A Good Week for the Short Term

Presidencies have a way of defining themselves in singular, dramatic, unexpected moments.  For Reagan, it was at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the last great rhetorical charge by the winner of the Cold War, challenging Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Iron Curtain even as (to the West, unseen) economic and political forces were tearing away at the fabric of the entire Soviet Union.  For the first President Bush, it was a declaration that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait “will not stand”; for the second, it was being given a megaphone at Ground Zero and summoning the nation’s sympathy, anger, and determination.  Bill Clinton’s, unavoidably, will be these words:  “I did not have sex with that woman.”  These moments might be prepared for but they’re not scripted, and that spontaneity — that collision of event and self — makes them so powerful.

For Barack Obama, that moment will be the picture in the White House situation room, watching the mission to take down Osama bin Laden.  It was a risky mission on multiple levels, and consequences of failure would have been severe.  Only he could sign off on it, and despite the potential pitfalls, he did, reasoning that the opportunity outweighed the risk.  He owns the success, just as he would have owned the failure, and for that boldness and decisiveness he has to be given due credit.

So there he is, at the side of a small conference table, eyes glued to the monitor in front of him, almost impervious to anyone around him.  He’s not demonstrative, like Hillary Clinton, or formal, like William Daley.  He’s simply watching events unfurl, roughly and concretely.  We don’t know exactly what he saw (Clinton’s gasp indicates it was something dramatic), and whether in fact he saw bin Laden’s last living moments.  As much as anything, he is watching a decision — several decisions, actually, given how deeply involved he was in the planning — play out in real time, something Presidents and policy makers rarely get to do, and with his own and the nation’s prestige on the line.

That this seems such a fitting portrait of his leadership isn’t necessarily a good thing.  Obama, it tells us, likes to decide.  He likes specific, clearly delineated problems with timelines, options and checklists; he likes hearing a variety of opinions, likes challenging them, and trusts his ability to line up the data toward a well-reasoned and calculated plan of action.  He likes the short term.

Contrast that with House Speaker John Boehner.  Boehner’s strength is the long term — the ability to think through variables and uncertainties, set a goal, and march through a strategy for achieving it.  This is a strength suited for legislation, which is all about variables and uncertainties and has none of the tidiness of checklists and maps.  This isn’t just a defining element of Boehner’s style or personality.  It’s why he has almost routinely beaten Obama wherever the two have faced off.

On Monday Boehner gave a speech on the messiest and most important long term challenge the country faces — our looming fiscal crisis.  It’s pretty clear from the speech that Boehner has a plan.  He’ll continue to link (correctly) our short-term jobs problem to the longer-term fiscal threat, he’ll use the pressure of a necessary debt limit bill to force concrete spending cuts, and he’ll leave as an alternative to a big spending cut package the possibility of multiple incremental debt limit increases, knowing that each one puts Obama and Democrats in a tougher and tougher political bind going into an election year.

It’s just as clear from the White House that Obama doesn’t have a plan.  He  has a proposal, but there’s no sense of strategy surrounding it just as there’s no sense that he really embraces it.  It’s just a proposal, a package of ideas sifted through experts and advisors, just like the mission to take out bin Laden.  Except that legislation is not a military mission.  It’s much, much harder.

Obama had a great week, but it was one that played to his strength in short-term decision making.  That’s not ultimately what Presidencies are judged by, and suggests that more of the good weeks to come will be Boehner’s, not his.

China Looms

Let’s just say, after Sunday’s finale to the toxic, too-long life of Osama Bin Laden — and, more important, after Sunday’s gold strike of al Qaeda computer data — that al Qaeda slides down the danger totem pole from center of U.S. foreign policy to significant irritant.  It’s been on the wane recently anyway.  The reliance on suicide bombings which kill Arabs as well as Westerners has angered many on the Arab street.  More important, its whole rationale has been unraveling.  Many of the disaffected, disenfranchised Arab youth who turned to al Qaeda are now finding much more successful channels for their energy and aspirations in the pro-democracy movements that — unlike al Qaeda — offer more concrete and earthly rewards.  So let’s assume that we get through the next few weeks without a big, murderous burst of al Qaeda revenge and that the bountiful intelligence harvest will allow the West to roll up the most active and vital al Qaeda hubs and networks.

Let’s also say that the democracy movements in Syria, Yemen, and Libya are successful, that Iraq gets its act together, and Egypt is able to maintain its current momentum.  If so, pressure on other Arab regimes — particularly Saudi Arabia — to democratize may prove irresistible.  That leaves Iran as the big irritant in the Middle East, but its patent lack of political legitimacy makes its ideology hard to take seriously, and its main military threat appears to have been crippled by a well-placed computer virus.  So let’s assume that within a few months, the Middle East’s place on the U.S. foreign policy radar reverts to the way it was on September 10, 2001, though with major, positive movement toward democratic governments.

What bubbles up to claim our newly freed attention?

China.

And not the China of the previous decade.  That was a China that wanted to vault up the economic ladder from production to innovation; that actively wooed western investment and creative capital; that was able to keep dissent at bay with real and significant progress in living standards.   It was repressive to be sure, but its overall tone was of a country which valued and understood capitalism and was trying to implement a capitalist economy while maintaining political control over a very, very large and diverse population.

The new regime appears to be stuffing all the genies that capitalism unleashes back in the bottle.   Roundups of political and religious dissenters have increased; crackdowns on internet chat have gotten more heavyhanded; the regime is going after not just those who oppose the government’s land seizures, but their lawyers.  They’re doing it far more visibly than in the past, with far less concern about how their actions will play to the resource-rich third world or the multinational companies whose intellectual capital they sought.  And they seem far less concerned with getting caught trying to hack into the Pentagon or U.S. military contractors.  In short, China is turning ugly.

The political class always overestimates the importance of present, even past foreign policy issues in U.S. elections.  And it’s always wrong.  Jimmy Carter made a huge contribution to Middle East peace with the Israeli-Egypt peace treaty of 1978, and George H.W. Bush oversaw the end of the Cold War and brilliantly managed an international reversal of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.  Both lost reelection bids.  In 2004, George W. Bush got very little political benefit from impressive military (and I stress military) wins in Afghanistan and Iraq.  He had a short-term bounce from the successful capture of Saddam, and I suspect that Barack Obama will get about the same from the successful killing of Osama Bin Laden.

But Americans do care about foreign policy as it points toward the future.  Ronald Reagan had practically no specific foreign policy successes in his first four years, but he did have a vision that addressed the biggest threats to peace and security — peace through strength.  George W. Bush beat John Kerry because Americans supported his vision of aggressively confronting terrorist groups and those who harbored them.  And I suspect that to win the White House in 2012, both Obama and his Republican opponent will have to offer a vision for the biggest threat to peace and security going forward.  And that’s China.

Saratoga

Saratoga, at the far north of the Hudson Bay, was where the United States became a possibility instead of a hope.  George Washington’s Continental Army was desperate for the resources that only a great European nation could offer, and every plea that Benjamin Franklin brought to France’s door was met with the same answer:  show us you can do the job, that our help will not be wasted, and we’ll talk.  On December 4, 1777, Franklin got the news that American soldiers had decisively beaten British soldiers in an honest, legitimate, major military engagement — not like Washington’s one-time sneak attack at Princeton, but the real thing — and rushed the news to France’s Count Vergennes.  The French were true to their word; two days later, France became an ally.  The United States, and democracy, now had a chance.

Which brings us, indirectly, to Libya.  I never really bought the idea that the invasion of Iraq was about Al-Qaida, or weapons of mass destruction, or even Saddam Hussein’s resolute refusal to honor the terms of his surrender to UN forces in 1993.  I never even bought the Tom Friedman justification — that sometimes, you need to whack a poster child for bad international behavior like Saddam, just to show you can.  I always thought it was the neocon line, which intellectually makes more sense than any of the above but straddles the line between bold and radical a little too dangerously for mass consumption.

It’s that we needed to reshuffle the deck in the Arab world.  Decades of political repression, hoarding of oil money by ruling elites and failure to diversify their economies have created the perfect environment for young people to grow disaffected, hopeless, and desperate.  Not only do disaffected, hopeless and desperate young people make a perfect recruiting crop for fundamentalist terrorist organizations, but also for the kind of extreme ideological and nationalist forces that define themselves by going after their enemies, both internal and external.  And when these forces win, one violent, repressive extreme simply replaces another:  witness Iran.

As extreme Muslim fundamentalists were killing people in the early part of this decade in England, in Spain, in Australia, in the Netherlands, in Indonesia, in Afghanistan, and yes, in the U.S., and as the pressures which created these terrorists were actually intensifying, we needed to change the game.  We needed Arabs to see democracy work in the Arab world, because democracy tends to empower the vast middle — the hump in the bell curve — which cares not so much about religious zealotry as it does about improving their own lives, improving their families’ lives, building a society in which their children can be free and prosperous.  And hands down, the best potential showcase for that kind of democracy in the Arab world was Iraq, with a diversified economy and a large well-educated middle class.  We needed Iraq to become a democracy because we needed young, frustrated people in Saudi Arabia, in Iran, and elsewhere in the region to see that democracy was a better goal, a more tangibly powerful aspiration, than blowing up buildings and going to war.  We could never say that, but it’s the rationale that made the most sense then, and to me, still makes the most sense for the basis of any kind of Middle East policy.

Of course, we made pretty much of a total hash out of Iraq, which is why the current wave of revolt in the Middle East is such a huge opportunity.  Here we have the big, brave middle of country after country rising up against repressive regimes in search of freedom and better lives.  They want to do it themselves, and most spectacularly in Egypt, already have.  In Libya they’re facing someone who gives despots a bad name, willing to kill the opposition to the last man and with the bullion and mercenaries to do it.  If he succeeds, others in the region will at least know that his formula for survival can work.  If he doesn’t, they will know that regime change is be inevitable and they’d better cut the best deal they can — just as the British fundamentally understood after Saratoga that the war in America was ultimately unwinnable.

And if we handle our role right we can go a long way toward wiping the smudge of our Iraqi occupation off our national sleeve.  A NATO military force protecting Libyan freedom fighters (can we please call them that instead of rebels?) from a ruthless, cannibalistic tyrant, preventing him from winning a military victory but forcing them to finish the deed themselves; then, offering help and advice only as asked, not intruding, not condescending, not pushing our culture down anybody’s throat; and then, allowing them to make their own decisions without pressure or demands for gratitude, insisting only that they play by the rules of the international community.  Wouldn’t that change the Middle East, for the better?  How could it not?