The Obama ‘Middle Eastern’ Doctrine
Abdullah Hamidaddin/Al Arabiya/March 11/16
Jeffrey Goldberg’s The Obama Doctrine could have well been entitled The Obama Middle Eastern Doctrine. In this very long – yet interesting read – we were given a peek into the way Obama thinks about my region and how America should deal with it. All of the tenets of that doctrine are presented as a rationalization of previous decisions Obama made on the Middle East, or as a preemptive testament before the court of history. The fact that Obama is leaving office in less than a year may lead many to read his doctrine as a chapter in Obama’s forthcoming biography. I think it is more prudent to read it as a first draft of a new American Middle Eastern Doctrine. This is because the discussions in which those tenets are couched in echo Neo-Realist wisdom, American popular sentiment and they resonate with America’s global interests.
We all know that a new chapter between America and the Middle East has been open in the White House, and we have seen some of its pages. That the Middle East is of less importance to the US is a given. Sadly this lack of importance is being embedded with a condescending view toward the Middle East. Our region, according to Obama, is a hopeless case, full of “malicious, nihilistic, violent parts of humanity”. Moreover it is a distraction to the US from other regions where “young people yearning for self-improvement, modernity, education, and material wealth”.
Whatever the case, Obama is now giving us a sneak preview of that new chapter. He is telling us that America is revising its alliances and it is also changing its rules of the game. Obama took great pride when speaking about not abiding by what he called the “Washington playbook”; a set of expectations and prescriptions towards international events.
Washington playbook
Obama is encouraging future presidents not to abide by that book, perhaps re-write it, warning them that the “conventional expectations of what an American president is supposed to do” can sometimes become traps. He is also telling us not to make expectations based on our knowledge of the current Washington playbook. The fact that Obama is leaving office in less than a year may lead many to read his doctrine as a chapter in Obama’s forthcoming biography. I think it is more prudent to read it as a first draft of a new American Middle Eastern Doctrine.
From the article I extracted what seemed to me the core tenets of the new Middle Eastern doctrine:
1. America’s global leadership is going to be based on its capacity to set the global agenda not on its capacity to direct regional events.
2.An American president should not “place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States.”
3.America’s pronounced moral position vis-à-vis a situation is not a signal that it will intervene.
4. When action is needed, America will not work alone rather with other countries.
5. America shall no longer welcome free riders as allies.
6.American will not commit US military forces unless they would change “the equation on the ground.”
7.Terrorism is not an existential threat to the US.
8.America’s credibility, while important, is also over rated and lead to decisions that damage US interest.
9.Stability in the Middle East can only come through “some sort of cold peace” based on sharing and not competition.
Each tenet has immediate implications on the security of the region. And we had already seen quite a few of them. I will not discuss those implications now. What I want to say is that we need to understand them quite well if we are going to be able to understand current and future US behavior and more importantly if we want to have an intelligible communication with American leadership. In the Middle East we’ve gotten used to a totally different doctrine, one based on extensive American interventionism. Many policy advisors, political analysts have always had that different doctrine in the back of their minds whenever they try to understand or criticize the US. They think: “your doctrine says you will do so and so; why aren’t you doing it?” Diplomats also had that doctrine in mind when they communicate with the US; and they formulate their communication in a language compatible to the now old doctrine.
The US will continue to be the indispensable ally no matter what its shortcomings are. And if we want to sustain an intelligent discussion with it we should read Goldberg’s piece well, again and again.
The Middle East Is Unraveling—and Obama Offers Words
Hisham Melhem/The Atlantic/11 March/16 http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/obama-doctrine-middle-east/473178/
Jeffrey Goldberg has conducted the most extensive autopsy of President Obama’s foreign policy—and revealed that it is based on the doctrine that the best leader is the one who leads the least, and contemplates and talks the most. Obama is an impressive wordsmith. The most important milestones in his political career, before and after he became president, have been well-crafted speeches. He has lived by words—eloquent, searing, soaring, contemplative words—to the point where he might equate words and concepts with what the ancient Greeks called praxis, or practical action. In Obama’s world, sharp words can be almost as effective as sharp swords.
Goldberg’s article delves into some of these pivotal speeches: the Cairo speech, the speeches on the Arab uprisings, addresses on combatting terrorism and the agony of Syria. Most of the pledges contained in these speeches ring hollow now; instead of ushering in a “new beginning” with the Muslim world, Obama’s relations with Pakistan, Turkey, and the Arab states are strained and characterized by mutual contempt. Obama told those Arabs struggling non-violently for basic rights such as free speech, gender equality, the freedom of peaceful assembly, and the right to choose their leaders that “our support for these principles is not a secondary interest.” But as I have written, when Obama “looked at the enormity of the challenges posed by the Arab uprisings, particularly when they became more violent, he simply flinched.” Obama did inherit a dysfunctional Arab state system and fraying civil societies, yet his own ill-conceived actions and inactions have contributed significantly to the great unraveling of the Middle East.
In these speeches, as in Goldberg’s article, Obama comes across as a scholar who oscillates between providing compelling analysis of the problems and trends he is confronting or anticipating, and a tireless sophist and procrastinator weaving elaborate excuses and justifications for dithering and hand-wringing. His explanation of his passivity regarding Russia’s rampaging in Ukraine and Syria is rooted in denial. Obama has convinced himself that President Vladimir Putin’s military intervention in Syria came “at enormous cost to the well-being of his own country.” He believes the Russians “are overextended. They’re bleeding.” Yes, Russia’s economy is contracting, and Putin is in charge of an autocratic oligarchy. And yet Russia has filled the vacuum Obama helped create in Syria when he failed to act on his promises and deliver on his threats. The Russia-Iran-Assad regime axis is the one determining the tempo of military operations and diplomatic maneuvering in the Syrian theater, not the United States and its allies. Putin has diabolically exploited the Syrian refugee challenge in Europe to weaken the institutions of the European Union and to divert Europe’s attention from his predations in Ukraine. Because of Obama’s dithering, Syria’s war has metastasized into a Middle Eastern and European crisis.
It is as if the president of the United States is declaring a whole generation of Arabs as the devil’s rejects.
What is most jarring is Obama’s tendency to distort the views of his detractors to the point of dissembling by reframing their original positions. He perfected this formula on critics of his maddening approach to Syria, including senior members of his administration, by belittling their proposals for establishing no-fly zones, or protected safe havens in Syria, as “half-baked” ideas or “mumbo-jumbo” proposals. Obama told Goldberg that his critics say, “You called for Assad to go, but you didn’t force him to go. You did not invade.” But Mr. President, who asked you to invade Syria? Could you please name one serious critic who said so? Obama speaks expansively and derisively about the “Washington playbook” and what he describes as the foreign-policy establishment’s “credibility” fetish; the playbook, according to Obama, tends to prescribe militarized responses to different crises in order to maintain America’s credibility. But credibility, particularly for a great power, is the coin of the realm. And it need not be purchased by force every time.
Obama boasts that he is “very proud” of the moment, on August 30, 2013, when he retreated from his threat to punish the Assad regime militarily following its mass murder of more than 1,400 innocent Syrian civilians, many of them children, with chemical weapons. He may view that date as his day of liberation from promises he made to help people who have been at the receiving end of weapons of mass destruction. But for millions of Syrians, August 30, 2013 is a day that shall live in infamy.
Obama is right to be resentful of America’s Sunni Arab allies, who foment sectarianism and anti-Americanism and help radical jihadists who are wreaking havoc in Syria and Libya. His frustration with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Egypt is well-known. Obama’s retrenchment from the Middle East reflects deep disillusionment with the region.
But it also reflects disdain for an Arab world that should be avoided. Obama ignores those states seeking tepidly to implement reforms and fight terrorism. He coldly and correctly diagnoses the ills of the majority of Arab states: predatory autocratic regimes, violent Islamist groups, diminishing civic traditions, rampant sectarianism and tribalism. But he does not see any ray of hope or promise in this bleak scene. It is as if the Arab world is inhabited only by angry Arab youths “thinking about how to kill Americans,” and totally bereft of decent Arab men and women, like those millions who marched and struggled against tyranny and called for freedom, empowerment, dignity, and modernity. He laments that if the U.S is not talking to the young people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America “because the only thing we’re doing is figuring out how to destroy or cordon off or control the malicious, nihilistic, violent parts of humanity, then we’re missing the boat.” It is as if the president of the United States is declaring a whole generation of Arabs as the devil’s rejects; it is as if he wants to have large swaths of the Middle East quarantined indefinitely.
