Defense Departments that the new president would seek to bring objectives and means into better alignment. The reviews were run by some of the foreign-policy establishment’s best hands, yet White House officials bridled at being boxed in; they complained that the military wasn’t giving them good options, then refused options that aligned with the president’s stated policies.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/obama-doctrine-wars-military/473550/

It is a criticism I have heard from more than one person who has worked with President Obama: that he regards himself as the smartest person in the room—any room. Jeffrey Goldberg’s fascinating article reveals that this is a considerable understatement. The president seems to think he is the smartest person in the world, perhaps ever.

Power corrupts in subtle ways. It appears to have made Obama arrogant. As described in Goldberg’s story, he is impatient to the point of rudeness with members of his own administration. His response to Secretary of State John Kerry when he hands him a paper on Syria is: “Oh, another proposal?” “Samantha, enough,” he snaps at the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “I’ve already read your book.” We learn, too, that he “secretly disdains … the Washington foreign-policy establishment.”

The president is also bluntly critical of traditional American allies. He is said to have told Prime Minister David Cameron that Britain “would no longer be able to claim a ‘special relationship’ with the United States” if it did not “pay [its] fair share” by increasing defense spending. The Pakistanis and the Saudis get especially short shrift here, as—predictably—does Israel.

“Bibi, you have to understand something,” he tells the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “I’m the African American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.” Netanyahu may have wondered what exactly in Obama’s biography gives him such insight into the present-day predicament of Israel.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/obama-doctrine-revolution/473481/

Does pretty well for a while.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s interviews with President Obama as recorded in The Atlantic shed additional light on how the president has processed the multifaceted challenges presented by Syria. Employing the time-honored principle that the best defense is a good offense, the president described his September 2013 chemical weapons red-line reversal as a source of pride: a rejection of “conventional wisdom," “the machinery of our national security apparatus,” [and the] “Washington playbook.” He upheld the appropriateness of speech without accompanying action, and dismissed the notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin was emboldened to take actions in Ukraine and Syria—actions that, in any event, “fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power” —by lessons drawn from the red-line episode.

Coming through strongly in the Obama-Goldberg interviews is the sense that the president is very much the analyst-in-chief. That he is thoughtful and temperamentally conservative is obvious: characteristics that any country would be fortunate to find in its chief executive. Being disinclined to reach for military options as the default response, knowing that the United States cannot fix every humanitarian catastrophe and international dispute, demanding that allies and partners step up to plate—these are all characteristics one prays will be found in the brain and character of Mr. Obama’s successor. For a president, however, linking words to action is important.

Clearly what galls the president is criticism—much of it Syria-centric—of the gap some see between his words and his actions, and the potential implications arising therefrom. The argumentation he employs to try to neutralize the criticism may be sufficiently misleading to persuade the critics that they really are onto something; that they have indeed identified the shortfall that may darken the legacy of one of the most thoughtful and reflective of men ever to occupy the presidency.

President Obama’s central argument is that he sees and understands things that elude the foreign policy cognoscenti and national security glitterati. Who knows: historians decades from now may credit a man who arrived to the Oval Office with no particular background or experience in foreign affairs for having deep-sixed “foreign policy orthodoxy” in ways that redounded to the long-term benefit of the United States. They may, on the other hand, judge that he acted recklessly and unwisely by substituting his own judgment for those in the administration, in Congress and elsewhere whose grasp of foreign policy may have been firmer and more rooted in pertinent experience than his own.

http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/syriasource/president-obama-s-atlantic-interview-the-syria-angle

In a 20,000-word essay, Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg has offered the best explanation yet for U.S. President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. “The Obama Doctrine” reveals a cool-headed thinker, a realist— someone with a true understanding of the limits of power — who both appreciates and somewhat resents the role of the United States as the world’s “indispensable power.”

The first key point to take away is that Obama thinks long and hard about foreign policy and, most importantly, about the appropriate use of power and the meaning of leadership. His is not a reflexive approach to U.S. engagement with the world; it reflects deep thought about, continued grappling with and considerable skepticism toward the guiding principles of American foreign policy.

For Obama, “real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence.” He does not believe in posturing, chest-thumping or bullying. Instead, he seeks to unite governments in pursuit of shared interests and concerns. Washington leads by marshaling coalitions, setting agendas and making it possible for diverse nations to work together, each contributing its own perspectives and resources. This is the classic application of “soft power,” Harvard Professor Joseph Nye’s notion that power reflects the ability to get other countries to join your efforts willingly, in the belief that what you want is also good for them. This approach also means that one of the most important things the U.S. can do is to get its own house in order. The U.S. must be strong at home, with both physical resources and moral strength, before it can claim to lead others. This belief animated Obama’s first National Security Strategy. It is sometimes mistaken for a desire to disengage, but that is a misreading of his intentions.

Plainly, Obama believes in multilateralism. In an age of transnational threats and dwindling national resources, each country must do more with less. But, and this is critical, all nations must contribute. Obama’s disdain for “free riders” is clear, and no nation — no matter how “special” a relationship with the U.S. — gets a pass. Apparently, there is considerable heartburn in London over some of Obama’s comments about British Prime Minister David Cameron and his government’s readiness to spend on defense. At the same time, however, the U.S. retains a central role by mobilizing nations and ensuring that they act to address international concerns. Obama also values multilateralism for the brake it imposes on U.S. unilateralism. It is “a way to check America’s more unruly impulses.”

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2016/03/14/editorials/the-obama-doctrine/

Obama’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg over his foreign policy doctrine was striking for many reasons, but none more so than his defense of his Syria policy—especially his decision not to act after the United States accused the Bashar Assad regime of using chemical weapons. Obama’s critics claim that the decision undermined American credibility, weakened international norms, and showed U.S. moral indifference, among other things. From the interview, it’s clear that Obama sees that decision as an essential piece of his foreign policy legacy.

Obama’s Syria policy has had its weaknesses. The president erred in stating “Assad must go” without having a policy to remove him; superpowers’ utterances signal policy, not merely analytical statements or wishes. And even as the United States knew that in the end it would have to work with multiple parties—including Russia—to seek a political settlement in Syria, it would have been wise to find a stronger lever to boost the U.S. position in the negotiations.

When Obama sought congressional approval to strike Syria in 2013, however, he and his supporters advanced arguments that simply missed the mark. As I argued then, the central theses behind the strike were flawed. With the renewed attention now on Obama’s foreign policy legacy—particularly on Syria—it’s worth revisiting those arguments. In my view, it remains as clear today as it did then that a strike on Syria would have been the wrong move.

Point-counterpoint

Back in 2013, the pro-strike camp advanced a number of spurious or otherwise dubious arguments, and my response then still holds today:

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2016/03/14-obama-syria-case-for-restraint-telhami

By David Ignatius

What accounted for Vladimir Putin’s surprise decision Monday to start pulling Russian forces from Syria? Is it possible that he spent last weekend reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece in the Atlantic and decided that President Obama was right about the Syria mess — and that he should quit before he got any deeper in the quagmire?

Goldberg’s account of how Obama fell out of love with the Arabs has inspired so much commentary that even the author’s parents are probably sick of hearing discussion about it. But here are a few brief thoughts, occasioned in part by Putin’s adoption of what in the Vietnam era was known as the “Aiken strategy” — named after Sen. George Aiken (R-Vt.), who said in 1966 that the United States should declare victory and redeploy its forces — but which we now might rechristen the “Goldberg variation.”

• Goldberg’s piece is authoritative and compelling. But it illustrates why presidents usually save such explanations for their memoirs. Such candor is destabilizing: Friends and foes discover what the president really thinks, a matter usually shrouded by constructive ambiguity. We may have imagined Obama’s growing disdain for the Arabs, his skepticism bordering on contempt for the foreign-policy establishment and his “fatalistic” view about the limits of U.S. power. Now, in “The Obama Doctrine,” we have chapter and verse.

When Obama visits Saudi Arabia this spring, will it help that we now know that Obama sardonically told the Australian prime minister “it’s complicated” when asked whether the Saudis are America’s friends? Ditto Goldberg’s revelation that “in private” (ha!) Obama said of the Saudis’ suppression of women’s rights that “a country cannot function in the modern world when it is repressing half its population.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/03/15/obamas-destabilizing-candor-on-the-middle-east/

World View: A striking feature of the President's foreign policy is that he learns from failures and mistakes

Commentators have missed the significance of President Barack Obama’s acerbic criticism of Saudi Arabia and Sunni states long allied to the US for fomenting sectarian hatred and seeking to lure the US into fighting regional wars on their behalf. In a series of lengthy interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg published in The Atlantic magazine, Mr Obama explains why it is not in the US’s interests to continue the tradition of the US foreign policy establishment, whose views he privately disdains, by giving automatic support to the Saudis and their allies.

Obama’s arguments are important because they are not off-the-cuff remarks, but are detailed, wide ranging, carefully considered and leading to new departures in US policy. The crucial turning point came on 30 August 2013 when he refused to launch air strikes in Syria. This would, in effect, have started military action by the US to force regime change in Damascus, a course of action proposed by much of the Obama cabinet as well by US foreign policy specialists.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/barack-obama-saudi-arabia-us-foreign-policy-syria-jihadism-isis-a6927646.html

Excellent stuff.

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The dirty little secret of the American presidency

The answer goes some way to understanding just how hard it is to actually follow a coherent foreign policy philosophy in Washington. The dirty little secret of the American presidency is that it is not as powerful as it appears, even in foreign affairs.

The key reason is that an American president cannot, as many other leaders can, simply admit that there is nothing the United States can do about an urgent international problem dominating the headlines. After all, the US is a "can do" country with more military power than strategic sense. This spirit of action has helped make America the richest, most powerful country on Earth, but it has also gotten it into a lot of stupid wars.

The "Washington playbook" provides a menu of prefabricated solutions to such situations, most of which rely on America's unique military capacity. They range from shipping arms to training local armies to simply imposing peace through the application of superior force. None of them involves standing aside.

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Responding to that pressure, Obama sought at each stage to split the difference: to respond to the crisis while remaining true to his philosophy and keeping US involvement to a minimum. I took to calling this practice, somewhat indelicately, "salami-slicing the baby." As one US official put it during the response to the September 2013 Syrian chemical weapons attacks, the White House sought a response that was "just muscular enough not to get mocked."

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/16/11244980/obama-syria-policy