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Rice and Power

Susan Rice has been named as the president’s next national security adviser. Jeffrey Goldberg relays some interesting information about Rice’s thinking on Syria: Rice is known as a liberal interventionist (as is the woman being named to replace her at the UN, the writer and former National Security Council staffer Samantha Power), but advocates of […]

Susan Rice has been named as the president’s next national security adviser. Jeffrey Goldberg relays some interesting information about Rice’s thinking on Syria:

Rice is known as a liberal interventionist (as is the woman being named to replace her at the UN, the writer and former National Security Council staffer Samantha Power), but advocates of greater American involvement in the Syrian civil war, the most acute problem Rice will face in her new position, will be disappointed to learn that she isn’t particularly optimistic about the effect that any U.S. action — such as imposing a no-fly zone — will have on the war’s outcome [bold mine-DL].

Rice, like the president, seems focused on the possibility that the downfall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime could mean a victory for al-Qaeda-like groups that represent some of the strongest elements of the Syrian opposition. The Obama administration is desperately seeking to avoid the creation of terrorist havens in Syria, because they would represent a direct national-security threat to the U.S. and would require an armed American response.
The American experience in Libya — not the Benghazi attack, which was searing in its own way — has also chastened Obama’s national-security team.

Most of the immediate reaction to the news about Rice and Power has been to conclude that liberal interventionism is once again on the rise inside the administration. Some have interpreted the appointments to mean that more aggressive action in Syria could be in the offing. Given the record of both women and their advocacy for the Libyan war, those are understandable responses, and they might end up being proven right. Fortunately, it seems for now that they aren’t correct at least as far as it concerns Syria. As it turns out, Rice reportedly agrees more with Obama than with liberal hawks on this, and it seems that the Libyan war was a sufficiently sobering experience even for some of its original advocates that they aren’t eager to try again.

Syria hawks and some opponents of intervention in Syria have been assuming that greater U.S. involvement is more or less “inevitable,” and they keep looking for signs that the “inevitable” is nearly upon us only to discover that Obama’s reluctance to get involved hasn’t changed. The more important question is whether Rice will be effective and competent manager of the NSC. One of the main reasons that Condoleeza Rice was widely regarded as a poor nationals security adviser in the first Bush term was that she didn’t perform this role very well, and that contributed to the overall dysfunction of the administration and its management of the war in Iraq. It remains to be seen whether Susan Rice will do better, but that will matter far more than her opinion on any particular issue.

Even so, I don’t like the choices for the same reasons that I didn’t want Rice at State. Both have an overly expansive definition of the U.S. role in the world, their formative experiences in the ’90s made them far too hawkish, and as Libya showed their judgment on these issues is not very good. The one major issue that distinguished Rice and Power in the first term was their support for the Libyan war, and in spite of backing that misguided intervention both of them are being promoted. That tells current and future officials that there is no penalty in supporting unwise military action, and indicates that ambitious officials should push for more aggressive policies whether they are in the national interest or not. I don’t understand the selection of Power for the U.N. unless it is simply a reward to a long-time Obama loyalist. I suppose that the position has sometimes been filled in the past to make a political or ideological statement (see Bolton, John), and appointing Power to this post might be an exercise in placating liberal hawks disaffected with Obama’s recent foreign policy record. If so, I doubt it will work, since it will just make Obama’s liberal hawkish detractors more vocal in their demands that the U.S. intervene in Syria.

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