A Patient Hawk
Ross and Yglesias have gone back and forth over the degree of Obama’s hawkishness, and both of them almost have it right. Yglesias is correct that “the safe thing to assume on foreign policy is that we’ll keep seeing more of the same — a President who meant what he said when he was a presidential candidate,” but he carefully omits some of the things that Obama said as a presidential candidate that would show Obama’s Iran position to be very close to that of the current administration. When Obama said that all options remained “on the table” (how I hate that phrase) or when he told AIPAC he will do everything in his power to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, these are the things his supporters very much want to believe were necessary electoral gimmicks and nothing more. When he says something encouraging about pursuing Israel-Palestine peace or taking the fight to Al Qaeda, well, that’s different. Ross makes sense when he says, “I have a sneaking suspicion that a President Obama will be slightly more likely to authorize airstrikes against Iran than a President McCain would have been,” but this isn’t just Ross’ sneaking suspicion–there is every reason to assume that Obama would launch such strikes if negotiations with Iran failed (because Obama has effectively said as much), and his perceived lack of “pro-Israel” and hawkish bona fides will probably make him less likely to resist pressure for military action.
This is why the emphasis on Obama’s willingness to enter into talks with “rogue” states was always misleading and its significance overblown: Obama did not and does not disagree about ends concerning Iran, and ultimately he does not rule out using the same means that McCain would also have been willing to use. Obama’s supporters will say, “Yes, but at least he thinks war should be a last resort.” Of course, Mr. Bush says that he believes war is a last resort, too, which doesn’t necessarily make it so.
Update: Jim Antle also joined the debate:
The most thoughtful of the Obamacons — that is to say, the ones who weren’t just voting for fancy book writin’ and against “You betcha!” — were realists or noninterventionists who opposed the Iraq war and any sequels its authors might be planning. If personnel is policy, the last few days of rumors and announcements suggest they are going to be disappointed.
This is right, but Jim’s point against the Obamacons is stronger than he allows here. Long before any of Obama’s likely personnel choices were known, there were many things, including his positions on Iran and NATO expansion, that should have made it clear to realists and noninterventionists that they would be disappointed in an Obama administration. Certainly, they could and did make the argument that he was still preferable to McCain, but their disappointment with such an ambitious interventionist was guaranteed more than a year before he became the Democratic nominee.
The spectre of what the appointments may mean doesn’t mean much unless you assume that Obama is just as detached from fiscal reality as his predecessor.
I have yet to see a government that allowed fiscal reality to get in the way of what it deemed its national security or strategic interest. Any administration that believes an Iranian nuke is an unacceptable threat to our interests is going to act in ways that are not strictly speaking rational.
The Spanish bankrupted themselves rather than let the southern Netherlands go and give up on vying for continental influence. There is an assumption that because we are broke that this administration will treat defense spending as if it were a normal part of the budget or another assumption that it will not have new expenses for new conflicts. The record of government for the last three decades tells me that these assumptions are wrong.
Your argument is inconsistent. You seem to be saying that we have to take Obama at his word when he says “all options are on the table” regarding Iran but we should *not* take him at his word when he says that war should be a last resort and he wants to practice diplomacy first by negotiating with people like Ahmedinejad.
Which is it? Do we have to take him at his word or don’t we? I’m fairly liberal but I generally like your writing. Using this kind of logic to argue that Obama is more likely to attack Iran than McCain would have been, though, just strikes me as either disingenuous or silly.
Similarly, I think you need to provide some evidence for your assertion that Obama will cave to pressure to use military force just to prove his “hawkish bona fides”.
What politicians usually mean when they refer to war as a last resort is simply, “I’m a reasonable person.” Except for Afghanistan, we haven’t gone to war as a last resort in over fifty years, but practically every time we have gone to war the President gravely intones that war has been the last resort. This is one of the annoying fictions undergirding U.S. hegemony–we supposedly never choose to fight, but are always “forced” into fighting by someone else. (Never mind that we consistently draw lines in the sand that other states are bound to cross and make demands that they are never going to accept.)
Politicians use this formulation that war is a last resort–and their supporters use it on their behalf–to counter charges that they are warmongers, even though the inevitable conclusion of their policy position is that they support attacking a regime for doing something that the regime is determined (and arguably within its rights) to do. If Obama believes that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon, and I take him at his word that he believes this, he has already determined what will follow failed negotiations.
On the second point, Obama has consistently adapted himself to the prevailing establishment view and does not break with a consensus once it is established in whatever political arena he happens to be in at the time. This is one reason why he consistently disproves charges that he intends to introduce radical changes into government and policy. That is not what he’s interested in. Unless the prevailing view in Washington changes significantly, Iran is considered a major threat and its possession of nuclear weapons is considered absolutely unacceptable, and Obama is not going to go against that consensus. Obama does not disagree with this view, but has repeated it time and again. Saying that something is unacceptable implies that Obama will do whatever he must to stop it. Otherwise, he would not use that word. This makes him particularly susceptible to pressure from hawks in his own party, many of whom are apparently going to be serving in high positions in his administration. I don’t think that’s a silly conclusion. I would be thrilled to be wrong, but I have not seen much reason to think that I am on this point.
Daniel and others and I seem to have been right about Obama not breaking fundamentally with the foreign policy conventional wisdom.
An interesting question is whether the economic crisis will limit Obama’s ability and propensity to go to war, or whether at with WWII and the Great Depression, war will be our social glue and economic stimulus.
And if the Depression analogy holds, no dobut there’s a Huey P. Long out there somewhere. We certainly seem to have “high popalorum” from one party and “low popahirum” from t’other.
“An interesting question is whether the economic crisis will limit Obama’s ability and propensity to go to war, or whether at with WWII and the Great Depression, war will be our social glue and economic stimulus.”
The latter has much more in the way of historical precedent to back it up.
I think that all possibilities are on the table – so we might as well wait to serve up our disappointment until the need actually arises. I don’t know what Obama will do in any particular situation, and neither does anyone else, possibly including Obama.
I expect disappointment, frankly, if only because, as Daniel points out, experience of the last several decades has set the stage for it.
Nonetheless, hope springs eternal.
And it’s not like we have a choice Obama is the horse we now all ride, and there ain’t no switchin’ rides in the middle of the river.
“If Obama believes that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon, and I take him at his word that he believes this, he has already determined what will follow failed negotiations.”
I think the unspoken implication here is what I take the greatest issue with. It seems to me that to believe that Obama is more likely, or even only *as* likely, as McCain to attack Iran you would have to believe that Obama is as or less likely than McCain to pursue diplomacy and other non-military measures as long as they’re viable.
McCain’s first instinct seems always to be belligerent brinksmanship (i.e. Georgia/Russia). Obama’s isn’t. I’m definitely not suggesting that I think Obama would never attack Iran, but if he does it will be after failed negotiations. I don’t see any reason to think McCain would have negotiations in the first place, failed or otherwise.
The notion that McCain and Obama are equivalent on Iran, or the Obama is actually more hawkish, is absurd if we take both candidates at their word. If McCain had won, he would have viewed it as a mandate for an aggressive foreign policy and more wars. Why? Because he explicitly ran, and repeated endlessly, that “I know how to win wars!” This is a far cry from saying war should be a last resort, or all options are on the table. This is tantamount to saying we should go to war as often as we can, because we are assurred of winning with McCain as President. What else could it possilby mean? A guy who “knows how to win wars” has absolutely zero reason not to start them, and an electorate who elects him is giving him a blank check to lauch and win them. This is a far cry from Obama’s position on all these things. When Daniel says that saying “war should be a last resort” is meaningless, he’s going against his own ground rules for this discussion, which is to presume that the candidates mean what they say. It’s just a way of expressing his endless doubts about Obama, even in the midst of a discussion in which doubts that the candidates mean what they say are precluded.
I keep saying that “war should be a last resort” is more or less meaningless because Presidents for the last four decades have made it meaningless. If McCain had been elected, he would end up using the same formulation, and he used some version of it during the campaign (“the only thing worse than a war with Iran is a nuclear Iran,” etc.). The phrase is an evasion politicians, including Obama, use to get around the moral obscenity of their own positions, which is that we have the right to start wars against countries that pose no real threat to us. Obama does hold that position, which his supporters pretend not to notice and try to deny when it is presented to them. His position is close enough to McCain’s as to be nearly indistinguishable in my view. He is isn’t as impatient or stupid about it, but the final policy ends up looking very, very similar.
Obama justifies his support for negotiations with Iran as an alternative means to prevent Iranian proliferation, which means that he has all but guaranteed that once he claims to have exhausted the diplomatic route he has left himself with only one other option. Interventionists who disagree about means do not really disagree about very much so long as they are all willing to use force to pursue the same dubious goals.
Well, Daniel, what other option is there when diplomacy with Iran has exhausted itself? I think he’s well aware that a war with Iran could be just as disastrous on as many levels as it was going into Iraq. I think that it is a farther-off option than you think it is.
What other option is there? How about not presuming that Iran’s nuclear program is something that concerns us enough to merit military action? I know, that’s my crazy radical purism coming through, but what I find so frustrating about the entire “debate” over Iran policy is that hardly anyone of any consequence argues that we (and Israel and the Gulf states) can live with a nuclear Iran. There are some people who are coming to grips with the reality that neither we nor Israel are going to destroy their nuclear program with air strikes, but there are not nearly enough of them in government. Iran has no incentive to dismantle or limit its program, and nothing we offer them in negotiations is going to change that. As long as the objective is to prevent Iran from acquiring a bomb, I don’t know what sort of deal the next administration could possibly strike that would accomplish this.
Daniel, I happen to agree with you that Iran getting nukes is not such a bad thing. It’s not only inevitable and not worth preventing by war, but not such a big deal in any case. Pakistan already has nukes. I don’t think Iran’s nuclear arsenal is a problem for the US, and in fact it could actually help keep the precarious peace in the middle east. As with virtually all nuclear nations, nuclear weapons are a defensive possession, making invasion of such a nation unthinkable.
But you keep insisting that Obama doesn’t actually mean it when he says war should be a last resort. If he doesn’t mean it, why did he oppose the Iraq war? Why didn’t he just say, as others did, that we had exhausted all the options and this was the last resort? Obviously he has a much higher standard for going to war than you are giving him credit for. Obviously he doesn’t just use that phrase as a boilerplate rationalization. I think he meant it back in 2002 that there were plenty of reasons not to go to war, that we had nowhere near come to the point of “last resort”, and that it was folly to say otherwise. Why not give him significant credit for that, and recognize that this is a guy who really doesn’t like going to war. Now, that doesn’t actually tell us where he draws the line. Clearly he supported the war in Afghanistan, so we know that’s acceptable to him. But where the line is drawn in Iran has to at least surpass the standards we used in Iraq, because we know he opposed drawing the line there, by quite a wide margin. So unless you can state with some rational assurance where Obama draws the line on these things, and project that onto the Iran situation, I don’t see how you can say that his position is anywhere near the same as McCain’s or most people we would call hawks. I will stipulate that I imagine his line is draw more to the hawkish side than your own, let’s face it, your position is not the general line by which we divide hawks from doves. I can certainly see you being critical of Obama for not being as reticient as you are to use force, but that in no way means he is equivalent to McCain or other neocons.
In fact, I have not yet seen any serious indication from Obama that if Iran is on the verge of developing nukes, that he will use military force. For one thing, our ability to stop Iran’s nuclear program by something as simple as a few airstrikes is virtually nil. It would take a full scale invasion to be certain of accompishing that task. And I see no indication that Obama is willing to do such a thing. He’s a realist, mind you, not a neocon idealist. Not that I doubt Obama wants Iran to know that, of course. One has to retain the ability to bluff, and one has to know that Obama is a rather serious amateur poker player. So it’s important for Iran to be kept guessing, which means we have to be kept guessing too. I just think, as in poker, you have to calculate the odds rationally, and not based on emotion, and the indications are that Obama is simply less of a hawk by quite a wide margin than McCain.
Also, you’re not taking into account the way Obama thinks about war. He doesn’t just go to war based on the notion that there’s no other way to get a country like Iran to capitulate on proliferation. He also takes into account the overall consequences of such a war, including all the problem of an occupation, etc. Look at his rationale for opposing the Iraq war. It wasn’t limited to “last resort” arguments. It also included arguments about the difficulties of an actual invasion, occupation, and humanitarian issues, and international outcry.
I think that Obama will approach Iran very much the way Kennedy dealt with the Cuban Missle Crisis. While everyone else is telling him to use military force, he will look for reasonable diplomatic means for compromise, including an assurance that the US will not invade Iran and cooperation on the building of a safe nuclear energy program in Iran. There are indeed a good many reasons for both countries to find an accomodation. They actually have many interests in common. All that is required is someone who actually cares enough to make proposals based on common interests, rather than saber rattling. I think Obama does care enough about peace to make those efforts, as he has repeatedly said he would, rather than just go through the motions in order to claim that war is now our last resort.
Shorter version of much said properly above:
Much of your column is probably right, but the false equivalency between Obama and McCain in the same position is silly. McCain and the Neocons have made it clear to conflate negotiation and “appeasement,” whereas Obama has done no such thing.
Now, to add to the discussion. My beef with Republican aggressions toward the Middle East goes back to the Gulf War, because Bush 41′s position toward Hussein clearly ignored every common sense of human nature, masculinity, and pride. This attitude of “bend over and take it up the ass (in public!) or we’re going to obliterate you” is *insane* (or, at a minimum, guaranteed not to work). And yet, this is the default neocon “negotiation” toward the Gulf region.
We have absolutely no reason to believe that Obama would subscribe to the same insensitivity or foolishness. And exactly the centrism and conciliatory tendencies you observe in other contexts have quite some bearing here.
Finally, it’s not absurd to at least *speculate* that Obama believes (properly) that war is a horrible thing, and sending men to their deaths should be a last resort, unlike the meager men who have simply shrugged off such decency in the last eight years.
Mind you, I’m in broad agreement that “Obama will disappoint people.” But on Iran, who HAS indicated willingness to negotiate in the past (before plainly rebuffed by the neocons), the difference between Obama and McCain might make all the difference indeed.