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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Obama Doctrine
The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about Americas role in the world.
By Jeffrey Goldberg
Photographs by Ruven Afanador, TheAtlantic, April 2016
Friday, August 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end Americas reign as the worlds sole indispensable superpoweror, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming voidbegan with a thundering speech given on Obamas behalf by his secretary of state, John Kerry, in Washington, D.C. The subject of Kerrys uncharacteristically Churchillian remarks, delivered in the Treaty Room at the State Department, was the gassing of civilians by the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
Obama, in whose Cabinet Kerry serves faithfully, but with some exasperation, is himself given to vaulting oratory, but not usually of the martial sort associated with Churchill. Obama believes that the Manichaeanism, and eloquently rendered bellicosity, commonly associated with Churchill were justified by Hitlers rise, and were at times defensible in the struggle against the Soviet Union. But he also thinks rhetoric should be weaponized sparingly, if at all, in todays more ambiguous and complicated international arena. The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq. Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. If you were to say, for instance, that were going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise, Ben Rhodes, Obamas deputy national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me not long ago
But Kerrys rousing remarks on that August day, which had been drafted in part by Rhodes, were threaded with righteous anger and bold promises, including the barely concealed threat of imminent attack. Kerry, like Obama himself, was horrified by the sins committed by the Syrian regime in its attempt to put down a two-year-old rebellion. In the Damascus suburb of Ghouta nine days earlier, Assads army had murdered more than 1,400 civilians with sarin gas. The strong sentiment inside the Obama administration was that Assad had earned dire punishment. In Situation Room meetings that followed the attack on Ghouta, only the White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, cautioned explicitly about the perils of intervention. John Kerry argued vociferously for action.
As previous storms in history have gathered, when unspeakable crimes were within our power to stop them, we have been warned against the temptations of looking the other way, Kerry said in his speech. History is full of leaders who have warned against inaction, indifference, and especially against silence when it mattered most.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/
Obama on ...
1.Why hes proud of not striking Assad in 2013
2.The necessity of pivoting from the Middle East to Asia and other regions
3.Why Ukraine will always be vulnerable to Russian domination
4.Resisting John Kerrys requests to attack Syrian-regime targets
5.Why Saudi Arabia should share the Middle East with Iran
6.How ISIS is like the Joker
7.Why Putin is not completely stupid
8.How France and Great Britain contributed to the mess in Libya
9.Why ISIS isnt an existential threat, but climate change is
10.Why he resents Netanyahus lectures
IMO, very well written, well worth the read.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)When the two men came back to the Oval Office, the president told his national-security aides that he planned to stand down. There would be no attack the next day; he wanted to refer the matter to Congress for a vote. Aides in the room were shocked. Susan Rice, now Obamas national-security adviser, argued that the damage to Americas credibility would be serious and lasting. Others had difficulty fathoming how the president could reverse himself the day before a planned strike. Obama, however, was completely calm. If youve been around him, you know when hes ambivalent about something, when its a 5149 decision, Ben Rhodes told me. But he was completely at ease.
pampango
(24,692 posts)American power unilaterally - something that Trump and most republicans have a hard time accepting and would change if they get elected.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)The president also seems to believe that sharing leadership with other countries is a way to check Americas more unruly impulses. One of the reasons I am so focused on taking action multilaterally where our direct interests are not at stake is that multilateralism regulates hubris, he explained. He consistently invokes what he understands to be Americas past failures overseas as a means of checking American self-righteousness. We have history, he said. We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other peoples suspicions