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Donilon Explains Obama: 6 Quick Points
President Obama’s press conference on Libya today demonstrates the aptness of this editorial comment in the Wall Street Journal yesterday: ”America’s response to the Libyan crisis is stuck in repeat mode.”
Two months into the Arab Spring, any of us who have by now heard it many times can smoothly spin from our mouths the Obama administration spiel on our foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa.
Obama today: sanctions . . . humanitarian aid . . . monitor the situation . . . raises our antenna . . . wrong side of history . . . oppose the use of violence . . . not taken any options off the table.
Okay, so the President’s comment that Gaddafi’s ruthlessness “raises our antenna” is new. And, yes, sometimes Barack Obama is cold-blooded.
At yesterday’s press briefing, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon was a primer for the spiel. Key principles . . . oppose violence . . . universal values . . . stability . . . peaceful democratic transitions . . . economic reform . . . aspirations of the people.
To my surprise, however, Donilon’s press conference, which he gave via conference call with reporters, was more revealing than anything we have heard to date about both the administration’s thinking on Arab Spring and the administration’s planning in response to it. Tom Donilon cracked open for us Obamic opacity.
Here, in what I rank to be their order of importance (and not the order of Donilon’s remarks), are the tactical lynchpins of the Obama/Clinton/Gates policy in the region. All the quotes are from Tom Donilon. They are especially revealing because the thrust of the conference call/the listeners’ questions was what the adminstration calls “the civil unrest” in Libya.
1. “Egypt really is at the center.”
Donilon made this observation twice. Fleshing it out, he mentioned the fact that Egypt has the world’s largest Arab population. But the real significance, from a practical and strategic viewpoint, is that in our increasingly prioritized thinking Libya is just not as important.
Why? Because the most fertile soil for democracy now in the Arab world lies in Egypt. Tomorrow Secretary of State Clinton travels to Egypt and Tunisia. (See my previous piece on why Tunisia matters.) She will meet with Libyan opposition leaders in Cairo, but the primary purpose of her trip, I am quite sure, is to nudge the Egyptian military, who have been backsliding, along the path to representative government.
2. “The international community spoke with one voice on this.” Donilon is referring here to the linked efforts of the United States, United Nations, NATO, Europe, the Arab League and the African Union to isolate Muammar Gaddafi.
This is a shift for American tactics. No longer will we be seen to take the lead up front. We will work behind the scenes—even if the set design is transparently fake and rickety—so that we will no longer appear to be an aggressor in the region.
3. “It’s not just regional rhetorical support. We’re going to be seeking actual support by those nations—the Arab League, the GCC and the African nations—to participate in any of these efforts as they go forward.”
Here is another significant change for our foreign policy. In the past, we have countenanced and hyped nominal support, whether in the First Iraq War, allowing Kuwaiti soldiers to “free” the homeland that we liberated, or now in Afghanistan, where the NATO coalition effort is a stalking horse for a largely American expenditure of lives and fortune and effort.
4. “Things in the Middle East right now and things in Libya in particular right now need to be looked at not through a static but a dynamic, and not through a uni-dimensional but a multidimensional lens.”
Donilon’s comment here was a reply to Jake Tapper about Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s observation, earlier in the day, to the Senate Armed Services Committee, that “over the longer term the [Gaddafi] regime will prevail.”
Clapper’s assessment, from a pure intelligence perspective, is likely a good one. Gaddafi has a trained and ruthless military; he will do whatever it takes to win; he has proven to be a survivor.
Yesterday a tweet from Ben Wedeman of CNN captured in less than 140 characters the lack of discipline among the opposing forces.
Jet flying over al-Brega…oppostion fighters shooting in air. #Libya 13 hours ago via web
Donilon put Clapper’s observation in a larger context. Other elements are at play, he argued. Both sanctions from other nations and the fierce desire of Libyans for change are forces that must be factored in.
The multidimensional lens through which Obama, Clinton and Gates look at the world is one we ignore at the peril of appearing obtuse and in fact observing much less intelligently than they.
I believe that it was Jon Stewart who once commented that Obama moves as if politics were three-dimensional chess. This is the way President Obama plays the great game in the Middle East.
Vice-president Biden’s trip to Russia the past few days? Hardly a coincidence. Not merely polishing the reset button. Biden bonhomie can be cringeworthy and tempting to dismiss. (WSJ’s Jonathan Weisman’s press pool report about Biden at Medvedev’s dacha is a classic.) But Russian cooperation will be needed to enforce the arms embargo against Gaddafi, as well as for that no-fly zone, should it ever come to pass.
5. “It’s not going to be resolved overnight.” Donilon, in talking about Libya, encapsulates what may be the crux of Obama tactics. This president moves slowly, cautiously. We must “avoid ranges of possible negative outcomes,” Donilon explains. The man sounds less a progenitor of policy than an attorney like my husband and his colleagues–as does Donilon’s boss sometimes.
“There must be a sound legal basis” for our actions against Gaddafi, Donilon says. How many times have we heard the phrase “legal basis” in the last two months? If Obama (constitutional law teacher) and his team are lawyerly, nevertheless that is not a reason to underestimate them.
For here’s the thing about leaders who can move in three dimensions at once. That capability is like the muscle power of an anaconda. “Over time, of course, this will really squeeze and tighten the containment effort around Gaddafi,” Donilon says of the sanctions, arms embargo, referral to the International Criminal Court, etc.
This is how Obama foreign policy rolls: slowly, inexorably, squeezing with the muscles of patience and acumen. Just as much as any large reptile, it can be a formidable obstacle athwart a path, for friend and foe alike.
Both Obama’s tactics and strategy could not be more different than those of George W. Bush. After 9/11, the Bush Administration was not the anaconda lying in wait for its prey and then taking all the time needed to ingest and digest it. Storming into Afghanistan to revenge us upon Al Qaeda and their hosts the Taliban, the Bush United States was the enraged elephant whose foot had been stepped on by a mouse.
6. “We are engaged in efforts really across the region, from Tunisia all the way to obviously our ongoing efforts in Iraq.” As Donilon quickly makes clear, the administration regards Iran as a different issue.
The demarcation is significant for several reasons—and not just because Iranians are not Arabs. Donilon calls out Iran for its “exported violent revolution.” The inference here is that Iran’s Arab neighbors, however imperfect, are not a threat to us. The inference is that the United States is dealing differently with Iran. The inference is that Iran is not part of the democratic spring in the region.
Most importantly, Donilon’s careful separation of Iran from the Arab discussion shows that the Obama administration can flex the muscle of particularization—one not much used in our elephant incarnation during the Bush years.
One final point. Read through Obama’s press conference transcript. Three-fourths of his remarks, and almost all of his opening statement (except for the earthquake and tsunami in Japan), are targeted to domestic issues. What does that tell us about the Obama administration’s priorities?
March 11, 2011
Complexity in foreign policy….for so many years it was a given. In recent years, a distant memory.