The Obama Doctrine: Death By a Thousand Cuts

I was rather beguiled at first by President Obama’s commencement speech at West Point.

Not just because everybody else dumped all over it, and I wanted to exercise my contrarian’s prerogative to defend the indefensible.

It’s because the central premise—what I call the Obama Doctrine—is rather attractive to me:

Here’s my bottom line: America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership. But U.S. military action cannot be the only -- or even primary -- component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

President Obama’s unwillingness to employ military action against Syria or in the Ukraine is, I think, a reflection of his bedrock principle, his aversion to committing US military power unless it is absolutely necessary, a conviction that he has maintained at some cost against determined pushback by hawks within his administration, in Washington, and internationally.  No more Vietnams or Iraqs. 

Good for him.

Unfortunately, the flip side of the Obama doctrine is that the United States remains committed to a forward counterterrorism posture and US“leadership” i.e. the ability to shape events overseas even without using military power.

Even when holding back on military power, there are plenty of ways for the United States to cripple a designated adversary.  There’s economic sanctions; financial warfare through the international banking, economic, and trade system; there’s subversion, through the Internet, through support of dissident parties and insurrectionists; there’s proxy wars. There’s JSOC. And of course, there’s drones.

And the most terrifying of all, the non-stop yammering of neo-liberal pundits advocating and excusing the latest US exercise in humanitarian intervention.

In other words, the United States still reserves the right to cruelly and counterproductively f*ck up any country with any and all means short of the direct commitment of US military forces.

That means plenty more Syrias.  

Even if the Assad regime assiduously astro-turfed the massive turnout of refuge Syrians to vote at the Syrian embassy in Lebanon, I found it sad, moving, and pathetic that these people who had been driven from their homes were trying to show the world that they desperately wanted to live in a safer place where that election mattered…and at the exact same time the Obama administration was discussing plans to funnel more support to the insurgents in order to forestall their military defeat and a political settlement on terms that the United States deems undesirable.

From an ethical point of view, is it a better, more humane policy to eviscerate a country slowly through sadistic proxies than simply to send in the troops and brutalize the locals briskly and efficiently and with some hope of genuine international oversight?

Looking at Syria, I don’t think so.  

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As a practical matter, I’m afraid the Obama Doctrine won’t fly as a matter of realist geopolitic.

Taking the possibility of US military action off the table in the case of lower-priority objectives undercuts the deterrent character of the US military machine.

I expect that the People’s Republic of China was interested and relieved at President Obama’s speech and its implications for the PRC’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea.

President Obama had a lot to say about “counterterrorism” and very little to say about “salami slicing” by a certain regional power.

He did obliquely compare China’s moves in the SCS to alleged Russian activity in Ukraine:

Regional aggression that goes unchecked, whether in southern Ukraine or the South China Sea or anywhere else in the world, will ultimately impact our allies, and could draw in our military.

But…

We can’t try to resolve problems in the South China Sea when we have refused to make sure that the Law of the Sea Convention is ratified by the United States Senate…

In other words, I’m not doing sh*t in the South China Sea?  Blame the Senate.

If that remains the full extent of President Obama’s succor to Vietnam and the Philippines in their attempts to check the onslaught of HYSY 981 a.k.a. Rigzilla a.k.a. the PRC’s intrusive, EEZ occupying drilling rig and its sizable flotilla of ships, there are going to be some long faces in Hanoi and Manila.

Perhaps President Obama has decided that it will take some time to work up a systemic riposte to the PRC in the South China Sea, and he’s not going to rush ahead with some half-assed measure that “reassures” our allies + Vietnam, but risks being exposed by the PRC as another unenforceable “red line”.

It may be that President Obama has decided that if he can extract most US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, that’s enough foreign policy legacy for his presidency and he doesn’t need to add a China war.  So he’s kicking the can down the road to the next administration.

The fully-formed China plan will, I think, come from a Hillary Clinton presidency.  The pivot is her baby, and she has convinced herself and her army of eager advisers that the key to US success in Asia is an aggressive China-containment policy underpinned by the idea of a credible US deterrent to undesirable PRC actions.

Well, judging by the PRC’s calculated defiance in the South China Sea, it might take more than US signing on the UNCLOS and pushing for the ASEAN Code of Conduct to deter the dragon.

So I don’t think President Clinton will be happy with the “Obama Doctrine” and the way it takes US military action off the table in non-existential situations.

A Hillary Clinton presidency might, I suggest, resurrect the Nixon “madman” posture, by which Nixon used the threat of extreme, non-proportionate force to try to get North Vietnam to forget that he had already committed to withdraw US troops and all they had to do was wait him out.

In her America’s Pacific Century essay, Clinton carefully laid the foundations for a US military role in Asian maritime disputes through the Asian maritime security = US economic security = US national security argument.

Maybe a “Hillary Clinton Doctrine” will look like “The United States will use all measures up to and including military force to ensure its economic and national security”.  We’ll see.

As Bob and Barbara Dreyfuss point out at The Nation, Hillary is a bottom-line hawk, and she wants all her coercive resources available for any situation:

[Robert] Gates took note of the fact that Clinton, as senator from New York, “had made friends with a number of high-level flag officers—three- and four-star generals and admirals—during her time on Armed Services.” She was, Gates noted, “an ardent advocate of a strong military” and “believed in all forms of American power, including force.”
…
[T]he Times adds that, after countless interviews, it is clear that Clinton was the administration’s hawk:

But in recent interviews, two dozen current and former administration officials, foreign diplomats, friends and outside analysts described Mrs. Clinton as almost always the advocate of the most aggressive actions considered by Mr. Obama’s national security team—and not just in well-documented cases, like the debate over how many additional American troops to send to Afghanistan or the NATO airstrikes in Libya.

Mrs. Clinton’s advocates—a swelling number in Washington, where people are already looking to the next administration—are quick to cite other cases in which she took more hawkish positions than the White House: arguing for funneling weapons to Syrian rebels and for leaving more troops behind in postwar Iraq, and criticizing the results of a 2011 parliamentary election in Russia.

And the Times quotes Dennis Ross, the pro-Israel advocate who worked for both Clinton and for the White House on Iran: “It’s not that she’s quick to use force, but her basic instincts are governed more by the uses of hard power.”

Either way, Obama or Clinton, it looks like American foreign policy will remain a meatgrinder for its enemies for the foreseeable future.  

Photo by Joseph Eid, AFP

Is the Hillary Clinton Coterie Pushing Obama Further Into Lame-Duck Territory?

Uh-oh.  Looks like things are getting somewhat Ides-of-Marchy within the Obama administration.

I think the coterie of Hillary Clinton supporters and enthusiasts have something to do with it.

From today’s LA Times:

Those who want him to act more forcefully include not only Republicans but also liberal internationalists and some members of his staff. [emphasis added]

I should say I’m pretty much on board with President Obama’s hesitations about using military force, which I would gloss as “Don’t use stupid actions to follow up on stupid policies.”

The US foreign policy establishment has come up with a series of stupid policies that it would like to get bailed out of with some showy military action.

Case in point: the anti-Russian enthusiasts (Victoria, I’m lookin’ at you) in the State Department overreached with the Kyev coup, now Obama won’t back them up by threatening to employ the U.S. military to buck up the government and deter Russia.  

My reaction:

1.   Boo-hoo
2. Cry me a river 
3. Thank God

Pretty much the same thing with Syria.

 

The United States contributed significantly to the catastrophe by listening to the regime-changers and backing the insurgents instead of considering some kind of accommodation with Assad.  Death toll 150K and counting.  Thank God Obama decided not to blow up the Middle East by bombing Syria and/or sending in troops in an attempt to rescue the faltering and increasingly radical and unpopular insurgency.

As for the pivot to Asia, Obama’s stance is pretty problematic.

The the pivot (by which I mean the US leading the China-containment effort, instead of simply participating in it) is premised on the idea that US military power is the trump card and the pivot rests on the foundation of a credible US deterrent i.e. a deterrent that the US will promptly deploy regardless of the geopolitical and economic consequences of f*cking with the PRC, a rather important regional power in a rather important region.

I’ve argued elsewhere that China containment is the wrong policy for Asia, and the US could do better for itself by playing the honest broker in a bilaterally-tilted engagement strategy instead of taking up the role of backup to Japan and the Philippines in an anti-PRC united front and basing US credibility on the idea that we'll start World War III over a cluster of worthless islands.

Unfortunately for President Obama he jumped into the pivot bed that Hillary Clinton and the neoliberal interventionists prepared for him, and he needs to declare that he will wield US military power precipitously, unfairly, and irrationally (like Nixon with his madman doctrine) if he wants to maintain his credibility as Pivoteer-in-Chief.

Sadly, I think the recent spate of articles question President Obama’s warmongering cred are simply another sign that he’s a lame duck.

The reference to dissent within the administration concerning his restraint on military matters is simply another sign that the vaunted Obama message discipline is crumbling, and everybody’s waitin’ on Hillary.

Hillary, I think, will come into office eager to bomb something in order to re-establish US military cred and get on the (literally) right side of the liberal interventionalists and even the neo-cons.

In other words, instead of questioning and modifying or even abandoning crappy policies (after all, the pivot is her baby), she will escalate, shifting the debate to the military sphere in which US military power is pre-eminent  for the sake of holding the political initiative inside the Beltway and claiming the geopolitical initiative overseas.

Wonder who the symbolic (presumably helpless and easily demonized) victim will be?  What country will be Hillary Clinton’s Grenada? [thanks, DC]

Once Upon a Time, President Obama Thought About Not Affirming Coverage of the Senkakus...

...In the US-Japan Security Treaty

I should address President Obama’s explicit statement in Japan that the Senkakus were covered by the US-Japan Security Treaty.

Nothing particularly new here; Secretary of State Clinton affirmed coverage in 2010 and I think it’s been reaffirmed incessantly since then.

Now, if President Obama had declared that the US regarded the Senkakus as Japanese sovereign territories (he didn’t; he carefully described them as territories administered by Japan), the PRC would have justifiably gone apeshit.

I am getting a little tired of repeating this point, but Nixon returned the Senkakus to Japanese administrative control with the understanding that Japan would negotiate their sovereignty with “China”, especially Taiwan which, by any interpretation is the most plausible candidate (see Yabuki Susumu & Mark Selden here).  By nationalizing three of the islands in 2012, the Japanese government basically spat on that deal and provided a certain degree of encouragement to PRC hopes that the US might act as a real “honest broker” over the islands.  Not to be, in my opinion.

If one wants to explore the real mystery of the Senkakus, their role in Japanese security adventurism, and what the PRC expects of the tenor and integrity of US-PRC relations in a Hillary Clinton presidency, I invite readers to reflect on this passage from the Japan Times in August 2010 (link no longer available; if anyone can find it behind the paywall in the archive, please let me know):

The Obama administration has decided not to state explicitly that the Senkaku Islands, which are under Japan's control but claimed by China, are subject to the Japan-US security treaty, in a shift from the position of George W Bush, sources said Monday.

The administration of Barack Obama has already notified Japan of the change in policy, but Tokyo may have to take counter-measures in light of China's increasing activities in the East China Sea, according to the sources. 

In other words, the Obama administration was ready to sidle closer to the PRC’s side on the Senkaku Islands.  But a few weeks later, PRC relations blew up with the detention of the Chinese fishing boat off the Senkakus, the rare earth “crisis”, and Hillary Clinton’s affirmation that the Senkakus were, surprise, covered by the treaty.  I think history will judge that the whole episode was a “counter-measure”, a provocation if you will, by Clinton and Seiji Maehara (Maehara insisted over the objections of the cabinet that the Chinese captain be tried in Japanese court, guaranteeing an international incident).