Peter Feaver's blog

It seems that no one can resist the temptation to opine on the one-year anniversary of President Obama's election. Shadow Government is no exception. In coming posts, Shadow Gov bloggers will answer any or all of four key questions:

• What, if anything, has surprised about Obama's foreign policy since the election?

• What one thing should be singled out for praise?

• What one thing should be singled out for constructive criticism?

• What prediction, if any, about where we might be 1 year from now?

In blogoyears, it has seemed like a lifetime since President Obama culminated his historic campaign with a decisive victory. But in reality, it was only a year ago. Imagine a latter-day Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep hung-over from the election night festivities and waking up to reality today. What would strike him about President Obama's foreign policy? Here are our answers...

PETER MUHLY/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

Surprise?

I am surprised at how quickly President Obama lost confidence in the Afghan strategy he announced to great fanfare in March and how slowly and publicly (with daily read-outs and extensive tick-tock backgrounders) he is conducting Afghan Strategy Review 2.0. I expected that he would find it politically very challenging to maintain support for his war policies, but I did not expect he would make the job so much harder in this way. If this review results in (a) a sound strategy that (b) President Obama wholeheartedly commits himself to so (c) he spends the political capital necessary to forge a domestic and international coalition behind it, then the do-over will have done some good. But it feels like such a positive outcome is slipping away.

Praiseworthy?

The best decision President Obama made in the foreign policy arena is one of the first decisions President-elect Obama made: keeping Secretary Gates. This step took some political courage on his part, because he had based his electoral campaign on a scorched-earth critique of President Bush. Keeping Secretary Gates and some other key figures (such as Iraq/Afghanistan czar Lt. Gen. Doug Lute) ensured a stable transition and meant that for the first half of the year there were very few transition-related hiccups. Given how difficult it is to change commander-in-chief horses in midstream, this is a great accomplishment.

Constructive criticism?

The aspect of Obama foreign policy that most concerns me may be the flip-side of the praiseworthy piece: how long it is taking for Obama to settle into the role of wartime commander-in-chief. It could be that the decision to continue the bulk of President Bush's war council (and thus its policies) reflected a decision to delay taking ownership responsibilities for the war. To my reading, that is the connective thread that stitches together various problematic aspects of Obama's foreign policy thus far: peddling stale campaign rhetoric long after its sell-by date; repudiating his own comprehensive Afghan Strategy Review and launching a new one; developing a tin ear for civil-military relations and wartime alliance relations; spending so little time explaining his national security policies to the American people; giving his political team such a prominent role in national security; etc.

Prediction?

I think it is highly unlikely that the national security team that is in place today will be in place one year from now. I would not want to bet which principal will leave, but the betting money is someone will leave. Personnel transitions tend to be associated with friction and other mischief, and the causal arrow can go in both ways: intra-team friction leads to early departures and new arrivals disrupt established modus vivendi. So my prediction is that the "no drama Obama" mantra will have proven unsustainable by November 2010. This is not something to celebrate nor is it something to dread. Every administration has to deal with shake-ups and I wouldn't be surprised if President Obama proves he can deal with it better than most.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

File this away under "who will guard the guardians", subfile "who will fact-check the fact-checkers." Media Matters, the leftist advocacy group that "fact checks" the media for alleged pro-conservative, pro-Republican bias, complained about a recent Politico story.  They took special exception to a point I made. 

The Politico story was about all the ways that President Obama seems to be getting away with activity that would have sent critics (critics like Media Matters, for instance) around the bend if President Bush had tried it. In the Politico story, the reporter quoted me saying that critics would have howled if Karl Rove and other political/communicator types had been as prominently featured in the strategy review that led to the Iraq surge as David Axelrod and the other Obama communicators are featured in Obama's current (second) Afghanistan strategy review. I told the reporter I was worried that this would give the appearance that Obama was viewing Afghanistan narrowly through a partisan political lens and it would complicate an already delicate civil-military situation.

Up gotchas Media Matters to claim that Karl Rove really did participate in national security strategy reviews, citing a Washington Post story about the the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), which included Rove, Karen Hughes, and other communicators, as well as policy people such as Condoleeza Rice and Steve Hadley.

The problem with the Media Matters claim is that the WHIG was not involved in deciding national security strategy -- what to do in Iraq (or Afghanistan) to protect our national security interests.  Rather it was involved in deciding national security communications strategy -- i.e., how best to explain to Congress, to the American public, and to the world what and why the President had decided regarding the national security strategy. In other words, the policy team advised the president on what should be done and the communications/political team advised the President on how to persuade the American people that he had decided correctly.  

Both functions are appropriate and necessary, but under President Bush the policy came first and drove the communications/politics, rather than vice-versa. In short, Karl Rove did not sit in on the national security strategy meetings. If Media Matters has additional evidence, I would be interested in seeing it, but if all they can point to is the WHIG, then they need better internal fact checkers (and perhaps not trust everything they read or hear in the media).  

Now a more interesting critique would claim President Bush had the political-military balance wrong. Perhaps President Obama is recognizing that his decision on Afghanistan is inescapably a political one, and that the choice of the right national security strategy hinges crucially on an assessment of what America's domestic political system will support. In that case, it might make sense that Obama's political team has a seat at the table.

I think there is something to this line of reasoning, but at least in the Iraq case I don't think it would have altered the course of history much. I don't think having the political team at the table during the Iraq surge debate would have changed the outcome -- except, perhaps, to have hastened the surge decision slightly. According to Bob Woodward's account of the surge, some of those who opposed it did so out of concerns for its political doability (would Congress support the surge and would the American people stand for it?).  Perhaps having the political team to weigh in on that question would have settled the matter more quickly. Such hypotheticals are hard to pin down with certainty.

But some things seem pretty certain to me. If the Bush political team had been as prominently involved, the critics would have howled at the time. And because President Obama has involved his political team, he will have to answer the question: to what extent was this decision - whatever it turns out to be--  driven by political considerations, especially election and re-election considerations? 

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

The mounting criticism of the Karzai family has got me thinking the same thing that Tom Ricks is thinking: When President Obama looks at Karzai does he see Diem? I am hoping he sees Maliki.

Diem was the leader of South Vietnam who famously frustrated President Kennedy (and before him, President Eisenhower, and before him the French). He enjoyed more legitimacy than any other South Vietnamese leader did in the early 1960s, but he ran a corrupt and somewhat ineffective government. He also got embroiled in sectarian conflicts with the Buddhists that further split South Vietnamese society. The American advisory and support commitment seemed to be handicapped by Diem's weakness and Kennedy perceived the American effort to be slowly collapsing. In response, Kennedy ramped up the pressure on Diem to do more, but Diem seemed only capable of doing less. Finally, Kennedy took a fateful step and authorized U.S. acquiescence in a coup to depose Diem, which transpired in early November 1963. During the course of the coup, Diem was assassinated.  

What came after Diem, however, was worse: years of political paralysis caused by successive coups. With each new political crisis, the South Vietnamese government got progressively weaker, and the need for greater U.S. involvement to stave off a catastrophic defeat got progressively stronger. Looking back on the matter in later years, the Johnson team concluded that toppling Diem had been a severe blunder, a pivot point in the gradual American slide into quagmire.

As it happens, the Bush team confronted its own "Diem" question in Iraq in 2006. The new Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki presided over a fledgling Iraqi government that suffered from some of the same weaknesses: corruption, ineffective governance, and debilitating sectarian squabbles. As President Bush wrestled with how to reverse the negative trajectory in Iraq, one nagging question seemed decisive: Is Prime Minister Maliki part of the problem or part of the solution? Bush even dispatched National Security Advisor Hadley to Baghdad to take his own soundings on this question. Hadley's memo was leaked to the New York Times so you can read his assessment yourself.  

While the option never had serious proponents within the administration, some arm-chair strategists outside of government even advocated the "Diem option" in Iraq: somehow replacing Maliki with some other Iraqi leader who would, it was hoped, prove more to our liking. President Bush decisively rejected such talk and instead authorized a series of efforts to bolster the Maliki government -- steps collectively called the "bet on Maliki" option. Since then, there has been plenty in Iraqi governance to complain about, but I think most people would agree that the two and half years since the surge in Iraq have gone better than the two and half years after the coup that deposed Diem.

President Obama and his advisors seem to be wrestling with this fundamental issue in Afghanistan and the optics and the body language seem more oriented towards Diem rather than Maliki. Of course, the analogies are not perfect and the Afghan situation must be evaluated on its own terms. But Obama would also be well-advised to reflect on the historical record and the dangers of undermining even frustratingly weak and corrupt allies when there are not obviously better alternatives ready to take their place -- and when American efforts to install a new leader might inspire resentment rather than support among the people he would ostensibly govern.

STF/AFP/Getty Images

Robert Kagan gets the Iranian issue exactly right and his question is also right: What kind of poker player is President Obama? 

Negotiating with Iran is by definition an unavoidable part of pursuing the diplomatic option with Iran. President Obama should not be faulted for trying to negotiate a deal with Iran. But negotiations must remain a means to an end, and here the record with Iran stemming back many years is an unhappy one: the Iranian regime is a master at turning the means into the ends, where the goal increasingly becomes "preserve and prolong the negotiations" rather than "reach a deal." Unfortunately, that seems to be happening again now. All of the players, including Russia, are returning to form.

This is precisely why I argued that it was important to get the negotiating leverage that comes with ramped-up sanctions before negotiations started rather than after they had been shown to fail. If we had that leverage on Iran now, then every delay and every dither would gradually strengthen our hand and weaken Iran's. Our options would improve because theirs would get bleaker. Without that leverage, the opposite happens and is indeed happening right now: every delay and dither puts Iran in a slightly stronger position vis-à-vis the world community.

Perhaps the poker analogy could be improved slightly with one tweak: without the sanctions, we are playing poker with our seat on fire but with the sanctions we would be playing poker with Iran's seat on fire. Even a Nobel Prize winning poker player will have a tough time getting success in the first instance, but even a so-so poker player might have success in the second.

By Peter Feaver

President Obama is presiding over a slow-motion civil-military crash occasioned by his meandering Afghanistan strategy review. The crash has not yet happened and is avoidable, but it also foreseeable. Of concern, the latest reports out of the White House suggest that Obama's team is not yet fully aware of the dangers. If it happens, it will be a problem entirely of Obama's own making and it could have a lasting impact on the way his administration unfolds.

As Rich Lowry has observed, President Obama rarely misses a chance to blame a challenge he is confronting on his predecessor. This rhetorical tic served Obama well during the campaign and probably still resonates with partisans who post anonymous comments on blogs or who suffer from chronic Bush Derangement Syndrome. But it gives the impression that the Administration never left the campaign bubble and may even encourage self-defeating campaign-like behavior such as picking feuds with news organizations.

And insofar as the Afghan strategy review goes, it is a narrative string that is thoroughly played out because the current civil-military problem confronting the Obama Administration is entirely of its own making. The problem is not that Afghanistan is a difficult combat theater, nor that Karzai is an inconvenient Afghan ally, nor even that President Obama is taking time to review his strategic options. All of that and more is true and, I suppose, some of it can be "blamed" on President Bush. The problem that cannot be blamed on Bush is that the way President Obama is reviewing his strategic options is generating needless civil-military friction and, unless the Obama team gets it under control, could generate a genuine civil-military crisis.

Tom Donnelly produced an extensive tick-tock of the evolving Obama Afghanistan policy that reads like the first draft of a "what went wrong" post-mortem.  For my money, the key developments were:

• President Obama opts for a misleading straddle in rolling-out the results of his first Afghan strategy review in March. He oversells the extent to which the new strategy is a radical departure from his predecessor's, but more crucially oversells the extent to which he is committed to this strategy. And, like President Johnson in 1965 and unlike President Bush in 2007, he announces the low-ball estimate of new resources expected rather than the high-ball estimate.  Military audiences hear what they want to hear -- namely that the President is committed to resourcing the "new" COIN strategy --and do not hear what they do not want to hear -- namely that the President is reserving the option not to resource adequately the new strategy and, indeed, to change his mind about the strategy in a few months time.
• Shortly after the roll-out, President Obama and his key White House team take their collective eye off the ball and are largely uninvolved in the firing of General McKiernan and the hiring of General McChrystal. Indeed, President Obama has only one substantive interaction with the battlefield commander of his most important "war of necessity" for the next four months.
• The most meaningful senior White House engagement with the Afghanistan theater over the long summer of discontent is a remarkable late June trip that NSA Jim Jones takes and that amounts to an on-the-record politicization of military advice. As reported by Bob Woodward, Jones appears to tell the military commanders to shave their military advice in light of President Obama's reluctance to approve new troop deployments. This episode, I believe, is the key pivot point. Military observers draw two "so that's the way it's going to be" inferences:
  • (1) The Obama team is fully cooperating with Bob Woodward -- a tried and true Washington strategy because Woodward tends to treat more favorably people who have cooperated (i.e. shared information and access) than people who haven't.  Application: it is OK to cooperate with Bob Woodward.
  • (2) The Obama team is politicizing civil-military relations.  Application: play the game or you will get burned.
• On 17 August, despite harboring serious misgivings about the Afghan mission -- and despite the accumulating evidence that the Afghan elections, a few days hence, will be riddled with fraud -- President Obama gives his most important speech since the March roll-out focusing on Afghanistan and uses the same rhetoric that he used on the campaign trail: Afghanistan is a war of necessity. Reasonable inference for military audience: The president is committed to fully resourcing this war.
• A direct result of Jones's late June trip, I suspect, is that Bob Woodward is put on distribution for the McChrystal report and receives it shortly after McChrystal delivers it  to his (McChrystal's) chain of command in late August. However, because Woodward is in the book-writing business, he does not publish the scoop, holding it back for the book. (Many observers believe that Woodward's source was a military officer, but my own hunch is that it was someone from Holbrooke's staff. My conjecture is based largely on the fact that when the story does break, Woodward leaves Holbrooke entirely out of the story, a telling absence of the AfPak czar that makes more sense if one is protecting a source).
• Throughout September, after the McChrystal report is delivered but before it is leaked, there start to be stories that indicate growing military frustration with the White House's lack of strategic focus on Afghanistan. The military apparently believe that President Obama is paralyzed with indecision. This is the context for Woodward going to his source and asking for permission to run the report as a news story rather than as a book scoop: the White House is trying to bury the McChrystal report by refusing to act or even debate it. The result is a real civil-military problem.
• In response to the leak, the White House kicks into high damage-control mode (after a brief delay occasioned by the unfortunate timing of the UNGA meetings), but even here shows some  clumsiness, at least regarding civil-military optics: the 25 hours for the Olympics vs. 25 minutes for McChrystal optic, and the surprisingly prominent participation of the political team in what is supposed to be a national security review.  This coupled with numerous anonymous quotes attributed to senior Obama team members aimed at knocking McChrystal down a peg or two do more to roil than smooth the civil-military waters.
• And then, most recently, a remarkable (and rare) public disagreement between Chief of Staff Emmanuel and Secretary of Defense Gates about whether the Obama team can wait to decide on the McChrystal request until after the fate of Afghan President Karzai is resolved.

In short, President Obama has been slowly veering off into a civil-military ditch of his own digging. Despite his relative inexperience in national security matters, this was not inevitable; during the campaign President Obama showed himself to be fairly deft rhetorically in regards to civil-military relations and he carried this strong performance through the first several months of his presidency. However, in recent months he has seemed far less at ease with his wartime Commander-in-Chief role.

If Obama regains a deft touch, the crash can be averted. To avert it he needs to do more than simply endorse the McChrystal request, though that would surely help. He needs to show that he respects the civil-military process, and he needs to rein in his advisors who have been stumbling about. If he is going to over-rule McChrystal, which is his right as a Commander-in-Chief, he will have a much steeper climb out of his civil-military hole. At a minimum, he will need to forthrightly take ownership of the war and all of its consequences and spend the political capital he has hitherto avoided spending on national security issues to explain his decision to the American people and the American military. Of course, while President Obama and his team bear the lion's share of the responsibility for the current civil-military friction, they cannot by themselves get out of the hole they have dug. The military will have to help by rigorously sticking to proper norms of civil-military relations. That means they must not counter-leak, not even to defend themselves from scurrilous attacks from unnamed White House staffers; seek redress quietly, within the system, and within the chain of command. They must avoid threatening President Obama with resignations in protest if he overrules their advice; such threats subvert the principle of civilian control which implies that civilians have a right to be wrong. And they must be prepared to do their utmost to implement Obama's chosen strategy as effectively as they can with whatever resources he puts at their disposal. If President Obama errs, it is up to the electorate to judge him, not the military.

Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

Will's measured analysis of Team Obama's Sudan policy is kind. Perhaps too kind. From my vantage point, today's Sudan rollout has all the feel of a group being hoisted with their own petard, in this case the bombast of their campaign rhetoric. And precisely because it was all so foreseeable, perhaps this counts as a teachable moment.

The two protagonists, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice and Sudan czar Scott Gration, had key roles during the 2008 presidential campaign. In particular, their job was to peddle the meme that Barack Obama could be trusted on national security because he was going to be even tougher than George W. Bush or John McCain when push came to shove. Gration, a retired Air Force general, was trotted out to participate in one of the more remarkable attacks on Senator McCain -- a series of retired military people floating the notion that McCain was temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief, a not-so-subtle effort to play off of the notion that McCain's time as a PoW may have left him unhinged. Gration put it this way: "I have tremendous respect for John McCain, but I would not follow him."

Ambassador Rice, for her part, was especially barbed on the issue of Sudan: "The Bush administration has spent years not only talking at very senior levels with one of the world's worst tyrants, who is responsible for genocide, but also reportedly offered the regime major concessions in exchange for minor steps and rolled out the red carpet for some of its most reprehensible officials." She didn't mention "gold stars and cookies," but she might as well have.

The notion that President Obama was going to be more hawkish on Darfur than President Bush should have been easy to dismiss from the outset. For years, President Bush was the single person in his administration most passionately committed to the Sudan issue (first the North-South civil war and then the Darfur genocide). If memory serves, he would raise it in his bilaterals with other world leaders even when his staff had not included it in the briefing materials. He regularly pressed the staff to come up with viable ways to move the Darfur issue along. Yet we were unable to make as much progress as the president wanted for several reasons: (1) our nonmilitary coercive diplomacy toolkit was already heavily utilized on Sudan; (2) our military coercive diplomacy toolkit was fully extended in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; and (3) the global balance of resolve heavily favored those backing the Khartoum regime (what we called Khartoum's "heat shield") and not our weakly committed allies.

The Obama campaign made it sound like the problem was with President Bush. With today's roll-out, the Obama administration is conceding that the problems actually lay elsewhere and they have proven just as insurmountable for President Obama as they were for President Bush. Perhaps it is time for a different kind of apology tour.

By Peter Feaver

Secretary Clinton's recent visit to Moscow provides another opportunity to do a midcourse assessment of Iran policy. The assessment is bleak. Very bleak. The "mission accomplished" banners that Obamaphiles were unfurling when the Russians hinted at a greater openness to sanctions look a bit more faded and ironic today in light of reports that the Russians are back to their old script of opposing sanctions as an impediment to negotiations.

I argued earlier that the key intermediate objective of the negotiations with Iran was getting Russia (and China and the European in-laws) on side to impose tougher economic pressure on Iran. Without such leverage, negotiations were very unlikely to succeed.

Of course, the overall objective of those negotiations is to get the Iranian regime to abandon its nuclear weapons program. The Obama team, like the Bush team before it, believes that the only way the Islamic Republic will do so peacefully is if the United States can exert serious economic leverage over the regime so a compromise deal looks attractive -- hence the urgency of the intermediate objective of establishing such leverage.

From the beginning, the diplomatic track has been stymied by two stubborn facts. Fact 1: The U.S. cannot unilaterally generate the sanctions leverage it needs to give diplomacy a chance. Fact 2: The Russians, the Chinese, and sometimes the European in-laws all believe that diplomacy is an alternative to sanctions (and vice-versa) rather than understanding that sanctions are a necessary component of the diplomatic track. In other words, sanctions are what you resort to when diplomacy has failed rather than something you resort to in order to help diplomacy succeed.

The "shocking" news that the Iranian regime had been misleading the international community with a hidden second enrichment program provided a one-time opportunity to bring the international community on side, impose sanctions, and then pursue negotiations. Instead, the Obama team contented itself with the rhetorical support for sanctions the Russians offered -- the vague suggestion that if the Iranians kept up their bad behavior stiffer penalties might follow -- basked in the glow of praise for its deft diplomacy, and launched negotiations.

With Secretary Clinton in Moscow, the Russians sprung the trap. We can't do sanctions, the Russians explained, because that would undermine negotiations. As long as the negotiations are ongoing, the Russians will block sanctions. All the Iranian regime has to do to keep sanctions at bay is to string the negotiations along. As was foreseeable, Team Obama is trapped negotiating with the Iranian regime without significant leverage and without much prospect of additional leverage. This does not guarantee failure, but it does guarantee that the Iranian regime has the strongest possible hand and that the U.S. hole card, the evidence of Iranian duplicity revealed at the U.N. General Assembly in late September, has been played to minimal effect.

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images