Rift in Obama administration over Putin

Rift in Obama administration over Putin
Michael Crowley/Politico

Updated 10/13/15, 1:39 PM CET

Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Syria is creating new rifts inside an exhausted and in some cases demoralized Obama national security team, where officials pushing for bolder action see the president as stubbornly unwilling to assume new risk as he nears his final year in office.

Current and former Obama officials say the president’s reluctance to respond more assertively against Putin is signaling U.S. weakness and indecision. “We’re just so reactive,” said one senior administration official. “There’s just this tendency to wait” and see what steps other actors take.

Putin’s direct military intervention — following years of indirect support for Syrian ruler Bashar Assad — has broken any momentum Obama had after sealing his nuclear deal with Iran. Secretary of State John Kerry had hoped to follow through on the agreement by working with Iran and Russia to win a political settlement in Syria, a goal that now seems fanciful. Adding to the frustration is the high-profile failure of the Pentagon plan to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels, which is being downsized.

“They’re on their back feet right now,” said a former senior Obama foreign policy hand.

Obama has recently approved the supply of ammunition to Kurdish and Arab fighters in northern Syria, and the Pentagon training program is being repurposed to arm trusted rebel commanders in the field. Mid-level officials throughout the administration have also been asked to “dust off old plans,” as one put it, and brainstorm new potential approaches to Syria and Russia.

But expectations are low that those efforts will lead anywhere. Sources familiar with administration deliberations said that Obama’s West Wing inner circle serves as a brick wall against dissenting views. The president’s most senior advisers — including National Security Adviser Susan Rice and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough — reflect the president’s wariness of escalated U.S. action related to Syria or Russia and, officials fear, fail to push Obama to question his own deeply-rooted assumptions. “Susan and Denis channel him,” says a former administration official who has witnessed the dynamic.

That dynamic is not new. But Putin’s escalation has combined two of Obama’s biggest foreign policy headaches — a newly aggressive Russia and Syria’s civil war — into one throbbing migraine.

In senior meetings, some of Obama’s top national security officials have pressed for a bolder response to Putin’s muscle-flex in Syria. They include Kerry, who has argued for establishing a no-fly zone in Syria, an option Obama recently suggested was “half-baked.”

A former Cold War nuclear deterrence expert, Defense Secretary Ash Carter has fretted that the U.S. isn’t standing up firmly to Putin’s provocations. And CIA Director John Brennan has complained that Putin is bombing Syrian rebel fighters covertly backed by his agency with seeming impunity.

“The optics are that we’re backing off,” said a former Obama official who handled foreign policy issues. “It’s not like we can’t exert pressure on these guys, but we act like we’re totally impotent.”

Obama’s refusal to take firmer action against Moscow has increasingly isolated several of his administration’s Russia specialists, who almost uniformly take a harder line toward Putin than does the president himself. They include Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs; Celeste Wallander, the National Security Council’s senior director for Russia and Eurasia; and Evelyn Farkas, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia. Farkas’ recent announcement that she will exit the Obama administration this fall raised eyebrows among officials aware of her frustration that Obama hasn’t responded more forcefully to Putin’s annexation of Crimea and his support for pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east.

More of an interesting read at............
http://www.politico.eu/article/rift-obama-administration-putin-syria-airstrikes-foreign-policy/