Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Stratfor on Obama's presidency and the prospects for a bold stroke
There is much to argue with here, but Stratfor's latest Geopolitical Diary (republished here with permission) poses an interesting speculation: That if the Obama administration is unable to pursue its domestic agenda after the November elections, it will turn to foreign policy where it has a much greater capacity to act unilaterally. Short commentary follows:
By George Friedman
We are now nine weeks away from the midterm elections in the United States. Much can happen in nine weeks, but if the current polls are to be believed, U.S. President Barack Obama is about to suffer a substantial political reversal. While we normally do not concern ourselves with domestic political affairs in the United States, when the only global power is undergoing substantial political uncertainty, that inevitably affects its behavior and therefore the dynamics of the international system. Thus, we have to address it, at least from the standpoint of U.S. foreign policy. While these things may not matter much in the long run, they certainly are significant in the short run.
To begin thinking about this, we must bear three things in mind. First, while Obama won a major victory in the Electoral College, he did not come anywhere near a landslide in the popular vote. About 48 percent of the voters selected someone else. In spite of the Democrats’ strength in Congress and the inevitable bump in popularity Obama received after he was elected, his personal political strength was not overwhelming. Over the past year, poll numbers indicating support for his presidency have deteriorated to the low 40 percent range, numbers from which it is difficult, but not impossible, to govern.
Second, he entered the presidency off balance. His early focus in the campaign was to argue that the war in Iraq was the wrong war to fight but that the war in Afghanistan was the right one. This positioned him as a powerful critic of George W. Bush without positioning him as an anti-war candidate. Politically shrewd, he came into office with an improving Iraq situation, a deteriorating Afghanistan situation and a commitment to fighting the latter war. But Obama did not expect the global financial crisis. When it hit full blast in September 2008, he had no campaign strategy to deal with it and was saved by the fact that John McCain was as much at a loss as he was. The Obama presidency has therefore been that of a moderately popular president struggling between campaign promises and strategic realities as well as a massive economic crisis to which he crafted solutions that were a mixture of the New Deal and what the Bush administration had already done. It was a tough time to be president.
Third, while in office, Obama tilted his focus away from the foreign affairs plank he ran on to one of domestic politics. In doing so, he shifted from the area where the president is institutionally strong to the place where the president is institutionally weak. The Constitution and American tradition give the president tremendous power in foreign policy, generally untrammeled by other institutions. Domestic politics do not provide such leeway. A Congress divided into two houses, a Supreme Court and the states limit the president dramatically. The founders did not want it to be easy to pass domestic legislation, and tradition hasn’t changed that. Obama can propose, but he cannot impose.
Therefore, the United States has a president who won a modest victory in the popular vote but whose campaign posture and the reality under which he took office have diverged substantially. He has been drawn, whether by inclination or necessity, to the portion of his presidency where he is weakest and most likely to face resistance and defeat. And the weaker he gets politically the less likely he is to get domestic legislation passed, and the defeats will increase his weakness.
He does not, at the moment, have a great deal of public support to draw on, and the level of vituperation from the extremes has reached the level it was with George W. Bush. Where Bush was accused by the extreme left of going into Iraq to increase profits for Halliburton and the oil companies, Obama is being accused by the extreme right of trying to create a socialist state. Add to this other assorted nonsense, such as the notion that Bush engineered 9/11 or that Obama is a secret Muslim, and you get the first whiff of a failed presidency. This is not because of the prospect of midterm reversals — that has happened any number of times. It is because Obama, like Bush, was off balance from the beginning.
If Obama suffers a significant defeat in Congress in the November elections, he will not be able to move his domestic agenda. Indeed, Obama doesn’t have to lose either house to be rendered weak. The structure of Congress is such that powerful majorities are needed to get anything done. Even small majorities can paralyze a presidency.
Under these circumstances, he would have two choices. The first is to go into opposition. Presidents go into opposition when they lose support in Congress. They run campaigns against Congress for blocking their agenda and blame Congress for any failures. Essentially, this was Bill Clinton’s strategy after his reversals in 1994, and it worked in 1996. It is a risky strategy, obviously. The other option is to shift from the weak part of the presidency to the strong part, foreign policy, where a president can generally act decisively without congressional backing. If Congress does resist, it can be painted as playing politics with national security. Since Vietnam, this has been a strategy Republican presidents have used, painting Democratic Congresses as weak on national security.
There is a problem in Obama choosing the second strategy. For Republicans, this strategy plays to their core constituency, for whom national security is a significant issue. It also is an effective tool to reach into the center. The same isn’t true for the Democrats. Obama’s Afghanistan policy has already alienated the Democratic left wing, and the core of the Democratic Party is primarily interested in economic and social issues. The problem for Obama is that focusing on foreign policy at the expense of economic and social issues might gain him some strength in the center, but probably wouldn’t pick him up many Republican votes and would alienate his core constituency.
This would indicate that Obama’s best strategy is to go into opposition, government against Congress. But there are two problems with this. One of the underlying themes of the Obama presidency is that he is ineffective in getting his economic agenda implemented. That’s not really true, given the successes he has had with health-care reform and banking regulation, but it is still a theme. The other problem he has is the sense that he has surged in Afghanistan while setting a deadline for withdrawal and that his Afghan policy is merely a political gesture.
Obama can’t escape national security issues. Clinton could. In 1996, there were no burning issues in foreign policy. There are now two wars under way. Obama can’t ignore them even if his core constituency has a different agenda. Going into opposition against Congress could energize his base, but that base is in the low 40s. He needs to get others on board. He could do that if he could pass legislation he wanted, but the scenario we are looking at will leave him empty-handed when it comes time for re-election. His strongest supporters will see him as the victim, but a victimized president will have trouble putting together a winning coalition in 2012. He can play the card, but there has to be more.
We come back to foreign policy as a place where Obama will have to focus whether he likes it or not. He takes his bearings from Franklin Roosevelt, and the fact is that Roosevelt had two presidencies. One was entirely about domestic politics and the other about foreign policy, or the Depression and then World War II. This was not a political choice for Roosevelt, but it was how his presidency worked out. For very different reasons, Obama is likely to have his presidency bifurcated. With his domestic initiatives blocked, he must turn to foreign policy.
Here, too, Obama has a problem. He ran his campaign, in the Democratic tradition, with a vague anti-war theme and a heavy commitment to the American-alliance structure. He was also a strong believer in what has been called soft power, the power of image as opposed to that of direct force. This has not been particularly successful. The atmospherics of the alliance may be somewhat better under Obama than Bush, but the Europeans remain as fragmented and as suspicious of American requests under Obama as they were under Bush. Obama got the Nobel Prize but precious little else from the Europeans. His public diplomacy initiative to the Islamic world also did not significantly redefine the game. Relations with China have improved but primarily because the United States has given up on revaluation of the yuan. It cannot be argued that Obama’s strategy outside the Islamic world has achieved much. It could be claimed that any such strategy takes time, Obama’s problem is that he is running out of political maneuvering room.
That leaves the wars that are continuing, Iraq and Afghanistan. We have argued that Afghanistan is the wrong war in the wrong place. It is difficult to know how Obama views it, given his contradictory signals of increasing the number of troops but setting a deadline for beginning their withdrawal. We have argued that a complete withdrawal from Iraq without a settlement with Iran or the decimation of Iran’s conventional forces would be a mistake, but we don’t know, obviously, what Obama’s view on this is. We do not know his view of the effect of the Afghan war on U.S. strategic posture or on Pakistan, and we do not know his view of the impact of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq on Iranian influence in the Persian Gulf.
Let’s assume that he has clear views, which is likely for a president, and he is playing a long and quiet game. This would not be a bad strategy if he were stronger and had more time. But if the polls hold he will be weaker and running out of time. It would therefore follow that Obama will come out of the November election having to turn over his cards on the only area where he can have traction — Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. The question is what he might do.
One option is to solve the Iraq problem by attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. This carries the risk, as I have said many times, of Iranian retaliation in the Strait of Hormuz and a massive hit on the Western economic revival. In that sense, a strike against Iranian nuclear targets alone would be the riskiest. Far safer is a generalized air campaign against both Iran’s nuclear and conventional capability.
But launching a new war, while two others go on, is strategically risky. From a political point of view, it would alienate Obama’s political base, many of whom supported him because he would not undertake unilateral military moves. The Republicans would be most inclined to support him, but most would not vote for him under any circumstances. Plus, brilliant military strokes have the nasty habit of bogging down just as mediocre ideas do. That would end the Obama presidency. Clinton’s war in Kosovo was not an easy option for him strategically or politically.
That leaves another option that we have suggested before, one that would appeal both to Obama’s sensibility and to his political situation: pulling a Nixon. In 1971, Richard Nixon reached out to China while Chinese weapons were being used to kill American soldiers in Vietnam. Roosevelt did the same with the Soviets in 1941. There is a tradition in the United States of a diplomatic stroke with ideological enemies to achieve strategic ends.
Diplomatic strokes appeal to Obama. They also would appeal to his political base, while any agreement with Iran that would contribute to an American withdrawal from Iraq and perhaps from Afghanistan would appeal to the center. The Republicans would be appalled, but Obama can’t win them over anyway so it doesn’t matter. Indeed, he can use their hostility to strengthen his own base.
What the settlement with Iran might look like is murky at best. Whether Iran has any interest in such a settlement is murkier still. But if Obama gets hammered in the midterms, his domestic agenda will be frozen. He doesn’t have the personal strength and credibility to run against Congress for two years and then get re-elected. He retains his power in foreign affairs but he has not gotten traction on a multilateral reconstruction of America’s global popularity. He has two wars ongoing, plus a major challenge from Iran. Attacking Iran from the air might or might not work, and it could weaken him politically. That leaves him with running against Congress or addressing the Middle East with a diplomatic masterstroke.
It is difficult to know the ways of presidents, particularly one who has tried hard to be personally enigmatic. But it is easier to measure the political pressures that are confronting him and shaping his decisions. I wouldn’t be so bold as to predict his actions, but I would argue that he faces some unappetizing choices that he could solve with a very bold move in foreign policy. His options on the domestic side will disappear if the polls are right.
Commentary
Even the foreign policy "bold stroke" will be difficult for a weakened Obama administration, in part because Barack Obama has not built up a track record of credibility the way Richard Nixon had done when he went to China. Nixon's China initiative worked because RN's reputation as a foe of Communism bought him enough trust among the hawks that Nixon had political room to treat with the enemy, which China literally was at the time. Barack Obama has earned no such trust -- quite the opposite -- so there is no Nixon/China analogy in a bold diplomatic initiative with Iran (especially since there have been so many failed attempts across administrations and party lines since 1979). If Barack Obama wants to surprise everybody with a bold foreign policy stroke, he would need to attack Iran (as Friedman discusses), not make concessions to it.
12 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Sep 15, 12:38:00 PM:
On every foreign policy front Obama has signaled that he/America is in retreat, so he has nothing to bargain with. (Except for cutting all ties with Israel, something that would be approved by his base, but loathed by everybody else.)
By 
jmt, at
Wed Sep 15, 12:49:00 PM:
With the emphasis on a new START Treaty, maybe the "bold diplomatic stroke" would be one of leveraging START and the Russians to hamper Iran's nuclear ambitions.
The START treaty would pander to his No Nukes base and if he could bring pressure to bear on Iran from Russia, he might get some support from the independents.
The down side is obvious - it weakens the US in the long term and props up a nationalistic Russian. However, Obama has not shown either one of those to be a concern of his.
By JC, at
Wed Sep 15, 01:23:00 PM:
Why not do the obvious?..
Hemmed in by rotten options, simply use a predicted defeat in Congress to grandly announce a reversal of policy on the domestic front saying "the people have spoken", and concentrate his efforts on fixing the economy. Keep the Bush tax cuts, cancel next year's tax increases, reduce the size of govt programs, support the Arizona border control efforts, start drilling again.
Foreign policy can be run as an extension of domestic frugality by (eg) pulling back in Afghanistan to those provinces that are more friendly and have economic potential etc.
JC
By Dawnfire82, at
Wed Sep 15, 01:25:00 PM:
Iran has no incentive to concede anything to Obama. They've pegged him as a weakling and American military presence in the Gulf is declining as Iranian nuclear materials increase and more bunkers and other related facilities are established and fortified. They would be fools to give up anything now, and any bargain with Iran that doesn't involve Iranian concessions would probably destroy Obama politically in the US and set Iran up to become new regional hegemon in the Middle East. Doing nothing (a third option that George leaves out) would probably be better than this.
George's analyses of executive action and intent rely upon a core assumption that the executive in question is as smart as he is, and pursues courses of action with a clear head and strategic realities in mind. I've had this discussion with him before, and I think that this assumption is simply wrong. Just because someone ends up in an executive position doesn't mean they have any idea about what they are doing, doubly true in woefully inexperienced Obama's case. Simply getting elected does not make a president an effective or wise leader that thinks rationally about things like you do.
I think that a proper analysis of Obama's likely moves would require placing yourself into his head, acting off of his priorities, experiences, and belief system. And in that context, 'trying to cut a deal with Iran' (and failing) does compute, but 'launching a new war against Iran' does NOT.
Quite frankly, I think that the zero sum game of global geopolitics scares the shit out of Obama. On every strategic issue he's dealt with he has either miscalculated (like the climate summit) or taken the safest position (Iraqi withdrawals, Afghani limited surge with scheduled withdrawal, pro-Russian START negotiations, backing out of E. Europe, etc.). When the president of *France* calls you a wuss... well, pack your bags and get off the big boys' field.
I'd bet that he half-assedly tries to cut a deal with Iran, fails, backs off, and then eagerly runs against Congress because it fits his personality. He's not Clinton. I think he believes completely in his programs for 'social change' and will take a Republican seizure of Congress as a personal affront. We've all seen how petty and bitter he and his administration can be when they are solidly in control; I think it'll get worse if that power is upset by the unwashed, racist, ignorant Tea-Partying masses. They will see a Republican resurgence not as a legitimate rebuke against their radical policies, but as a sinister conspiracy of interests to destroy their agenda against the greater good of the nation. They're already preparing the battlefield for this with the laughably transparent, and weak, 'Boehner is a pawn of lobbyists' campaign this past week.
I think he will spend 2011 and 2012 flailing about against a solid Congressional opposition bloc, complaining the entire time about obstructionist reactionaries in the 'Party of No' (which he did even with solid Democratic majorities! imagine what it will be like when it's actually true).
It's not smart, it's not strategic, and it's not Presidential, but it fits Obama's words and actions to date.
By Escort81, at
Wed Sep 15, 03:28:00 PM:
I don't see how President Obama would launch any kind of military attack against Iran, unless the IRGC did something incredibly provocative against a U.S. (flagged or crewed) commercial vessel or a U.S. military asset. Even then, if a counter-attack happened, it would be limited and proportional, not a take-down of the Mullahs and their regime. Assuming the IRGC understands that they can get away with a great deal, as long as they are not stupidly provocative, Iran will not hand Obama an excuse to retaliate. On the other hand, if there was a stupidly provacative move made by the IRGC, and Obama did nothing, then he would be Carterized and would have his approval rating drop 10 points or more overnight, and would have almost no chance of being re-elected (only the Paulites and the pacifist wing of the Democratic party would support no action).
In terms of 2012, Obama will run against Congress and hope that the Republican nominee is already (as of right now) perceived as "far right" so that centrist voters are scared away, and that his base will turn out as it did in 2008. That would mean a candidate who is not that well known and has not been demonized yet -- someone like a Mitch Daniels -- would have a realistic chance of derailing that strategy. Of course, demonization can happen quickly, so who knows.
President Bush was not a particularly popular president when he won re-election in 2004, but he was running against John Kerry, who was not a wonderful candidate. In 1996, Bob Dole may not have been the strongest candidate that the Republicans could have run against Clinton, but it was "his turn." If the Republicans want to re-take the White House in 2012, the party and the voters should nominate a candidate who can beat Barack Obama. Like other contact sports, politics can be about match-ups.
By , at
Wed Sep 15, 03:33:00 PM:
Come to think of it, he could probably open relations with Cuba. Would play well with his base (but might still be a sore point with voters in Florida??), and the press would extoll this accomplishment.
He may also have some credibility with leftwards oriented countries in Middle and South America, but his union buddies would oppose any trade deals.
By , at
Wed Sep 15, 03:55:00 PM:
Our real problem is that arry HO isn't that smart and he certainly has no intestinal fortitude.
He's just a ward heeler from the Chicago Machine, nothing more.
I just hope that the Republic survives the Age of Obama.
By Robert Arvanitis, at
Wed Sep 15, 04:55:00 PM:
Iran can take a page from North Vietnam's book.
Kissinger and Le Duc Tho reached an accommodation, where America abandoned and betrayed South Vietnam, in return for the communists' promise to wait a face-saving interval before overrunning South Vietnam.
Iran is smart enough to agree to almost anything for 18 months, until the last American soldier, Humvee, rifle and bullet is gone from Iraq, before allowing Muqtada or some such to "rise up."
By , at
Wed Sep 15, 07:16:00 PM:
Anon Attorney here.
Dawnfire82 absolute nailed this.
In the end, Obama will do what Clinton and Carter did when their domestic agendas were blocked: waste time pursuing peace between the Palestinians and Israel, pretending like this is somehow important.
By , at
Thu Sep 16, 08:54:00 AM:
This seconds some of Dawnfire’s points.
Obama is a Domestic President – he doesn’t care about foreign policy. As a Domestic President he cares about his legislative agenda and community agitating. Getting a second term is secondary to his goal of being a Transformative President. We’re on course to level America over a decade or two through increased social spending commitments and the taxes necessary to pay for them – “Mission Accomplished” or so Obama thinks.
So the Statfor lead to this thread is built on a false premise – that Obama might actually care about foreign policy. Anything he’ll do in foreign policy will be in reaction to events or “window dressing.”
Obama thinks everything is “political” and binary … Left/Right , Red/Blue, Black/White. To him, whites are either Enlightened But Still Guilty … or Stupid Rednecks. He doesn’t understand Independents at all – people who’d rather not be “political.” So he’s lost middle America and doesn’t even realize it -- the Peasant Pitchfork Army now assembling.
So I expect Obama to spend 2011 into 2012 whining about Boehner & Co. Putin will have a free hand to keep moving pieces on the big board.
By Kinuachdrach, at
Thu Sep 16, 10:31:00 AM:
Friedman's piece reads like a star-struck teenage girl trying to explain away the unacceptable behavior of the Big Man on Campus.
Friedman is just another leftist trying to persuade himself that Obama is really smart, against all the evidence. Quite embarrassing, really.
By , at
Tue Sep 21, 04:10:00 AM:
I disagree that Friedman is just another leftist, but he is a lousy analyst.
It never fails to amaze me when commentators write as if Obama is a serious person -- he is not. He is spoiled, ignorant, not terribly bright, and timid. He has no credibility so he cannot pull off a "bold stroke". If he tries to, he will only end up looking worse than Carter being attacked by a bunny.
