THE DECIDER / THE ECONOMIST ( HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING )

The making of the president's foreign policy

The decider

Nov 26th 2009 WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

The long delay over Afghanistan suggests that Barack Obama seems determined to conduct foreign policy in person

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IT IS the hardest call he has so far had to make, and he has taken his time doing it. On November 24th, after the ninth in a protracted series of situation-room conferences on the Afghan war, Barack Obama said he had settled on his strategy, but that the world would have to wait a few more days to hear the details. He told reporters that they already had “a sufficient preview to last until after Thanksgiving”. The leaks say the president will send more troops, though perhaps only 30,000 or so rather than the 40,000 or more requested by his commander in the field, General Stanley McChrystal. After eight years of an under-resourced war, Mr Obama said, “it is my intention to finish the job.”

If the president found deciding hard enough, explaining will not be much easier. True, his generals and NATO allies will be relieved to know where they stand after months of uncertainty. Republicans who said Mr Obama would quit a vital fight may be reassured. But it will take all Mr Obama’s salesmanship to talk his own party round. Democratic memories are haunted by Lyndon Johnson, whose ambition to build a Great Society was thwarted by escalation in Vietnam. No matter how Mr Obama tries to sell it, his Afghan decision will be bitterly controversial.

As—already—is the manner of his decision-making. Candidate Obama contrasted the necessary war in Afghanistan with the unnecessary one in Iraq. Only a few months ago he was still making spine-stiffening speeches. Then came the wobble, and the leak of General McChrystal’s plea for reinforcement. John McCain, still a respected Republican voice on foreign affairs, called Mr Obama’s autumn of cogitation too “leisurely”. Others have connected the dots—a rebuff in Palestine, Iran’s refusal to grasp Mr Obama’s outstretched hand—to argue that the foreign-policy machine is broken. “Amateur hour at the White House” was the title of a scathing article by Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, which said that Mr Obama gained nothing from his recent tour of Asia.

But the case for the prosecution is far from watertight. The case for the defence is that if Mr Obama’s vacillation discombobulated NATO allies it also gave him leverage over Afghanistan’s underperforming president, Hamid Karzai, who got a free pass from George Bush but will now be under stricter supervision. As for all those long meetings interrogating his team, different presidents have managed foreign policy in different ways. Mr Obama plainly intends to set foreign policy in person rather than delegate it to his national security adviser, Jim Jones, or to Hillary Clinton, his secretary of state.

Since a president who runs foreign policy himself pushes his team into the shade, an oft-voiced criticism of Mrs Clinton is that she has failed to lead on any big issue, preferring instead to travel, speechify and spend time on an internal reorganisation of the State Department. A swirl of rumour, congealing into conventional wisdom, is that Mr Jones, the six-foot-four former commander of NATO, is a weak national security adviser. Some say that Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, and David Axelrod, a close friend and adviser, have a bigger say.

And yet by historical standards relations between Mr Obama’s foreign-policy principals have looked harmonious enough given the risks he ran when he appointed a former presidential rival as secretary of state and kept on Robert Gates, Mr Bush’s man, as secretary of defence. In the event Mrs Clinton has proved loyal and seen eye-to-eye with Mr Gates on Afghanistan. Mr Gates and Mr Jones have provided an inexperienced president with useful cover in dealing with the armed services. Both men chided General McChrystal when he looked in danger of taking his quarrel with Mr Obama public. This White House is not Plato’s Republic, as the eviction after an unseemly whispering campaign of Greg Craig, Mr Obama’s top lawyer and point man on Guantánamo, shows. But there has been nothing like the struggle between Donald Rumsfeld at Defence and Colin Powell at State during Mr Bush’s first term. Vice-President Joe Biden has disagreed with his boss, but politely.

Most problems have occurred lower down. The administration’s Europe team has had mixed reviews. Leaked memos from Karl Eikenberry, America’s ambassador in Kabul, exposed a rift with General McChrystal. Richard Holbrooke, the envoy in charge of “Af-Pak” policy lost his temper with Mr Karzai and made himself unwelcome in Kabul, leaving a gap that has had to be plugged by Mrs Clinton and Senator John Kerry. Another Clinton-era retread, George Mitchell, has failed to repeat in the Middle East the magic he performed for Mr Clinton in Northern Ireland.

The price a president pays for failing to delegate is that he cannot do everything. Mr Obama’s biggest flop to date was the stillbirth of his plan to make Israel freeze all settlement on the West Bank and the Saudis offer better relations with the Jewish state. He put a lot of work into a big speech in Cairo but a visit to the Saudi king was underprepared and he never visited Israel at all. Elliott Abrams, deputy national security adviser for the region under Mr Bush, claims that governments in the region no longer know who is in charge—the president, Mrs Clinton, Mr Mitchell, Mr Jones or Dennis Ross, a Middle East veteran recently brought into the NSC.

Still, Mr Obama has at last made his big decision on Afghanistan. He has avoided first-year fiascos such as JFK’s Bay of Pigs or Mr Clinton’s Black Hawk Down debacle in Somalia. As for his management style, good organisation is no guarantee of success in foreign policy. “The Obama administration has an overflowing and messy inbox containing many foreign-policy problems that may be intractable,” says Jim Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations. “No process will save you from intractable problems.” Ronald Reagan presided over a notoriously dysfunctional foreign-policy team and worked his way through six national-security advisers. Yet history records that he won the cold war.

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