Playing it long

The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s Role in the World. By Derek Chollet. PublicAffairs; 247 pages; $26.99 and £17.99.

WHEN Barack Obama comes to write his memoirs they will no doubt be an elegantly persuasive account of the ideas that guided his presidency. Until then “The Long Game”, Derek Chollet’s apologia for what he sees as Mr Obama’s distinctive approach to grand strategy, is likely to be the closest that anyone will come to understanding the thinking behind a foreign policy that has many critics.

Having served in senior positions in the State Department, the National Security Council and the Pentagon, Mr Chollet has been close to the action throughout the Obama years. His contention is that the foreign-policy establishment in Washington (of which he admits to having been a “card-carrying member for over two decades”) has underestimated the extent of Mr Obama’s achievement. Policymakers at home lambast Mr Obama for having overlearned the lessons of Iraq, for his extreme caution and aversion to the use of America’s hard power in support of global order and for an unwillingness to shoulder the burdens of leadership, which has dismayed allies and emboldened foes.

Meanwhile, detractors on the left have been horrified by his cold-blooded use of drones to kill America’s enemies, his commitment to a costly nuclear modernisation programme and his bombing of more countries than George W. Bush. So which is he, asks Mr Chollet: a woolly-headed liberal idealist or an unsentimental realist?

The answer, of course, is neither. Mr Chollet argues that Mr Obama is misunderstood because he likes to play what the author calls the “long game”. The book portrays the president as trying to be Warren Buffett in a foreign-policy debate dominated by day traders. He has an unwavering view of what is in America’s long-term interests and refuses to be forced by impatient demands for action to intervene in ways that may be temporarily satisfying but have little prospect of success at acceptable cost.

To this end, Mr Chollet argues that Mr Obama has formulated what amounts to a long-game checklist, a series of principles that should be applied to managing American power and making strategic choices. The first of these is balance: balance between interests and values, between priorities at home and abroad, between declared goals in different parts of the world, and between how much America should take on and how much should be borne by allies. And balance in the use of the whole toolbox—military power, diplomacy, economic leverage, development. Mr Chollet contrasts this with the lack of balance Mr Obama inherited from Mr Bush: a tanking economy, over 150,000 troops deployed in two wars and sagging American prestige.

The other key principles of the Obama checklist are: sustainability (avoid commitments that cost too much to stick with); restraint (ask not what America can do but what it should do); precision (wield a scalpel rather than a hammer); patience (give policies the time and effort to work); fallibility (be realistic about the chances of failure and modest about what you can achieve); scepticism (interrogate the issues and beware those peddling easy answers to difficult questions); exceptionalism (the recognition that because of its enormous power and attachment to universal values America has a unique responsibility to provide leadership in the world that cannot be ducked).

For Mr Chollet this mix of cautious pragmatism and cool realism finds an echo in the approach of two Republican predecessors, Dwight Eisenhower and the first George Bush, whose reputations have grown considerably since their departure from office. Mr Chollet reckons that this president’s foreign policy will look pretty good too once hindsight kicks in.

Maybe. But eminently sensible though the checklist appears to be, rather than setting the appropriate conditions for action, it can also be used as a way to do too little, too late. By and large, Mr Obama managed to get right his policies towards China (the “rebalancing” towards Asia was timely and has been quite effective) and Russia (the “reset” of the first term delivered some benefits; when Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and opted for confrontation with the West, Mr Obama responded accordingly). But in Afghanistan, Iraq and, most of all, in Syria, the Obama doctrine—let us call it that—has had terrible consequences.

In Afghanistan, Mr Obama’s long-debated troop surge was fatally undermined when he announced that American forces would start to come home within 18 months. He repeated the error in May 2014, saying that the residual American force in Afghanistan would be fully withdrawn by the end of 2016. He has had to reverse that foolish promise. But by setting timetables for forced reductions unconnected to conditions on the ground, Mr Obama has given encouragement to the Taliban and left Afghan forces cruelly exposed.

Mr Obama’s decision to pull all American forces out of Iraq at the end of 2011 was even more disastrous. He used the excuse of the difficulty of negotiating a new status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqis to do what he wanted to do anyway. Had a few thousand American troops been left in Iraq, Mr Obama and his team would have known much more about the Maliki government’s subversion of the US-trained and US-equipped Iraqi security forces and would have had some leverage to prevent it. A direct result of Mr Obama’s insouciance was the emergence of Islamic State in 2014 as an organisation able to take and hold Iraqi cities.

In Syria the catalogue of errors is far too long to enumerate. But Mr Obama’s extreme reluctance to do anything to help the moderate rebels (while there still were some) and his failure to punish the regime for crossing his previously declared red line on the use of chemical weapons were turning points that contributed to the scale of the catastrophe. Mr Chollet is reluctant to blame Mr Obama, but he was among those arguing for the president to take a different course of action.

The one unambiguous policy success that Mr Obama’s long game can claim is the nuclear deal with Iran. Patient diplomacy and the building of international support for a crippling sanctions regime, combined with the credible threat of military action if all else failed, resulted in an agreement that has effectively dealt with worries about Iran getting a bomb for the next decade or so. If the deal holds, it will be the defining achievement of the Obama doctrine. But not every problem can be approached in the same painstaking, deliberative way.

The president is far from being the feckless wuss portrayed by his critics. But nor is he the master of grand strategy that Mr Chollet makes him out to be. His contempt for the interventionist excesses of his predecessor, his suspicion of arguments to “do more”, his arrogant disdain for military advice and his ingrained pessimism about the utility of hard power have had the effect of reducing America’s capacity to do good in a bad world. If Hillary Clinton succeeds him, she is likely to provide a modest but welcome corrective. If Donald Trump is the next president, Mr Obama and his long game, whatever its defects, will be sorely missed.