The defense secretary was a loyal servant in a thankless job
By Lexington | WASHINGTON, DC
WHEN in a hole, fire someone. That's the Washington way. Bigwigs and advisers alike must be wondering who will be next after Monday’s very public sacking of Chuck Hagel, the defence secretary (though to be precise, the White House says he resigned after conversations with the president, during which the pair agreed that there should be "new leadership" at the Pentagon). President Barack Obama’s national security team has entered a time of high anxiety, not to mention peril.
Mr Hagel was picked for his Obama-like caution less than two years ago. His stated mission was to help wind down the Afghan war and shrink America’s war machine to fit a new, post-Bush era in which military force would be a tool of last, rather than first resort. Mr Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, came by his own war-wariness honourably, seeing action in Vietnam as a sergeant. This made him the first enlisted man to serve as Pentagon chief.
He had forged a bond with Mr Obama when the pair travelled as senators to far-off places. He shared with the future president a scepticism about the utility of force for solving complex global problems. Long before he was nominated by a Democratic president he broke with his own party over Iraq, publicly regretting his vote for a war resolution in 2002, and arguing that no military solution could be imposed on Iraq from the outside. He presented himself as a Republican of the Colin Powell school, committed to maintaining America as the world’s unrivalled military power, and adamant that force should only be used for a clear objective and with a viable exit strategy.
Alas, even before arriving at the Pentagon, two problems dogged Mr Hagel. He seemed diffident and tongue-tied as a salesman for the Obama doctrine, putting in a halting, gaffe-strewn performance in his Senate confirmation hearings. Then real world events started to test that doctrine harshly.
Team Obama learned that in foreign policy, others get a vote: from Islamic State (IS) fanatics to muscle-flexing Chinese generals to territory-grabbing Russian leaders. In the salons of Washington power, poor, decent Mr Hagel was quickly judged a failure. He was called a weak manager of the Pentagon’s vast and wily bureaucracy. White House allies grumbled that he was out of his depth.
Nodding to the broad Obama-era strategy of stressing trade and diplomacy over war-fighting, as well as the “pivot to Asia”, Mr Hagel’s staff stressed how the highlight of the trip was expected to be a stop in Delhi to meet the newly-elected prime minister, Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist with no special love for America. There were to be talks about China’s rise (a shared concern), about Afghan stability after American combat troops leave in 2016 and even about flogging India some weapons.
Events rapidly intruded. Even as the secretary’s lumbering airborne command post, a converted Boeing 747, left Andrews Air Force Base, aides circulated details of a two-star American general killed by an Afghan soldier. Questions about Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s border dogged Mr Hagel at his first stop, in Germany. As he arrived in Delhi, news broke that American airstrikes were imminent in northern Iraq against the fanatics of IS. Mr Hagel had to cancel a banquet with hosts to take part in a secure video-conference with the president and colleagues in Washington.
All in all it was a perilously political moment. Mr Hagel could ill-afford to sound more gung-ho than his president back home. Mr Hagel seemed to feel his predicament acutely. In a briefing in Delhi with the half dozen reporters on the trip, he called the jihadists of IS a “very significant threat to the security of Iraq”. But in the next breath he insisted that the fight to tackle IS would have to follow the strict, narrow guidelines set out by his president. America would support Iraqi forces and Kurdish peshmerga fighters, but, he insisted: “This is not a US responsibility.”
In the months that followed, Mr Hagel did not grow in confidence. Even as the Pentagon’s uniformed chiefs chafed publicly at the narrowness of Mr Obama’s plans for Syria and Iraq, Mr Hagel seemed to fade into the background. A predecessor as defence secretary, Leon Panetta, made headlines with a cross book of memoirs which accused the Obama White House of micro-managing defence policy, and called the president an overly cautious, professorial leader. Mr Hagel stayed loyally silent, but it won him no Washington respect: the idea had set in that he was being side-lined.
More departures now surely loom, as Mr Obama’s foreign policy doctrine is effectively rewritten in real-time. Already, fresh troops are being sent as advisers to Iraq. American airstrikes are targeting IS fighters in Iraq and Syria. It emerged in recent days that American forces in Afghanistan are to be given a larger role supporting Afghan forces against the Taliban, even after the declared end of American combat operations next month.
The Washington rumour machine is weighing the names of likely replacements for Mr Hagel. Favourites include Michèle Flournoy, a former under-secretary of defence for policy, who nearly snaffled the top post before Mr Hagel got it in 2013; and Ashton Carter, a former deputy defence secretary. Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a Democrat and retired Army ranger, is also being discussed, but his staff say that he is not interested.
Whoever is nominated faces unenviable challenges. The nominee will need confirmation by a Republican-controlled Senate that thinks Mr Obama a feckless war leader. If the next secretary is to thrive, he or she will also need to do better than Mr Hagel at penetrating the tight, highly politicised inner-circle around Mr Obama.
With American foreign policy in a bad way, some inner-circle sackings would surely help, too. But don’t count on it.
