Barack Obama’s aides call him the coolest of presidents. “As cool as the back of your pillow,” their saying goes—and it is not entirely a compliment. Obama was right to say that his job was to get America out of “dumb wars” it should never have been in. Let me be clear—I think Obama’s election was transforming for the United States, and that his important achievements, in a political battle of unprecedented ferocity, outweigh (just about) the disappointments. But his distaste for foreign affairs is clear, and damaging. There are only three foreign leaders whom aides say he has really enjoyed dealing with: Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor; Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s Prime Minister; and Lee Myung-bak, President of South Korea until last year, although he politely added the British and Indian prime ministers in public remarks. The rest? You can almost feel the frost coming down the phone lines—and US foreign relations these days seem too often to consist of a report in the Washington Post that “the President yesterday made a phone call.” Henry Kissinger, the pre-eminent advocate for direct negotiation, is scathing about Obama’s lack of contact with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in a Ukraine crisis that he says echoes July 1914.
Obama is right to say that America should engage in air strikes against the Islamic State, and on both sides of an Iraqi-Syrian border that is now meaningless. Yet that will create its own problems; it could help either Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad or any of the rebel groups. It is still unclear who the US wants to win; Obama’s worst mistake has been to say that use of chemical weapons was a “red line” but fail to act when Assad crossed it. It’s not enough to say that forcing the dismantling of weapons was action; the international watchdog has announced “compelling confirmation” of their continued use this year.
The bigger question, though, is how America and the west should advance their values—liberal democracy, but even more so, the principle of a rule-governed world to which countries that are not democracies should still subscribe. Both Kissinger and John Gray ask this; Gray, writing about the 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, argues that the west is deluded if it thinks that history is “on its side.” Rory Stewart, Chair of the Defence Select Committee, is scathing that the UK’s Defence Intelligence stopped watching Russia in 2010.
The argument is certainly not lost. Yet it needs making more vigorously than the US and European Union have done, although Secretary of State John Kerry’s immense efforts in the Middle East talks were honourable, and Iranian nuclear talks have at least bought some time. This doesn’t mean “nation building”; that lesson has been learned—and both Stewart and Thomas Dichter, who has spent his life in development aid, are blunt about the limits of the possible. But it does mean engagement and commitment, of a kind that Obama has now begun to make. And if the Democrats lose the Senate in the November mid-term elections, he really will have little to do for the final two years but to talk to foreign leaders.
