The Amateur

by Edward Klein

  Jones was particularly annoyed by Donilon’s habit of making derogatory remarks about American military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan—two theaters of war that Donilon had never bothered to visit. On one occasion, Jones told Donilon that, given his lack of overseas experience, “You have no credibility with the military.” But Donilon was protected by Rahm Emanuel (who openly snubbed Jones in favor of Donilon) and by Vice President Joe Biden (Donilon’s wife, Cathy, was chief of staff to Biden’s wife, Jill).

  Not everyone in the administration was sold on Donilon. No less a player than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates agreed with Jones that Donilon had a poor record of working with the military. But that didn’t stop Obama from appointing Donilon, who was a favorite with the Democratic Party’s leftwing base, to succeed as national security adviser when Jones finally decided to pack it in after nineteen vicious months.

  CHAPTER 18

  MIND-MELD

  I’m a genocide chick.

  —Samantha Power, senior director for multilateral affairs, National Security Council

  The shameful treatment of General Jones pointed to a neglected fact about Barack Obama’s foreign policy—namely, that it was as ideologically skewed to the Left as his domestic policy. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who had followed Obama’s ascent to power on the left flank of the Democratic Party. Obama won his party’s nomination at least in part because he promised to end the Bush-era wars, and put a stop to “torture” and the imprisonment of terrorists without trial. Equally important, he pledged to re-establish American foreign policy on a whole new set of lofty-sounding but dubious liberal principles.

  Obama’s approach was a rupture with the past. For several decades during the Cold War, there had been general agreement among Democrats and Republicans about the underpinnings of American national security. As Douglas Feith and Seth Cropsey wrote in an important article in Commentary magazine, most Americans, both left and right, subscribed to the following ideas:American interests, rather than global interests, should predominate in U.S. policymaking. American leadership, as traditionally defined, is indispensible to promoting the interests of the United States and our key partners, who are our fellow democracies. American power is generally a force for good in the world. And, as important as international cooperation can be, the U.S. president should cherish American sovereignty and defend his ability to act independently to protect the American people and their interests.

  Obama challenged all of these basic assumptions. In his view, American power had done more harm than good. Global interests should generally come before American interests. International law should be taken into consideration by American courts. Washington should hesitate to act without the cooperation of the world community. America had an obligation to extend an olive branch to everyone, including its sworn enemies in North Korea and Iran.

  The Obama Doctrine, as it came to be known, was given official status in the administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), a 30,000-word document, required by an act of Congress, which repudiated President George W. Bush’s “unilateralism” and argued in favor of “counting more on U.S. allies.”

  “Most notably,” wrote Miles E. Taylor in World Politics Review, “Obama’s NSS downplays the promotion of American values when compared to those of his predecessors. The words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty,’ for example appear only 14 times in the text. This is stunning when compared to the Bush NSS, released in 2006, which stressed those core principles no less than 110 times—and in a document that was substantially shorter than Obama’s.... The Obama NSS declares that ‘American values’ like freedom and democratic governance are ‘the essential sources of our strength.’ Why, then, are they given comparably short shrift in the document itself?

  “The answer,” Taylor continued, “is that the Obama team has been consistently cool toward the idea of democracy promotion since winning the White House, partly to avoid the appearance of being similar to Bush and partly to avoid ruffling the feathers of rogue regimes with which it hoped to engage.”

  All of this struck a chord with members of Obama’s leftwing base, who had wailed and gnashed their teeth over George W. Bush’s policies of preemptive wars and nation building. However, having bought Obama’s do-gooder rhetoric, liberals were thrown into a state of shock when he increased the number of American troops in Afghanistan, failed to end the war in Iraq immediately (he merely modified the Bush administration’s timeline for withdrawal), and upped the ante on Bush’s unmanned drone war against terrorists. What’s more, liberals were rendered practically speechless by the fact that, under Obama, America’s relationship with Europe turned out to be no better than it had been under Bush, and that—despite all his ballyhooed diplomatic overtures to the Islamic world—polling showed that Islamic countries actually felt more hostile toward the United States than before.

  Naturally enough, conservatives did not suffer the same disillusionment and buyer’s remorse. Many of them had forecast disaster for Obama, and they were not surprised when their predictions came true. To conservatives who championed a muscular foreign policy of Realpolitik, the Obama Doctrine was a confused hodgepodge at best and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Foreign Policy at worst.

  The Obama Doctrine wasn’t born full-blown from the head of the newly elected president. The ideas that animated his worldview could be traced back to the end of the Cold War and a debate that broke out in the ranks of the Democratic Party over the proper role of America in the world.

  By the early 1990s, liberal Democrats were raising questions about the limits of American power and the willingness of the American people to act as the policemen of the world. Alan Tonelson, a research director for the liberal Economic Strategy Institute, argued in the quarterly Foreign Affairs that “the superpower role that America has played since 1945 is now not only too expensive and risky for the public taste, but it is also unnecessary.” And in May 1993, just four months into Bill Clinton’s first term, Peter Tarnoff, the undersecretary of state and the third-ranking official in the Clinton State Department, went a good deal further than that.

  In a lunch with the Overseas Writers Club, a group of diplomatic reporters, Tarnoff said: “Our economic interests are paramount,” and given America’s limited resources, the United States must “define the extent of its commitment commensurate with those realities—this may on occasion fall short of what some Americans would like and others would hope for.”

  Dubbed the Tarnoff Doctrine by the media, this policy suggested that the Clinton administration expected to withdraw America from many of its customary foreign leadership roles. Although that was not exactly what Tarnoff had in mind—he pointed out that the United States would continue to defend its national interests alone when directly challenged—his interview made a splash in several major newspapers. For instance, the Los Angeles Times reported: “President Clinton’s decision to defer to European views on Bosnia-Herzegovina reflects a deliberate shift in a new, post-Cold War model of American power: limited by economic problems, modest in style and rarely exercised unilaterally, a senior State Department official said Tuesday.”

  Such stories created an instant outcry from moderates and conservatives. The State Department’s public relations flack, Tom Donilon—the same Tom Donilon who would later replace Jim Jones as Obama’s national security adviser—tried to talk the Washington Post out of running a story on Tarnoff’s comments. When that didn’t work, Secretary of State Warren Christopher rushed to disavow Tarnoff’s statements and assuage the fears expressed by America’s allies around the world. But the damage had already been done; world leaders expected the United States to behave in a weaker fashion.

  As things turned out, the ideas behind the Tarnoff Doctrine were commonplace among liberals in America’s leading universities and think tanks. “Their community is Barack Obama’s community,” Feith and Cropsey wrote in Commentary. “These are the people with whom he studied and with whom he worked as a facu
lty colleague. He drew heavily on his fellow progressive academics to fill top jobs in his administration, and it is evident they have helped shape his understanding of American history, his perception of international affairs, and his strategy for transforming America’s purpose and role in the world.”

  When it came to foreign affairs, no one had a more profound influence on Barack Obama’s thinking than Samantha Power, who burst upon the foreign policy scene in 2003 with the publication of her book, A Problem from Hell, which indicted America and other democracies for being “bystanders to genocide.” A glamorous Harvard professor with a mane of lustrous red hair, Power hobnobbed with Hollywood stars and other liberal celebrities, and once posed in a teal gown and high heels for Men’s Vogue, which described her as a “Harvard brainiac who can boast both a Pulitzer Prize and a mean jump shot (ask George Clooney).”

  As an academic, Power had steered clear of politicians—that is, until she met Barack Obama in 2005, became smitten with him, and volunteered to work in his Senate office. It was an instant mind-meld, and Power became one of Obama’s closest foreign policy advisers. They enjoyed a special relationship and frequently texted via their BlackBerries. Power authored a memo titled “Conventional Washington versus the Change We Need,” in which she buttressed the foundations of the Obama Doctrine. “Barack Obama’s judgment is right,” she wrote. “The conventional wisdom is wrong. We need a new era of tough, principled and engaged American diplomacy to deal with 21st century challenges.”

  In the midst of the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Power embarked on an international tour to promote her book, Chasing the Flame. She told a reporter from The Scotsman: “We fucked up in Ohio... and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win.... She is a monster, too—that’s off the record—she is stooping to anything.... If you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”

  Though Power quickly apologized for calling Hillary a monster, she was forced to cancel her book tour and resign from the Obama campaign. The neoconservative Weekly Standard noted: “It might have been the most ill-starred book tour since the invention of movable type.” But it was impossible to keep Power down, and when Obama won the White House, he made her a member of his transition team, then appointed her to the National Security Council, where she serves as special assistant to the president and runs the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights.

  “U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought,” Power argued. “It needs not tweaking but overhauling.... Instituting a doctrine of mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors. When [then German Chancellor Willy] Brandt went down on one knee in the Warsaw ghetto, his gesture was gratifying to World War II survivors, but it was also ennobling and cathartic for Germany. Would such an approach be futile for the United States?”

  Power’s answer to her own question was clear: she wanted Obama to get “down on one knee” and seek pardon for the sins of American foreign policy. But that alone, Power warned, would not be enough to undo the harm America had inflicted on the world, especially in the Middle East. In order to solve the problems of the Middle East, Obama had to disentangle the United States from Israel and not worry about the so-called Jewish Lobby.

  “So much of [the debate over the Middle East] is about: ‘Is [Obama] going to be good for the Jews,’” she complained, apparently unaware that such a remark could be interpreted as anti-Semitic. Obama, she went on to say, had to be willing to “alienate a domestic [Jewish] constituency of tremendous political and financial import: it may more crucially mean sacrificing... billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the state of Palestine.... America’s important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon ... demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.”

  Samantha Power’s history of America’s Middle East policy was a complete distortion, but her radical leftwing attitudes were reflected in Obama’s antagonism toward Israel.

  In April 2009, when Barack Obama attended the G20 Summit in London and greeted the King of Saudi Arabia with a full bow from the waist, it was plain for all to see that Samantha’s Power’s ideas had prevailed over Miss Manners’ book of etiquette, which strongly advised Americans “not to bow or curtsy to a foreign monarch.” And when Obama went to Cairo two months later and addressed the Muslim world in a landmark speech, foreign-policy cognoscenti could detect the echoes of Samantha Power in the president’s words.

  “I’ve come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,” Obama declared in Cairo. The poor relations between Americans and Muslims had little to do with the shockingly bad behavior of dictatorial Arab regimes and their obstinate refusal to recognize the right of Israel to exist, he said. Rather, the strains were the fault of Western “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims.” (He made no mention of the fact that the Ottoman Empire ruled the Arab world for 600 years—far longer and with a more detrimental effect than the West.)

  Obama presented himself as a paragon of religious tolerance in contrast to the narrow-minded people “in my country [who] view Islam as inevitably hostile... to human rights.” (He made no mention of how existing policies in the Arab world discriminated against women.) The response by President George W. Bush to the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, he lamented, “led us to act contrary to our ideals.” No longer would America seek to impose its will on others, because “any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.”

  “Barack Obama’s mention of ‘nearly seven million American Muslims’ in the course of his rambling and complex 6,000-word address to the Muslim world from Cairo symbolizes the whole message,” blogged Daniel Pipes, the respected editor of Middle East Quarterly. “Study after study has found that demographic figure about three times too high. But Islamist organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America relentlessly promote the notion of seven or even ten million American Muslims. Obama’s acceptance of their version amounts to a giveaway, a cheap way to win the approbation of Islamists who so widely influence Muslim opinion.

  “‘Giveaway,’ indeed, defines the whole speech—inexpensive nods, tips of the hat, and salutations to win Muslim favor without initiating new approaches or embarking on new policies,” Pipes continued. “The speech confirms Obama’s personal efforts ... as well as the established practice of American political leaders to promote Islam, tell Muslims what their religion really means, avoid references to radical Islam, and excoriate violent Islamism while accepting the non-violent variety.”

  Obama was so anxious to curry favor with the Muslim community that his Justice Department prohibited the mention of “Islam” or “Islamic terror” in federal law enforcement training manuals. In addition, Obama instructed his advisers to remove the term “Islamic extremism” from the central document outlining America’s National Security Strategy. The change in approach was dramatized when Paul Stockton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Security Affairs, appeared before a joint Senate/House Homeland Security hearing. He was asked by Representative Dan Lungren, a former attorney general of California, about the source of the threat to America and its troops. The exchange went as follows:Representative Daniel Lungren (R-CA): Secretary Stockton, are we at war with violent Islamist extremism?

  Mr. Stockton: No, sir. We are at war with al Qaeda, its affiliates.

  Rep. Lungren: Okay, I understand that. My question is, is violent Islamist extremism at war with us?

  Mr. Stockton: No, sir. We are being attacked by al Qaeda and its
allies.

  Rep. Lungren: Is al Qaeda—can it be described as being an exponent of violent Islamist extremism?

  Mr. Stockton: They—al Qaeda are murderers with an ideological agenda.

  Rep. Lungren: No, I—that’s not my question. That wasn’t my question. My question was, is al Qaeda acting out violent Islamist extremism?

  Mr. Stockton: Al Qaeda is a violent organization dedicated to overthrowing the values that we intend to advance.

  Rep. Lungren: So is it yes or no?

  Mr. Stockton: Can I hear the question again? I’ll make it as clear as I can. We are not at war with Islam. And it is not—

  Rep. Lungren: I didn’t ask that—I did not ask that, sir. I asked whether we’re at war with violent Islamist extremism. That’s my question.

  Mr. Stockton: No, we’re at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE RISE OF THE HUMANITARIAN VULCANS

  Leading from behind.... That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the bal- ance that Obama now seems to be finding. It’s a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world.

  —Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker