Vultures circle lame-duck Obama

Barack Obama’s duck life is all but over; as a result, every autocrat on the globe feels he’s been given carte blanche.

Barack Obama with Vladimir Putin. Picture: AP.

Technically a US president is classed as a lame duck only when the votes of his successor have been tallied. Barack Obama’s duck life, however, is already all but over: he has been plucked, filleted and is about as dead as any duck ever served up in Chinatown. As a result every autocrat on the globe feels he has been given carte blanche, free of US restraints or scrutiny. If you see them circling the president at next month’s G20 summit in China it will not be out of respect but out of a sense that something can still be won from a weakened leader.

Outgoing presidents, though handicapped, still have some say in foreign policy. Obama has none. His first years in office were dedicated to the principle that inaction was less harmful than action. And so he stayed out of Syria, led “from behind” in Libya and then quickly cleared out. He left Iraq, returned to Iraq and spent most of that time trying to puzzle out who were America’s friends or least-deadly enemies.

The president wants to be measured according to the wars he didn’t fight. The result: no one is sure if the US, the world’s greatest military power, has lost the will to fight. Quite a legacy to leave his successor.

Obama’s pivot to the east has been so badly managed that Japan and South Korea, America’s major allies, feel dangerously exposed. There is every chance that China, authoritarian and restless, will take on the mantle of being the world’s largest economy under the next American president. What does that mean for China’s neighbours, or for the stability of the seas? Obama has chosen not to frame this question, let alone answer it. “We’re on a bicycle going downhill,” a Japanese official tells me, “and our friends are tampering with the brakes.”

He sketched inverted commas around the word “friends”.

Everything that the president does to firm up the Obama Story — there surely hasn’t been a presidency since Kennedy’s truncated term so concerned with crafting a personal narrative for the history books — leads him further into confusion. The opening up of Cuba? Predictably marred by the Castro brothers’ reluctance to surrender or even share power. To keep the Iranian nuclear deal on course the president is willing to undergo any manner of contortions. Early this year the US loaded dollars 400 million in cash into an unmarked cargo plane to Iran apparently in part-payment of an almost 50-year-old debt to the Shah’s government; the cack-handed timing made it seem like a ransom payment for hostages. And since the cash was untraceable it may have gone straight to fund the Revolutionary Guard’s expensive war in Syria. Even a separate issue — Obama’s wish to renounce the first use of US nuclear weapons — can be read as an attempt to reassure Tehran that it can feel safe in abandoning any plans it has to make a bomb.

Iran is the lame duck’s cherished duckling. By agreeing to curbs in enrichment and strict international verification in return for the easing of sanctions, the regime has helped to give substance to Obama’s claim that he is playing the long game. Patient diplomacy and smart statecraft cannot only avoid war, say Obama supporters, but also turn an enemy into a useful partner in complicated regional crises. The historical judgment on that will have to be suspended for a decade while we see if Iran returns to its well-established patterns of cheating inspectors and secret development of weapons.

For the time being all we have to go on is Iran’s support for Bashar Assad in Syria, its funding, training and arming of terror groups across the region, the readiness of its Revolutionary Guard to take foreign prisoners and use them in the diplomatic process, its trampling on human rights. Now it is allowing Russia to use its air bases as a platform for strategic bombers. Obama should be waking up to what he has brought about: a new military axis in the Middle East bonded by contempt for Washington.

Obama has never been free of vanity and the lame-duck period has reinforced it; he still has one more flawed grand bargain in him. To no one’s surprise it is being cooked up by Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin leader appears to favour Donald Trump, if only on the grounds that he would “normalise” relations with Moscow, but may now be calculating that Hillary Clinton will win. That would signal a tougher line on Ukraine.

He thus hopes to strike a deal with Obama in these last few months. This could be something along the lines of: step back from Ukraine and we will restrain our courtship with Turkey. Moscow calculates that the US cares more about keeping Turkey firmly inside Nato than it does about maintaining a stand-off over the illegal annexation of Crimea. And all the signals from western Europe at the moment are that the Europeans care more about Recep Tayyip Erdogan honouring his migration pact than about speeding Ukraine’s access to the EU.

Perhaps Obama won’t be sufficiently interested in such a trade-off; his time is running out fast. Putin knows that it would be worth making a pitch, though. Didn’t Ronald Reagan make effective use of his lame-duck period by talking to Mikhail Gorbachev in a way that laid the foundation for the end of the Cold War? Is that not one of Reagan’s most lasting claims to be a hero leader? The idea could be tempting to Obama, one last fling of a statesman’s dice. The people who can make it happen for him are called Putin, Rouhani and Erdogan. Reassuring, no?

The Times