Clearly, President Obama has come a long way from a Nobel Peace Prize and gracing Time Magazine as its Person of the Year. Those distinctions were a lifetime of Black History in the making. But neither prepared him for the bubbling geopolitical melee he’s faced with at the moment.
Countless Obama critics, naysayers and we-didn’t-vote-for-him hecklers have found their moment in six words that may possibly seal the fate of his presidency’s legacy: “We don’t have a strategy, yet.” How much that haunts him depends – a lot – on either the resolution or outcome of events taking shape in Ukraine and the Middle East, and possibly in forgotten Asia if saber rattling between the Chinese and Japanese doesn’t cool down. And so, ok, some of us get it: it wasn’t the most artful thing to say.
But, after last night’s ISIS speech, we’re left wondering: why did it take all that to get him there? There’s really no serious problem with the Obama strategy he initially said he didn’t have a strategy for, at least not yet. It was just so painful to watch him politic his way through a stomach-churning process, to make it so unnecessarily hard. Even last night, when he finally arrived at strategic nirvana, he kept driving the worn out point that he wasn’t putting American troops on the ground. Okay – we get that, you said it a million times already. Just tell us what you’re going to do in place of that and we’ll be on our merry way.
Obviously, the Commander-in-Chief, as much as he dreamed about being president since birth, didn’t watch many war movies growing up. So the contrived “gates-of-hell” theater his Vice President pulled off the previous week isn’t the type of thing that comes naturally for the younger Obama. It could also be a generational thing.
What he did do last night, however, is make fresh political theater in some effort to respond to Americans craving for exactly that: gladiator-style theater responding to current global theatrics. You should read Micah Zenko’s Foreign Policy piece about why we’re idiots for doing that.
Even though Obama is (you have to get him credit) still showing stubborn resolve in committing military action, he’s still in a place where nearly 60 percent of Americans think he’s “weak” – and the other 40 percent simply not wanting to believe that (in this volatile day and age) an American president can be weak:
Those are (potentially) legacy-killing numbers – the type of sentiment Jimmy Carter never recovered from. Added to that is some political validation for many Republican and conservative detractors who, for years since his selection as Democratic nominee for president in 2008, decried the fact that voters were about to elect a man who had no prior experience (or even interest) in military service or affairs.
I’m convinced a lot of this could be, simply, cultural. His cool pose, “don’t-give-a-fuck” Black man DNA won’t allow him to show he doesn’t care when he does. It’s like the difference between a Black man and a White man stepping in dog shit on a sidewalk; the latter freaks out and launches into a 90 second episode of cursing and air-punching while the former just quietly scrapes it off his feet, curses under his breath and keeps on moving. We saw this difference on blast with the last president after 9/11 happened. Rather than stay cool and target the assholes that did it, President Bush tripped out and put the whole world on fire to make a point about whose geopolitical balls were the largest.
That’s not to say Obama can’t lead or manage the world’s most well-funded and powerful military. It’s to say that he’s not managing public expectations of how that’s done.
His famous “long game” approach doesn’t fit with the “short play” approach we prefer. While managing a military is, ultimately, all about a long game strategy, generals and commanders through history show that you still have to strike the balance between strategic thinking and tactical gimmickry. Lincoln mastered this during the Civil War with his ability to clearly articulate the strategic interests at stake (keeping the Union intact) through grandiloquent staging like the Gettysburg Address or keeping the White House open to citizens and wounded Union soldiers. How else was he going to ask millions of young men to put themselves in the path of slaughtering Confederate rifles and artillery?
Still, it was perfectly reasonable for him to claim he didn’t have a strategy. If you want successful military strategy, you don’t broadcast the details – but, you do give a sense that you know what you’re doing.
But, I see it. In a war against the Islamic State common sense dictates that you would want just as much of an all-out coalition of Muslim nation states unified than you want Western intervention. Making it a U.S.-led or Western-motivated war only falls into the ISIL’s hands – they want a New Crusades pitting one civilization against the other. In the process of forming that coalition, Obama can actually resolve a number of thorny topics that have gripped the Middle East in perpetual warfare for generations, not limited to finalizing an agreement with Iran and finding a way towards peace in other conflict zones. ISIL is the common evil everyone can agree to hate. Hitler during World War II, for example, became that existential threat so intense that even the United States and its hated communist rival the Soviet Union couldn’t help but team up against him.
The problem, though, is that Obama is no Franklin Roosevelt. If he was, he’d have crafted last night’s speech more in the context of a war between good and evil, and that this is a fight against evil.
Navigating war in Ukraine also requires patience and deft understanding of very shaky fault lines along the so-called Baltic States. The bottom line: how much do you really want to test a crazy ass, unpredictable nation holding a stockpile of 1,500 nuclear warheads (second only to the U.S.)? Did Presidents Eisenhower or Nixon do it when the Soviet Union did, essentially, the exact same thing when it bum-rushed through Hungary and Czechoslovakia? Of course not – so what makes Obama’s restraint so different? Said Russian President Vladimir Putin the other day to a youth forum: “Thank God, I think no one is thinking of unleashing a large-scale conflict with Russia. I want to remind you that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers.” Who wants to play chicken with that?
So, rather than be responsible for blowing up the planet (because he’s got kids, too), Obama opts for the long game, deal making approach. Pulling together a coalition of former enemies – like Saudi Arabia and Iran – against the ISIL threat is no small thing. Additionally, we’re getting close to the moment where, inevitably, Ukraine will be split into East and West Ukraine (see the Cold War German model for reference). And, if the U.S. let’s Putin have that much – giving him better strategic foothold along the Black Sea – then perhaps Russia turns a blind eye when the U.S. begins air-striking ISIL targets in Syria. It’s been more Russia rather than Syrian President Bashir al-Assad, that’s been holding U.S. warplanes back since the rogue Eastern European giant has a major naval base in the Middle Eastern country. The White House has been working those phones.
All of this depends on which threat is worse: an egotistical, but rational Putin or a megalomaniacal and irrational Islamic State?
Certainly, Obama didn’t want to broadcast his options to enemies. Let the pundits dissect that for him. Yet, for someone known to give grand speeches, he sucks at user-friendly and digestible break downs that get us to the point. There is a way to pursue the long game strategy and cut deals while also keeping your public confident you have it under control. Strategically, he’s got a very logical vision; optically, he’s hitting self-inflicted road bumps and giving his political rivals more excuses than needed to undermine him. Thanks for wearing us out.
CHARLES D. ELLISON is a veteran political strategist and Chief Political Correspondent for Uptown Magazine. He is also Washington Correspondent for the Philadelphia Tribune and a frequent contributor to The Root. He can be reached via Twitter @charlesdellison.