by Ben Rhodes
Obama’s outlook was closer to the European Union’s. Change should be gradual. Ukraine should be able to draw incrementally closer to Europe. Over time, standards of living would improve, and a less corrupt politics could evolve. “If I’m living in Kiev,” Obama told us during one meeting, “I can see how much better people have it in Warsaw. That’s what’s going to pull them closer to the EU.”
In late February, Obama and Putin agreed upon a formula that included a schedule for expedited elections in Ukraine. European leaders formalized the deal, and it seemed that the issue might be resolved. But Yanukovych fled the country and protesters took control of Kiev. The scenes were reminiscent of the early days of the Arab Spring: a corrupt leader abandoning ship; jubilant young people cheering in the streets; images of exotic birds and a classic car collection inside Yanukovych’s estate, confirming the worst allegations that he was on the take. But this was not the place or time for a revolution to succeed.
The familiar rhythm of crisis: Weekend meetings in the Situation Room chaired by Tony Blinken, email chains with updates, hastily scheduled press briefings. Russia was moving special forces into Crimea. These men didn’t wear traditional uniforms, but they occupied buildings, controlled airports, and raised a Russian flag over the Crimean parliament. Just as Crimea evoked a nineteenth-century war, the names in play—Tartars, Cossacks—spoke to a rough part of the world where history was never far away. The Russians no longer bothered to calibrate their denials about what they were doing, they just lied about it.
For the next few weeks, something approaching a routine developed. Obama would have a long conversation with Putin, trying to find some common interest we could work toward. These calls would last more than an hour, and Putin would always steer the conversation back to what he saw as the original sin—in his view, the protests that overthrew Yanukovych were initiated by the United States because some of its leaders received grants from U.S. democracy promotion programs. The people who took power, he told Obama on March 6, made a coup d’état.
Obama argued back at length, stressing that we had no interest in controlling Ukraine and that we respected Russia’s historic bonds with that country. “Our consistent interest,” Obama insisted, “has been in upholding basic international principles that sovereign states should be able to make their own decisions about their policies internally and externally.” He’d get exasperated, but he never seemed surprised. He didn’t think Putin was a grand strategist because he was acting on impulse—responding to Assad’s opposition in Syria, or Yanukovych fleeing Ukraine. He neither liked nor loathed Putin, nor did he subscribe to the view that Putin was all that tough. “If he was that sure of himself,” Obama said, “he wouldn’t have his picture taken riding around with his shirt off.”
On March 18, Crimea was annexed. We began to ratchet up sanctions on Russia—targeting individuals and entities, oligarchs seen as close to Putin or involved in Ukraine. The value of the ruble plummeted. Massive aid packages were prepared for Ukraine. Obama was in the weeds, speaking regularly with Angela Merkel, designing a response that sought to thread a needle: Hold together a Europe wary of conflict with Russia; pursue coordinated economic pressure through sanctions; and stabilize the Ukrainian government. “Aim first, then shoot,” he told us.
Our response went far beyond anything that the Bush administration had done to Russia after it invaded Georgia in 2008, but Republicans still castigated Obama as weak. Some even praised Putin as a strong leader, someone to be admired. Watching this, Obama told me that it represented something of a turning point for a Republican Party that had been rooted in opposition to Russia for decades. In Obama’s view, the praise for Putin that you could see on Fox News went beyond partisanship, though that was part of it; Putin was a white man standing up for a politics rooted in patriarchy, tribe, and religion, the antiglobalist. “Some of these folks,” he said of the more right-wing elements in the United States, “have more in common with Putin than with me.”
Publicly, my job was to make our response look as tough as I could. But nothing we could do was going to make Putin give back Crimea, nor would Obama go as far as the hawks in Washington who wanted us to send arms to Ukraine—even if we would never be willing to escalate as much as Putin. John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, had come on board as a senior advisor. Podesta was a brilliant guy, pencil-thin, with close-cropped hair, a strategist who could anticipate the turn that events would take in Washington. But he also brought something of the Clinton-era ethos. Obama should make his statements on Ukraine standing in front of Marine One, Podesta suggested, so he’d look tougher. McDonough described this kind of posturing as necessary to impress the “Russian judges”—his term for the Washington commentariat. But even as I agreed that Marine One made for a great backdrop, it made me cringe a little: Standing in front of a helicopter was only a degree removed from posing with your shirt off.
Obama’s real strength was in his ability to hold Europe together while Biden took the lead in bucking up the Ukrainian government. In late March, we set out for emergency summits on Ukraine. Working hand in glove with Merkel, Obama kept Europe together behind sanctions and secured a multi-billion-dollar IMF package that ended up saving the Ukrainian economy. Instead of sending weapons to Ukraine, he focused on deploying troops and military assets to the NATO members that bordered Russia. He started talking more and more about how he wanted to hand things off to the next president. “I don’t want to leave the next president in a position where there’s not some kind of trip wires in the Baltics and those NATO front line states,” he told us. “Putin needs to understand that even if we won’t go to war in Ukraine, we will if it’s NATO.”
After our trip, the crisis ground on as Russian-backed separatists started to occupy government buildings in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. The Ukrainian military was trying to hold on to their territories with force. When Obama called Putin, he again pivoted back to Yanukovych’s removal, telling Obama that protesters in the Maidan had also occupied government buildings; what was happening in eastern Ukraine, he said, was no different.
There was something awkward about sitting in the Oval Office for these sessions. One leader, Putin, was lying about what he was doing and flouting international law; the other leader, Obama, was imposing sweeping sanctions on Russia. It never felt like a conversation. Putin would go on for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time, then Obama would do the same. Obama ended with a warning: Despite the break in our relations, we still had time to resolve things in a way that could respect Russia’s interests. On the other hand, Obama said he’d impose much stronger sanctions if Russia continued moving into eastern Ukraine. In that scenario, he said, “relations between Russia and the West will be strained for many years to come. There is no need for that.”
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INCREASINGLY, OBAMA VENTED TO us about the constant demands that he do more—bomb Assad, arm Ukrainians—even though there was little evidence it would work. By his sixth year in office, he had used military force in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya while escalating our use of armed drones against al Qaeda. He saw the necessity of drones, but he spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to impose restrictions on when they could be used, setting standards for whom we could target and how to avoid civilian casualties. I also saw the need for drone strikes and couldn’t argue with their effectiveness in removing al Qaeda leaders. But I felt it was impossible to know whether every strike was justified. Obama once spoke to this mixture of support and ambivalence: “If someone wrote a novel about us,” he told me in the Oval Office, “it’d be about two guys who got into this to end a misguided war in Iraq, right about the time that the U.S. government was perfecting the technology to use drones.”
What bothered both of us the most about the debates in Washington was the sense that there had been no correction after Iraq—no acknowledgment of
the limits to what the United States could achieve militarily inside other countries. In one session that I went to with a group of foreign policy experts, we faced a litany of criticism for not doing more in the Middle East. After I patiently explained our approach, one of the participants—who’d been silent up to that point—interjected with an edge in his voice, “You have to bomb something.”
“What?” I asked, taken aback.
“It doesn’t matter. You have to use military force somewhere to show that you will bomb something.”
I saw the reasons why these arguments gained traction. Advocating intervention gets attention. And there’s something innately American about believing that there must be a solution. Many of the people who work in American foreign policy today were shaped by the experience of the 1990s, when the United States was ascendant. The Berlin Wall had come down. Democracy was spreading across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. Russia was on its back foot, and China had not yet risen. We really could shape events in much of the world. NATO could expand into the former Soviet Union without fear that Russia would invade one of those countries. We could bring together the whole world to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
Obama occasionally pointed out that the post–Cold War moment was always going to be transitory. The rest of the world will accede to American leadership, but not dominance. I remember a snippet from a column around 9/11: America bestrides the world like a colossus. Did we? It was a story we told ourselves. Shock and awe. Regime change. Freedom on the march. A trillion dollars later, we couldn’t keep the electricity running in Baghdad. The Iraq War disturbed other countries—including U.S. allies—in its illogic and destruction, and accelerated a realignment of power and influence that was further advanced by the global financial crisis. By the time Obama took office, a global correction had already taken place. Russia was resisting American influence. China was throwing its weight around. Europeans were untangling a crisis in the Eurozone.
Obama didn’t want to disengage from the world; he wanted to engage more. By limiting our military involvement in the Middle East, we’d be in a better position to husband our own resources and assert ourselves in more places, on more issues. To rebuild our economy at home. To help shape the future of the Asia Pacific and manage China’s rise. To open up places like Cuba and expand American influence in Africa and Latin America. To mobilize the world to deal with truly existential threats such as climate change, which is almost never discussed in debates about American national security.
Yet American politics pushes military interventionism, even as public opinion is wary. In the aftermath of 9/11, it became an imperative for politicians to demonstrate that they were tough on terrorism, with the measure of toughness being a willingness to use military force or flout the rule of law. Democrats were deeply scarred by elections in 2002 and 2004, when they were tarred as weak, untrustworthy, or even unpatriotic if they dared question the so-called Global War on Terror. With the public turning against the Iraq War and the election of Barack Obama, it seemed that this dynamic might change. It didn’t, at least not in Washington.
The very first debate answer I wrote for Obama in the 2007 primary season dealt with a hypothetical terrorist attack on the United States. I had been asked to prepare an answer on what steps a president should take in response, and he’d delivered it largely as I’d written it: “The first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response…the second thing is to make sure that we’ve got good intelligence, (a) to find out that we don’t have other threats…and (b) to find out whether we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can potentially take some action to dismantle that network.” John Edwards and Hillary Clinton pounced, making clear that the first thing they would do is go after the people responsible and take them out. Obama’s response was treated as a gaffe.
For many years, the phrase “Vietnam syndrome” was used to describe the reluctance of Americans to get back into wars after the catastrophe of Vietnam; but it was often used as a term of derision, as if it was wrong to learn those lessons. In early 2014, with the recent example of the Iraq War still shaping the world in which we operated, Obama was already being roundly accused of “overlearning the lessons of Iraq.” So even as the Syria red line episode demonstrated that public opinion was skeptical of war, the political frame for national security debates remained the same: Doing more was tough, anything else was weak.
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OBAMA’S FRUSTRATION WITH HIS critics boiled over during a lengthy trip to Asia in the spring of 2014. In the region, the trip was seen as another carefully designed U.S. effort to counter China. We’d go to Japan, to bring them into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—weaving together twelve Asia Pacific economies into one framework of trade rules, environmental protections, and labor rights. We’d go to South Korea and discuss ways to increase pressure on North Korea. We’d go to Malaysia, something of a swing state in Southeast Asia, which we were bringing closer through TPP. And we’d end in the Philippines, a U.S. ally that was mired in territorial disputes with China over maritime boundaries in the South China Sea.
Before leaving, we had a meeting in which a guy who focused on strategic planning at the NSC reminded us that the most important foreign policy work often involved incremental advances—hitting singles and doubles, as he put it. Obama leaned forward in agreement. “After I was reelected,” he said, “I pulled together a group of presidential historians that I have in from time to time.” People like Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough, Douglas Brinkley. “It’s interesting: They made the point that the most important thing a president can do on foreign policy is avoid a costly error.” He ticked through the list of presidents who had seen their tenures defined by such mistakes: Johnson in Vietnam, Carter with Desert One, Bush in Iraq. The lesson? “Don’t do stupid shit,” he told us, tapping on the table in front of him.
On Air Force One, Obama sometimes liked to walk back to where the press sat, and he did this in the middle of our Asia trip. Usually this was planned in advance, but on occasion, we’d just see him walking down the aisle of the plane. These sessions were off the record, but the reporters sent detailed notes back to their news bureaus, and the substance of the comments would ricochet around newsrooms, ultimately making their way into news analysis and Washington gossip.
Obama complained about the recent negative coverage of his foreign policy, airing grievances that I’d heard him express privately—about how the press ignored the steady work of American leadership and legitimized every demand that he do more to escalate conflicts. He went on a long tangent about how the failures of American foreign policy were ones of overreach, complaining about the lack of accountability for Iraq War supporters who were still the tribunes of conventional wisdom. Finally, he reached the end of his lecture. “What’s the Obama doctrine?” he asked aloud. The silence was charged, as we’d always avoided that label. He answered his own question: “Don’t do stupid shit.” There were some chuckles. Then, to be sure that he got his point across, he asked the press to repeat after him: “Don’t do stupid shit.”
At the press conference wrapping up his last stop in the Philippines, one reporter asked about “the Obama doctrine,” trying to elicit some less vulgar version. Obama didn’t bite. Instead, he gave a measured description, saying that we needed to avoid errors, and that in foreign policy, “you hit singles, you hit doubles; every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run.”
As we loaded the motorcade to head back to Air Force One for the flight home, I got a nervous email from Jake Sullivan—the reference to singles and doubles wasn’t going to play well with the foreign policy crowd. I knew that was true, but I had grown as frustrated as Obama with the odd intersection of the triviality of our politics and the heavy-handed nature of our foreign policy critics. “Don’t do stupid shit” would be panned, held up as a s
ign of negligence, but who is for doing stupid shit? “Singles and doubles” would be similarly derided, but what is wrong with hitting singles and doubles? And, as Obama complained to me, “they keep forgetting that I said we’re also going to hit some home runs.”
CHAPTER 22
DIVINE INTERVENTION
We were on the long flight home from Manila when I started to get messages about the fact that another email I’d sent more than a year and a half ago was being made public by Congress. PREP CALL WITH SUSAN was the headline of the email, which I’d quickly drafted for Susan Rice’s Sunday show appearances. On a list of goals that I’d written was the line “Underscore these protests are rooted in an Internet video and not a broader failure of policy.”
I closed my laptop and felt a wave of dread. In the context of September 14, 2012, the email I’d written was not remarkable. That day, protests were erupting across the Arab world that were rooted in an anti-Muslim Internet video. In the context of April 2014, however, the email was explosive. Nineteen months of investigations, hundreds of segments on Fox News, and thousands of talk radio rants had established the idea that something nefarious had taken place after the attacks in Benghazi. The talking points embedded in the document headed PREP CALL WITH SUSAN had already been litigated in public by multiple congressional investigations. Those investigations had found no wrongdoing. But that only increased the appetite in some quarters for proof that the conspiracy theory was right, that we had invented this excuse of an Internet video. Here, shouted a thousand angry voices, was “the smoking gun.”
The destruction of any objective truth over those previous nineteen months was one of the strangest aspects of my experience. Toward the end of 2013, a reporter who was deeply sourced in Libya reached out to me. He was writing a long reconstruction of the events in Benghazi, including documenting the ebb and flow of the crowd, the way in which a large, angry mob ultimately turned into a smaller group of heavily armed men waging a military-style assault. People he’d spoken to—people who had been there in Benghazi that night—said that some people had gone to the American facility out of anger over the video. To protest, to loot, to kill—it depended upon whom you asked. “You’re not in Washington,” I said. “If I went out and said that it was actually because of the video, they’d burn me in effigy.”
