Barack Obama’s restraint is not weakness

The US President’s foreign policy is a combination of caution and wisdom.

A Chinese warship launches a missile during a live-fire exercise in the South China Sea.

The caller was an Australian living in the US, effectively embedded in George W. Bush’s administration. He knew the cabinet, got to see the vice-president, had spent time in the Oval Office. It was March 2003, the Iraq war just launched.

“America will have a decisive win,” he told me, and went on with arguments imbibed from the feisty, cordite-flavoured atmosphere of a Washington at war. It was all upbeat.

“Iraq gets a market economy. It becomes a democracy. This changes the Arab world. They make peace with Israel.” He may even have implied a prod or two from this triumphant US military would bring change to Iran.

Here, then, was the prevailing wisdom of the neo-cons who had salivated over a war with Iraq and the ultranationalists they had recruited for this preposterous mission.

The war was a disaster for religious minorities, unloosed sectarian carnage and spilled out a generation of Middle-Eastern refugees. It filled US veterans’ administration hospitals and military cemeteries and loaded taxpayers with $3 trillion in costs, ranking just behind Afghanistan as the most expensive war in US history.

In May Jeb Bush, seeking votes in Nevada, was accosted by an 18-year-old student, with the comment, “Your brother created ISIS”. Jeb was flustered. There was no convenient and convincing reply.

Now with a queasy stomach we witness the results of the other war launched by the Bush administration in its furious, blood-in-the-eye response to September 11.

In 2012 at a Brussels summit on Afghanistan I had allowed myself to be half-persuaded by American optimism. I later watched Hillary Clinton dangle the prospect of a negotiated settlement before the Taliban. After all, ran the argument, anti-insurgency requires you split the rebels and persuade some to leave the caves in the mountains for a seat at the cabinet table in Kabul.

The Doha talks with the Karzai government never materialised. All the while the Taliban were laughing at us, biding their time.

In my published diaries I recorded a conversation with an Australian public servant in 2013. He had visited Afghanistan twice a year for the previous decade. He reflected that he could have achieved the same results if he’d been sent there with $10 million to distribute as bribes to tribal chieftains. Taking out al-Qa’ida was one thing; staying on to build an Afghan democracy another.

What are the lessons?

After 2001 both sides of Australian politics treated the judgments of a Republican administration with too much respect, bordering on reverence.

Washington got Iraq and Afghanistan wrong to a ghastly degree, despite all the charm and persuasiveness that impresses us when, in Washington, we meet its CIA analysts, its State Department diplomats, the White House advisers and the scholars in its think tanks.

It happens with all empires. That’s one of the things empires do: they get wars wrong.

So one lesson for Australia is to treat with care any bursts of Wilsonian missionary zeal — the great surges of idealism, the bugle calls of duty — that sometimes take hold of America. To argue for caution and diplomacy, as we should have over Afghanistan and Iraq; to press the pause button before we commit to the mission of the hour.

But the next lesson is positive: to welcome the tempered judgment of the Obama administration, especially when weighed against its critics, who are committed (rhetorically at least) to measuring America’s greatness by its readiness to throw armies into the Middle East.

Think on it. If Obama’s critics had run policy the US would have been arming militias in Syria, bombing Assad forces and struggling to maintain no-fly zones. At war with Assad and Islamic State. Says Senator Lindsey Graham as he runs for Republican nomination: “Don’t vote for me if you want to avoid going to war.” He and 46 other Republican senators tried to undercut Obama’s draft agreement with Iran. Senator John McCain captures this Republican spirit nicely with his ditty, “Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran.”

It was Robert Gates, stepping down as US defence secretary, who said anyone recommending military intervention in the Middle East should “have his head examined”. He said enforcement of a no-fly zone, a favourite proposal of interventionists, would be a massive operation and probably inconclusive. He was talking about Libya, but his remarks apply to Syria.

In Washington the Republicans have embraced a sort of populist nationalism, thumping the alleged foreign policy weakness of their President. But as I argued in The Australian on April 25 the only alternative they have to Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran is to let things slide, until the point the US bombs Iranian targets. “If we don’t, someone else will,” says Senator Marco Rubio with insouciant spirit.

Yet a war-exhausted American public doesn’t want it; and nor does the US military. The Republicans hesitate before pushing these themes out on the stump, when seeking votes. Some voters may remind them they created ISIS.

I quoted in my diaries from a briefing given by Henry Kissinger at the 2012 meeting of Bohemian Grove, a gathering of US corporate heavies and their guests. He said America had to rethink its military strategy. There have been three wars that have ended up in debate about withdrawal. He said the US needs a peripheral base strategy. It needs to intervene but not for protracted conflicts. America’s strength lies in mobility, technology and firepower.

Well, it strikes me Obama’s foreign policy — more than the rhetoric of his critics — captures this wisdom.

Instead of defying international norms about intervention, Obama policy refers to the importance of “international support and legitimacy”. He has anchored the support of allies like France and Germany, not lost them as did George W. Bush. After Russia invaded Ukraine America was able to mobilise world opinion and the support of international institutions. The use of soft power shone through.

In May 2014 the President said some of America’s most costly mistakes came not from restraint but from “a willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences — without building international support and legitimacy for our action, without levelling with the American people about the sacrifices required”.

If this is a retrenchment phase in policy — a reaction to the maximalism of Bush — then let’s have more.

Those who argue for more American commitment to the Middle East — including Republican critics of Obama and, only last week, The Economist magazine — look like armchair generals urging the US to offer up more of its blood and treasure in pursuit of objectives as vague as Bush’s “war on terror”.

Obama’s “failed foreign policy” gets drummed up as the conventional wisdom. Important, I think, to remind ourselves it’s not uncommon for commentators to trash or belittle the foreign policy of any two-term president in his final years — right now, in Obama’s case, for drift, naivety or lack of doctrine.

But critics neglect two facts.

First, Americans did not elect Obama to launch military action in the Middle East. President Bush, the foreign-intervention maximalist, left office with a 22 per cent approval rating because Iraq went so badly. Even 79 per cent of Republicans were telling pollsters the US should “pay less attention to problems overseas”.

Second, events in the Middle East are for the most part beyond America’s control. They reflect a murderous cycle of violence with its own dynamics. Obama did not “lose” Iraq or Syria or Libya or Yemen. They were not America’s to lose.

Bush signed up to a sprawling and meaningless “war on terror”, fighting people who had no capacity or desire to attack the US, in the view of Peter Beinart writing in The Atlantic last year. Obama’s been tough when it made sense to be tough, as witnessed by his deployment of drones and his taking out Osama bin Laden (or, he might have added, protecting the Yazidi). Hence Beinart argues Obama has been neither a dove nor hawk in the Middle East, but a “fierce minimalist”. Which means, according to Beinart, he “only unsheathes his sword against people he thinks might kill American civilians”.

In the meantime, Obama pushes US partners to set limits on global warming and the spread of nuclear weapons. Kissinger told me in 2012 that if he had to guess at the President’s core, personal foreign policy goals it was these — global warming and non-proliferation — plus achieving a Palestinian state.

The Israeli hardliners took care of the last possibility when they junked peace talks in favour of still more Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

Right now, though, we have a President motivated to fight on against the prospect of a planet two degrees hotter and with more nuclear players. These, I would argue, are unimpeachably decent instincts; and healthier than senators Rubio and Tom Cotton talking up an attack on Iran, or Chris Christie urging a military response to China. And further up the food chain than Jeb Bush speculating climate change “may” be real.

In 2017 we will see how Bush or Clinton or another president handles the rise of China and the challenge of accommodating its ambitions in the Western Pacific.

The Obama China policy has been realist enough, and I include in this assessment the speech by Ashton Carter, US Secretary of Defence, at the Shangri-La defence dialogue three weeks ago.

In line with the Carter speech, America may well decide to direct naval patrols in the South China Sea to approach — but not enter — the 12 nautical mile boundary around islands.

The Vietnamese have reportedly told the Americans that, for their part, they are not going to stop their own land reclamation. If that is confirmed it makes Chinese activity look less unilateral: assertive, but also reactive. In fact, one way of understanding the tensions in the region is to see it as a series of provocations and reactions from each of the nations in dispute.

In this spirit the US can accommodate Chinese sensitivity by quietly ruling out Japanese involvement in any multi-navy patrols, for example.

Meanwhile the threat to freedom of navigation posed by China has been assumed, not explained. Why China would be motivated to interdict vessels taking fuel, food and mineral resources to its own ports is a mystery; the notion it would want to interfere with ships leaving its ports for the export markets on which the country depends is almost as great a mystery.

An optimistic view would see Obama’s firm but tempered approach leading to an accommodation of the US to the essential reality: a steadily growing Chinese influence in the Western Pacific.

A June 1 Time poll showed 36 per cent of Americans wanted to rid themselves of international burdens and focus on improving the country from within, compared with 28 per cent who supported the buoyant notion that America was indispensable to the world. If Obama’s critics had had their way — more interventions, more troop commitments — war weariness in America would have mounted, until more Americans, perhaps a majority, were today in the isolationist column.

Obama’s restraint about new wars in the Middle East has guarded against this overcorrection.

Anyone can see that is profoundly in Australia’s interests.

Bob Carr was foreign minister from 2012-13 and Labor premier of NSW from 1995-2005.