When U.S. presidents suffer galactic losses in midterm elections -- as it looks like Barack Obama is about to do on Tuesday -- they are often tempted to turn outward to foreign policy. Here, freed from endless haggling with an oppositional Congress, they have traditionally had greater flexibility and latitude to maneuver and more opportunity to appear decisive and presidential.
Will Obama be any different? After all, he's a wartime president with a Nobel Peace Prize. The last time we had one of those -- Woodrow Wilson -- the United States fared pretty well.
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But Obama confronts a host of foreign-policy challenges that go well beyond those of Wilson's presidency. Wilson won a world war and got himself into trouble not for want of a diplomatic opportunity but because of his own rigidity and refusal to make practical compromises over the League of Nations. Wilson headed the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, but refused to include any senior Republican senators or any influential members of Congress in the delegation. His relationship with Henry Cabot Lodge was poisonous; but had the president been willing to play politics he could have managed to shepherd the treaty and U.S. membership in the League through the Senate. Obama is wrestling with two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that he can't win decisively, and nation-building efforts will go on long after he leaves the White House. Unlike Wilson, however, it isn't Washington politics that are undercutting his foreign policy; it's the politics out there.
Obama's real problem is this: Unlike Wilson and other consequential foreign-policy presidents, he lacks ready-made or even easily manufactured opportunities abroad. The world the president inherited, at least in the Middle East and South Asia, isn't defined by the promise of stunningly conclusive U.S. military victories or decisive conflict-ending agreements; instead of black and white, the United States confronts the world of gray -- extractive and corrupt allies, determined and often undefined enemies, asymmetrical conflicts, and failed or failing states. There are no heroes, breakthroughs, or definitive outcomes to much of anything here.
Tuesday's midterms -- whatever their outcome -- won't change that. Even if the House and Senate both go to the Republicans, the president will still be able to have his way in Congress should a serious diplomatic opportunity open up abroad. On domestic matters, it's likely that Obama will meet significant resistance over the next two years, and while "game-changing" peace agreements or international diplomatic overtures might prove alluring, it's dealing with the internal politics of the small tribes in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan that will shape the success or failure of his policies.
If he's smart on this one (and I think he is), the president will keep his head, his rhetoric, and his ambitions small. He isn't going to find much solace and refuge in the world of Hamid Karzai, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Hamas and Hezbollah. He can't (and won't) withdraw from this world, but he now also knows he can't remake it either. Gone are the transformational ambitions of nation-building, grand bargains, and comprehensive peace. What's left are more in the way of downsized transactions: managing, not resolving conflict; contracting, not expanding the U.S. role in them; and just plain getting by, or in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, getting out.
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