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The Foreign Policy “Failures” That Weren’t

Jackson Diehl dubs Obama’s foreign policy initiatives to be failures: That’s largely because, in pursuing “engagement,” Obama has mishandled the biggest international development of his presidency: the popular revolutions against autocracy. Detente with dictators can sometimes yield results, but Obama’s outreach turned out to be spectacularly ill-timed. Following the failure to back Iran’s Green movement, […]

Jackson Diehl dubs Obama’s foreign policy initiatives to be failures:

That’s largely because, in pursuing “engagement,” Obama has mishandled the biggest international development of his presidency: the popular revolutions against autocracy. Detente with dictators can sometimes yield results, but Obama’s outreach turned out to be spectacularly ill-timed. Following the failure to back Iran’s Green movement, the strategy caused the administration to lag in supporting the popular uprisings in Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and elsewhere.

It’s interesting to read this alongside John Hannah’s very different indictment of Obama’s policies in the Near East. According to Hannah, one of the main mistakes that Obama made was in withdrawing support from Mubarak, which has caused U.S.-allied monarchs to lose confidence in Washington:

So acute is the crisis of confidence that America’s closest allies now openly question Washington’s reliability and mettle. Months after Obama’s rapid embrace of an Egyptian revolution that toppled the United States’ most important Arab partner [bold mine-DL], Hosni Mubarak, Jordan’s King Abdullah II was asked whether the region’s leaders could still depend on the U.S. With shocking candor, Abdullah responded: “I think everybody is wary of dealing with the West…. Looking at how quickly people turned their backs on Mubarak, I would say that most people are going to try and go their own way.”

As Hannah’s article shows, the idea that Obama’s support for the popular uprising in Egypt was “lagging” is untrue. It certainly was not perceived that way by other allied rulers in the region. As these allies saw it, the U.S. dropped Mubarak almost instantly. One could argue that there was nothing that the U.S. could have plausibly done to keep Mubarak in power anyway. Even so, it seems much more likely that the administration’s error last year was in being too quick to back the protesters rather than being too slow. As Diehl would have it, the U.S. should have publicly turned against Mubarak within days of the first protests instead of doing it within a few weeks, and that’s an absurdly high standard. Once Mubarak was out of power, there was little chance that Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were going to listen to U.S. appeals regarding the protesters in Bahrain. The decision to side with the protesters in Cairo had costs for U.S. influence with other allied governments (and with the Egyptian military), just as the decision to side with the rebels in Libya had costs for the ability of the U.S. and allied governments to offer much in the way of help to protesters in Syria.

The original “failure” that administration critics like to focus on was the “failure” to support the Green movement. As I’ve already said more than a few times, this is a ridiculous line of attack that mostly shows that the critics don’t understand what the Green movement wanted. The administration responded to the Green movement protests about as well as it could have, and none of the people citing this as a “failure” ever offer any suggestions for what could have been done differently that would have made a bit of difference to the protests’ outcome.

Diehl’s assessment of the “reset” is also badly flawed, and he doesn’t even attempt to gauge the value of improved relations between the U.S. and Russia, but this is because Diehl appears to believe that improved U.S.-Russian relations are undesirable. Even if those relations have “cooled” somewhat in recent months, the Obama administration has certainly kept the relationship from deteriorating to anything like the abysmal state of affairs at the end of the Bush years, and there have been some real benefits over the last three years. In addition, Russia has been granted membership in the WTO, and the administration helped to make that happen. This would normally be hailed as a success by doctrinaire free traders everywhere, but because it involves Russia and because it would require giving some credit to Obama’s Russia policy no one seems interested in mentioning it.

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