The World Obama Faces: Grand Old Strategy?

When Barack Obama takes the oath of office, he will face some fundamental foreign policy choices. Ironically, given his party affiliation, he may find it most useful to turn to the experience of two past Republican chief executives — Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. Both of them, upon taking office, had to deal with unpopular wars that appeared to have no clear exit strategies that they had inherited from their Democratic predecessors. Both, in turn, attempted to redefine American leadership in the global arena.

Eisenhower worked to liquidate the Korean War by accepting the status quo that two years of combat had established — even if that fell short of a “victory” defined as a Korea reunified. He worked to get all sides to accept the stalemate that had resulted as being sufficient to terminate active operations. Seven months in to his presidency, the fighting was over.

Nixon’s strategy of Vietnamization was intended to permit withdrawal of American forces both by strengthening the South’s ability to fight but also by using U.S. power to destroy the North’s capacity to fight (as well as terminating its bases of support in Cambodia and Laos) — and to try to use diplomatic efforts to have China and the Soviet Union lessen their support to Hanoi. Because it took far longer than expected to create conditions Nixon and his team found acceptable for a U.S. withdrawal, however, the impact was to transfer political blame for the
war from the Democrats to the Nixon Administration.

Unless Obama is prepared to let his presidency — at least in terms of foreign policy — be defined by the choices made by George W. Bush — he will have to end or at least severely curtail the American expenditure of blood and treasure in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He seems to be aware that the continued focus on both these wars inhibits his ability to maneuver in other areas of the world. It was not accidental, for instance, that a report issued last year by Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy noted that America’s ongoing commitments in the Middle East have been the major reason Russia has been able to restore a good deal of its influence in the Eurasian space — something graphically demonstrated by the relatively impotent American response to the Russian-Georgian conflict this past August.

Based on his statements to date — and with the caveat that what a candidate says on the campaign trail may not reflect what he will do once actually sitting in the Oval Office — Obama seems to be moving along an “Eisenhower” path for Iraq. He, after all, was an opponent of that war to begin with, and the extravagant goals set out for a post-war Iraq are associated with his predecessor. With the sectarian divide stabilized for now and with a government in Baghdad that, earlier this summer, endorsed Obama’s thinking about a plan for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces over a sixteen-month period, Obama has momentum for declaring a stalemate to be sufficient condition for American disengagement. And, as in Korea, where major combat operations stopped but U.S. forces remained provisions for U.S. trainers and anti-terrorism units to remain active as necessary in Iraq are loopholes that prevent Obama’s opponents from claiming he “cut and run.” The Obama team has additional political cover, given that the McCain camp proclaimed that the surge in Iraq had worked and that the situation has been stabilized. Indeed, there is a compelling narrative in place — much of it already disseminated by conservative pundits — that Iraq has been secured and that any future failures should be laid at the door of the Iraqis who failed to build on the foundation that America had laid.

In contrast, Obama appears, from his earlier statements, to be more inclined to pursue a Nixonesque strategy in Afghanistan — focusing on propping up the government of Hamid Karzai and deploying more military forces to break the back of the Taliban insurgency — and being prepared to widen the scope of the war to assault Taliban sanctuaries in the Pakistani tribal areas. While Iraq may be “Bush’s war of choice”, Obama and many Democrats from the beginning identified Afghanistan as the key front in the war on terror. This makes it less likely that an Obama Administration would pursue a strategy that our British allies now seem
to favor — a negotiated settlement with the Taliban (even if, as Prime Minister Gordon Brown has indicated, this must take place after fighting stops).

So it seems that Obama will split the difference: wind down the Iraq war as a “Bush mistake” but invest a good deal of his own prestige and standing on being more successful in Afghanistan. As Nixon demonstrated in Vietnam, it is a risky approach.