More than 18 months into his presidency, Barack Obama has yet to bank a significant foreign-policy success. Surveying policy toward Israel, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, my blogging colleague Stephen Walt has scored the Obama administration oh-for-four. Politically, that's right -- and that's a big problem. But that doesn't mean the president has been doing the wrong thing, unless the right thing is simply whatever works in the polls. I would argue that the lesson of Obama's tenure to date is not so much, "The policy isn't working" as, "It's even harder than you thought."
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This is the season of diminished expectations. Obama's speech on Iraq this week was designed to highlight what is now deemed his greatest foreign-policy success to date -- pulling U.S. troops out according to schedule. The speech was so painfully modest that at its rhetorical apex, when Obama uttered that stern presidential phrase, "make no mistake," he went on to vow not that the United States would stay the course until victory was gained, but rather that "Our commitment in Iraq is changing -- from a military effort led by our troops to a civilian effort led by our diplomats." The great achievement was not leaving Iraq a better place, but simply leaving it. I think, unlike Walt (but like Walt's fellow blogger, Marc Lynch), that the Obama administration has handled Iraq about as deftly as possible, but that is in large part because the administration has recognized that it must let Iraqis make their own mistakes in the hope that they will ultimately muddle through. Policymakers have wisely husbanded their limited political capital. So far, of course, Iraqi leaders have not been muddling through, but rather fiddling while their country burns. (The White House may need to take a more active role, but Iraq is now facing a political problem that only its own politicians can solve.)
Obama has gotten it right in Iraq by trying to do less; if the president has gotten it wrong in Afghanistan, which increasingly seems to be the case, it's because he passed up the "do less" option advanced by Vice President Joe Biden and others in favor of the full-bore counterinsurgency option that his generals insisted would work. The advocates of "do more" believed that a focused application of military force and civilian effort could change the political dynamic inside Afghanistan and do so quickly enough that U.S. forces would be able to begin withdrawing by mid-2011. So far, that looks wrong. Here the lesson is: Even with virtually unlimited force and money at its disposal, the United States cannot confer legitimacy upon a government viewed as illegitimate by its own citizens. (Good morning, Vietnam!)
Is there a pattern here? Does this administration succeed when it is modest, and err when it expects, and promises, more than can in fact be produced by the instruments of American power? It's a surprising thought: From the time of the campaign, Obama offered himself as a cautious figure, in the mold of Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, aware of the limits of American power, as George W. Bush decidedly was not. He knew that nations have conflicting interests, that American values cannot simply be imposed or transfused, that history conditions people's expectations -- and that past experience had conditioned many people, especially in the Middle East, to fear and resent the United States. He recognized the inherent intransigence of things. As he said in his much-admired June 2009 address in Cairo "no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust."
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