Aaron David Miller: Obama Must Resist Foreign Policy Temptation
[Aaron David Miller is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His forthcoming book is Can America Have Another Great President?]
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.
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...
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
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.
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...