Putin: The Enemy We’ve Been Waiting For
BY JAMES TRAUB
Listening to U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech in Brussels this week, I found myself thinking, “He’s got his voice back.” This thought came right around the moment when he deployed the expression “we believe” as a rhetorical device to underline the universality of faith in free expression and free markets and in “an international system that protects the rights of both nations and people.” Obama is a belief-driven leader who in recent months has had very few opportunities to project his beliefs upon the world. Now, suddenly, he has a cause.
I wonder whether Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose strategic talents have been so favorably compared to Obama’s, has not in fact given the American president an immense gift. Leaders need obstacles; better still, they need enemies. President Bill Clinton, ruling at the noontide of American power, never had an adversary against whom to show his mettle. The George Bush who came before him was fortunate to have Saddam Hussein, and the Bush who came later had Osama bin Laden. You could hardly do better. Of course, the difference between the two Bushes shows that a president can use that morally charged confrontation to unite the nation and the world, or to divide them.
The second George Bush discredited American moralism by reducing it to the cowboy slogan of “Either you’re with us or against us.” As a presidential candidate, Obama found his footing by declaring, in a campaign debate with Hillary Clinton, that, unlike either Bush or then-Senator Clinton, he would talk to any American rival without preconditions. Afterward, Samantha Power, then one of Obama’s chief foreign-policy advisers, confided to me that he had found this unplanned exchange “orienting.” That’s who he was — the dispassionate statesman who would dispense with moral posturing in order to find shared interests.
Thus was born “engagement,” the dominant foreign-policy paradigm of Obama’s first years in office. Over time, however, Obama discovered the limitations of finding common ground. The Iranian leadership rejected his overtures; only the ever-tightening vise of sanctions has brought Tehran to negotiate over its program of nuclear enrichment. In the Arab world, engagement foundered on its own contradictions because Obama had to choose between engaging with regimes and engaging with citizens who despised those regimes. The “reset” with Russia, which bore fruit in Obama’s first two years, had flagged long before Putin unleashed the hounds in Crimea.
Engagement ran its course. What was worse was that the Arab Spring, once a source of transcendent hope, ultimately entangled Obama in portentous conflicts with no morally satisfying solution. On Syria, the White House convinced itself that it would do more harm than good by seriously supporting the insurgents, yet by withholding that support helped give birth to a Hobbesian setting that really does seem beyond rescue. Egypt, though less monstrous, is just as bewildering, for the administration supported a democratically elected Islamist government that the Egyptian people themselves turned against en masse. The same masses who bled and died to overthrow a military dictator have now embraced a new one. Against what, and with whom, is America to stand? The “pivot to Asia,” the world’s most overadvertised foreign-policy venture, seemed designed to leave behind this torrid and tormented zone for the cool uplands of sovereign states bent on increasing their GDP (and fending off China’s rising ambitions).
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/03/29/4024567/putin-the-enemy-weve-been-waiting.html#storylink=cpy
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