Barack Obama, Voice of the Establishment

There’s an interesting article by academic Paul Miller at War on the Rocks, assessing President Obama’s foreign policy legacy. Dr. Miller opens by characterizing the prevailing view of President Obama’s legacy:

In place of the black-and-white establishment view that the United States must always do something, Obama played a “long game” in which patience, balance, restraint, and pragmatism counted as much as the establishment’s fetishes, strength and credibility.

Indeed, this seems to be Obama’s own view of his legacy.

and continues by analyzing whether that view holds water. His conclusion: it doesn’t.

The premise of these assessments of Obama’s foreign policy legacy is that there is something identifiable as the foreign policy “establishment” that has a consensus worldview; that the establishment consensus led to foolish adventurism and needless conflicts in strategically unimportant regions; and that the solution, therefore, was to challenge establishment interventionism and exercise more restraint. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, complained that U.S. foreign policy was dominated by groupthink — or, as he called it, the “Blob” — from which Obama struggled hard to break free. A New York Times Magazine profile quotes Rhodes on this point: “The reason the president has bucked a lot of establishment thinking is because he does not agree with establishment thinking.”

But what if these premises are wrong? What if Obama, Rhodes and their supporters wove a misleading narrative about what ailed U.S. foreign policy? Obama’s foreign policy worldview came from his self-conscious effort to learn the lessons of history — specifically, the lessons of the George W. Bush administration — which no one will fault. As anyone who has ever taken a class in history or political science knows, Obama knew George Santayana’s famous aphorism that “those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” But learning the lessons of history can be difficult, even deceptive. Obama does not seem to have known Robert Jervis’ important riposte to Santayana that “those who remember the past are condemned to make the opposite mistake.”

I think there’s some appeal in the idea of President Obama’s foreign policy as a revanchist return to the foreign policy establishment’s consensus rather than one of “restraint”. It certainly conforms to a commonplace European view of President Bush as a reckless cowboy.

Although you might strain to think of what President Obama did in Iraq and Syria as restraint, I don’t think that a reasonable person would think of his “Afghan surge”, aid to the rebels in removing Qaddafi from Syria, or expansion of the use of drones in that light.