"You know the score, pal. You're not cop, you're little people!"
Questions of Obama’s proclivity for realism were raised in the New York Times, amongst others well before Obama okayed the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. Today we’re told that he gave the State of The Union speech while neglecting to mention that he’d just ordered a commando raid in Somalia that wound up killing 9 pirates. President Obama, the man elected on a platform of “Hope”, the great left(ish) liberal dream, the man awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for being elected, has turned out to be something of a foreign policy enigma. At least, he falls far short of the anti-thesis of George W. Bush, which many of his supporters had probably hoped he’d be. What is the core understanding of Obama’s foreign policy? Not his rhetoric, but the things that he actually does. The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that he is a realist in the post-state era. When dealing with the great affairs of politics amongst nations, his record is far from clear. When it comes to the little people: individuals who do things that America considers threatening, it is not so murky. Obama’s “Shadow War” doctrine is pretty simple in this regard: if you threaten us, we will hurt you, and we won’t make much of a fuss about it, either.
On Obama’s watch, the ethical, legal, social and political restraints on killing individuals have dropped to the point that it’s okay to launch a drone strike if you think you might hit a terrorist. George W. Bush might have invaded two countries, Obama seems to consider that persistent lethal force is okay, anywhere. That is, as long as you don’t have state backing. Obama’s played an incredibly cautious hand with the big beasts of the international system: states. The closest he’s come to flexing muscles was Libya, and there he was content to put about 2/5ths of the cash in, compared to US leadership in Afghanistan, which is still haeomorraging money. When it comes to the terrorists, militants and pirates, he’s okay with killing them, but he doesn’t talk about it all that much, and even then, only really in passing.
What strikes me about this is that it is, in essence, the realist critique of liberal theories of international relation: your talk, your speech, your laws, they’re all okay and fine, but when it comes down to it, the gloves come off. How Obama has approached supposedly weak states such as Yemen, Syria and Iran is supposedly indicative of a liberal foreign policy – respect for international law, sabre-rattling in the august institution of the UN and so on and so forth. I think that any real critique of Obama’s foreign policy should include the fact that people who are pretty much defenceless (well, unless someone figures out a cheap way of protecting against 24 hour surveillance and JDAMs) are getting killed on the presumption that they might pose a threat in future, or that their very existence is a threat. Whereas George W. Bush may have contorted international law past breaking point before tilting at WMD windmills, Obama seems wholly content with ignoring it. How? Because in these affairs he is the anti-thesis of the neo-conservative. See the SOTU speech for details: “For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country.” In fairness, he already did the slayed-the-dragon speech, but the fact that the death of OBL barely warrants a footnote in the summation of a year is interesting. In case you’re wondering, the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki doesn’t even warrant a mention.
I write all the above not because I think the policies are necessarily wrong, or that Obama is a bad president, and so on and so forth. Rather, the conduct of Obama’s foreign policy reminds me of an adult stepping on ants whilst on the way to work – there are more important things to worry about. Obama is a man of big (some say too big) ideas, and the US has a hell of a lot on its plate (global financial armageddon, China, the usual laundry list). I used to consider the silence that surrounds the targeted killing program somewhat deafening, but now I think of it in a slightly different sense. After all, when the world is falling down, will anyone really miss a few self-proclaimed terrorists? Obama seems to have astutely guessed that these men-without-country are vulnerable, in that their own territorial sovereigns will offer them up for dead (Yemen), as long as not too much of a fuss is made (and in Pakistan’s case, they get to complain about it loud enough for domestic constituents to hear). Rather than proclaim these people so evil as to warrant special measures, Obama’s foreign policy appears to reduce them to the point of unimportance, past the point, incidentally, where the administration cares whether stepping on them might violate some legal principle or other. As long as no-one kicks up a fuss, and the Supreme Court refuses jurisdiction, the results are left to speak for themselves. After all, who’s going to call America to account over a couple of hundred people? Russia? China? I’m sure both are quite glad that America is coming around to their way of slicing Gordian knots in two.
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Interesting, and reminds me a little of this old post… http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2009/04/obama-conservative-realist/
To a large extent this has always been the way for Great Powers. The ability to dabble, as you please, in ‘remote’ corners of the globe without any real furor being created as a result is almost the hallmark of the big players. Britain did it for years as per of her imperial maritime empire, so did the other European powers. The U.S. itself has a tradition of this stemming back for over a century, including Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs Fiasco and Reagan’s clandestine intervention in South and Central America. Is this a sign that – when the pleasantries are removed and the chips are down – that realism generally trumps liberalism? As a self confessed realist (with a social constructivist tint), I’d say so. But as with all things theoretical, I stand ready to eat my words once a more convincing argument comes along…
I think it’s not accurate to characterize these as situations of “on the presumption that they might pose a threat in future” at all. While I agree with some of what you’ve said, the picture becomes different if you account for the rather high bar overall these activities have. Sure, if your teenage nephew wants to go party with the hard men he might just end up eating a missle, but generally the collateral damage is low, and no one crys very hard for these very evil men.
Bush, Cheney & their crowd are quite fond of the idea of the use of arms with overarching themes of rewriting the destiny of nations. Obama’s more interested in just killing the bad guys and getting done with the job. He has a more practical approach that’s far more in tune with the sensibilities of most Americans. Granted those are not the people you see on the cable sensationals, but the rest of us like it.
The US has not decisively won a war since WW2. The US military can always win the “gunfight” against non-state actors armed with AK47′s, RPGs and some home-made bombs, but the strategic objectives are never met. To some extent I think this is simply violence for political theater to compensate for the strategic failures of US military action.
…but the strategic objectives are never met.
I think this post is on a whole a bit simplistic William. Perhaps this concept of “winning” or “losing” is better understood (given greater context) against a backdrop of politicians refusing to “stand still”. And that, of course, is due to the demands of the electorate.
Also, there is the First Gulf War (while it was really the second gulf war, but it was the first to have any Americans in it). It is difficult to argue that the Americans failed to meet their “strategic objectives” with this spat… if I recall, their strategic object was to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and that they did.
To some extent I think this is simply violence for political theater to compensate for the strategic failures of US military action.
The very point that Jack is making (and I happen to agree with), is that all of this is occurring with very little fanfare – so not “simply violence for political theater”: it would have received far more cover than it currently is.
Overall, I think it is purely a matter of it being sensible to ignore that forest fire on the other side of the hill while your hair is on fire.
That would have to be one of the biggest frustrations of my time serving: for approximately 3 years, we knew where we stood, what equipment we could expect, funding, strategic perspective, etc. until the next election or when the federal government wanted to take the focus off of some other blunder. Then the spotlight would be on certain aspects and everything would shift to accommodate whatever change was enforced. The expectation of acheiving a military victory cannot lie with the military alone, because in the end, whether we like it or not, the military is just another political tool.
Technically, the U.S. has only ever been formally involved in
The others can be broadly classified as ‘Military Engagements Authorized by Congress’ (12 cases), ‘Military Engagements Authorized By United Nations’ (6 cases), and ‘President Acting Without Prior Consent From Congress’ (125 cases).
Aside from this being irritatingly pedantic of me (sorry), it does rather illustrate that force as a tool has always been used by the United States on an informal rather than formal level, suggesting again that Obama is essentially following a long tradition of lower profile initiatives, rather than pursuing a particularly new or unusual course.
(Perhaps slighly off topic, but it’s also interesting to note that some Americans would claim that they won the Cold War too:
I recalled this particular post as I consume yet another work on defeat (Johnson and Tierney: Failing to Win) and it occurs to me that, when drawing on certain measures for the determination of victory, (in this instance, J & T’s score-keeping), the US and her allies are in a position of overall capability that precludes the perception of victory within the general community of observers. That does not mean that the US and her allies are not winning – but it is near impossible for them to establish the perception that they are.
Here are the reasons: J & T distinguish between gains and aims as measures for the determination of outcome and for each of these, the importance and difficulty in establishing these. That is, (and this could possibly be modelled in a Boston grid), if a gain/aim is important and is achieved, it leads to the perception of victory. The degree of victory is determined by the ease of achievement (to draw on one of J & T’s examples, Grenada cannot be thought of as a significant victory for the US, as the outcome was never anything but a foregone conclusion). The ease of achievement is therefore determined by the discrepancy in opposing abilities.
Given the above, it is nigh impossible for the US to establish any impression of victory for a campaign such as Somalia (as an example). Being of no material gain, having a poorly defined aim, and being surprisingly difficult in achievement, the US military was set up for a perception of defeat, even before the first Force Recon touched the sands of Mogadishu. It was only a matter of time. Yet, as J & T points out, the loss of life during Black Hawk Down was considerably less than other events that are generally perceived as victory instances.
On the basis of the above, and given the preponderance of US military might in relation to almost every conceivable opponent, it is the destiny of the US forces (as with any of the preceding ‘greatest military machine known to man’), to perpetually being perceived as having lost.
If you’d forgive the flippancy, for the US to ‘win’ in Afghanistan, (something we will encounter often in the near future), my recommendation to them would be to issue blindfolds to all of their combat soldiers and direct RoE that compel them to walk backwards only.
The case of Omar Khadr is also instructive, both about Obama’s choice of means and about the willingness of Anglo voters to accept that their governments are torturing and murdering bad guys somewhere far away. The arrangement seems to have been that he would plead guilty, spend another year in Guantanamo, then go to Canada where he could challenge his detention and the US wouldn’t have to think about him any more. A whole series of Canadian parliaments refused to do anything about the boy, and his dreadful crime of being the son of a friend of some very nasty people (and, possibly, fighting back when his home was bombed and a special forces team stormed the ruins). On 10 September 2001 I would have dismissed someone who said that Canada or the US would slip so low as a raving anti-American.