Reluctant to project power, Barack Obama stands apart

In his most revealing interviews as US President, Barack Obama, the elusive, retreating rationalist, asserts he has saved America from imperial overreach, defied the foreign policy establishment and shown that strategic caution, not military intervention, is the wise option for the US.

The Obama presidency is dominated by three failed wars — Iraq and Afghanistan, which predated his arrival, Libya, which he initiated and now brands a “failure”, and even before these, Vietnam, where he excoriates past presidents, notably Richard Nixon.

In an article drawing on a series of interviews with Obama and his advisers, The Atlantic magazine’s correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg, provides a sweeping yet sympathetic account of Obama’s world view with remarkable admissions from the President. The article has provoked a storm of debate.

“What I think is not smart is the idea that every time there is a problem, we send in our military to impose order,” Obama says. “We just can’t do that.”

He wants to preserve US power by not deploying it. Warning that “almost every great world power has succumbed” to overreach, Obama champions prudence, the limits of military power and cutting back risks.

When he uses military power — and he does — it is typified by assassination by drones, a lethal strike from safe distance. “There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow,” Obama says. “It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign policy ­establishment. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions.”

Obama is proud that he has defied the playbook and the establishment.

He won’t be trapped — not in Syria, not in taking on Russia’s Vladimir Putin, not in early action against Islamic State.

This is not just a reaction against the failed wars of George W Bush: Obama has a more diffident view of US power than any president since World War II. His philosophy is that “the price of direct US action” may be “higher than the price of inaction”.

Deeply aware of America’s flaws, Obama is inclined to multilateral action because “multilateralism regulates hubris”.

He says: “We have history. We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America.” It means when the US starts talk of intervening, it must “understand the source of other people’s suspicions”.

Invoking Vietnam, he says: “So we dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II, and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, (Henry) Kissinger went to Paris and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter and authoritarian governments.” By contrast, given his diplomacy: “In Vietnam, right now, America pulls at 80 per cent.”

Obama believes in diplomacy, saying that diplomats and bureaucrats “are helping to keep America safe and secure”. Goldberg says Obama eventually issued an instruction that nobody but the Defence Secretary should bring him a proposal for military action. Obama says great nations “don’t do stupid stuff”. Sure, but there is a flip side: if great nations don’t act then bad nations fill power vacuums and create chaos.

Goldberg calls August 30, 2013 the decisive day of Obama’s foreign policy. He brands it “liberation day”, when Obama rejected the military playbook. This is the day the President violated his previous statements about “a red line” for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in his gassing of civilians and, with world leaders expecting US military action, Obama changed course. After a walk on the White House lawn, he said there would be no strike against the Syrian government, leaving his aides shocked.

Secretary of State John Kerry said Assad should be punished: US credibility was on the line. Hillary Clinton criticised Obama for his retreat, saying the “jihadists” had filled the vacuum. His adviser, the champion of liberal intervention, Samantha Power, had wanted US support for the rebels against Assad but was rebuffed by Obama, who snapped: “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book.”

“I’m very proud of this moment,” Obama tells Goldberg of his Syria decision. “The machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was stake.” But Obama rejected this orthodoxy. The upshot, as Goldberg says, is that history will record August 30, 2013 either as the day that Obama stopped the US from entering “yet another disastrous Muslim civil war” or as the day “he let the Middle East slip from America’s grasp into the hands of Russia, Iran and ISIS”.

Obama says it was “as tough a decision as I’ve made”. For Obama, being tough is saying “no”. Two years later, nearly half a million Syrians have been killed, there are 4.8 million refugees, the EU faces an internal people movement crisis and Islamic State, Russia and Iran have expanded their influence.

Obama, as Goldberg says, is willing to contest conventional wisdoms. “ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States,” the President says. “Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.” Goldberg says that during their conversations he came to see Obama as a President “who has grown steadily more fatalistic about the constraints on America’s ability to direct global events”.

On Libya, Obama did press the button. The consequences were profound. Libya proved for Obama that the demise of the Arab Spring had created a massive trap for the US. Obama was reluctant about Libya but this time he followed the advice of his national security team. He felt the operation was sound — there was a UN mandate with an allied coalition. “It didn’t work,” is Obama’s verdict given Libya’s descent into chaos and Islamic State influence.

He sheets home some responsibility to allies who operated as “free riders”. He felt countries were “pushing us to act but then showing an unwillingness to put any skin in the game”. He complains about France and Britain, saying British PM David Cameron became “distracted by a range of other things”.

“Free riders aggravate me,” Obama says of reluctant allies. Goldberg says Obama warned Cameron that Britain could no longer claim a “special relationship” with the US if it did not commit to spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence. The Turnbull government has just affirmed the 2 per cent goal for Australia.

Convinced that avoiding overreach in the Middle East is the key to a strong US strategic position in Asia and in dealing with China, Obama is also changing US global priorities.

He sees the world as “a tough, complicated, messy, mean place” where “you can’t fix everything”, and, therefore, he is driven to a highly selective view of core US interests. Where, pray, does Australia come? Obama has been President for nearly eight years and we probably don’t know.

He is a realist of sorts with a super-narrow view of core US interests. He reassures himself by being a disciple of Harvard’s Steven Pinker’s philosophy that the world, overall, is becoming a far better place than it used to be. Obama believes that “history is bending in his direction”.

Analyst Josef Joffe says: “This is not grand strategy. It is religion.” The pivotal question is whether Obama is an aberration or represents the new norm.