Robert J. Lieber is Professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University, where he has previously served as Chair of the Government Department and Interim Chair of Psychology. In addition, he chairs the Executive Committee of Georgetown’s Center for Jewish Civilization. He is author or editor of seventeen books on international relations and U.S. foreign policy and has been an advisor to presidential campaigns, to the State Department, and to the drafters of U.S. National Intelligence Estimates. He was born and raised in Chicago, received his undergraduate education at the University of Wisconsin and earned his Ph.D. at Harvard. He held fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. He also has taught at Harvard, Oxford and the University of California, Davis, and has been Visiting Fellow at the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques in Paris, the Brookings Institution in Washington, and Fudan University in Shanghai.
The following exchange will focus on Professor Lieber’s new book Retreat and its Consequences: American Foreign Policy and the Problem of World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Parts 1 and 2 can be found here and here.
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Dear Professor Lieber,
In the last round you ended your answer by stating that the choices America faces in the Middle East “often involve false dichotomies in which the alternative to inaction or retrenchment is posed as major war on the scale of Iraq in 2003. This is a false choice and it obscures the reality that there is a very extensive range of policy responses available to the United States.”
Now, it would obviously be very difficult to claim that the Obama administration has been anywhere close to ideal in the Syria crisis or in Iraq – it is hard to find anyone who doesn't believe more could have been done in both cases. But assessing the role that retrenchment has played in the big picture is a different matter altogether.
In a recent exchange we had with NYT Middle East correspondent Robert Worth, he claimed that although America could and should do a lot more in the Middle East, mainly on the diplomatic front, the Arab uprising's “descent into chaos would not have been much altered by a different American policy.” According to him, and many others, the grassroots societal forces at play are so sweeping that preventing the current state of chaos in the Middle East was always beyond America's reach.
My question: how can we assess, without the perspective of history, the role of American retrenchment in the current Middle-East mess? If we don't know that the US could have had a dramatic effect without taking on substantial risks of different kinds, how can we unequivocally conclude that retrenchment has been a failure?
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
The late great Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan once spoke of the serious societal problem of “defining deviancy down.” In foreign policy terms, the claim that there is little the U.S. could have done better in the Middle East (or elsewhere for that matter) implies an unwillingness to examine policy failures and undesirable outcomes that have taken place during the two terms of the Obama-Biden administration.
There is also a double standard at work here. Many of those who are reluctant to pass judgment on Obama’s Middle East policy instead argue that societal forces in the region would have made effective U.S. policy nearly impossible. Yet many of these observers also strongly criticize the George W. Bush administration's fateful decision to invade Iraq in 2003. That criticism implies that better choices and outcomes could otherwise have occurred.
One way of judging the effectiveness of Obama policies is to examine their outcomes. As I noted in a previous exchange, if one considers each of the seven longstanding American foreign policy core interests in the Middle East, all but one of these (the availability of oil supply) are in a far worse situation than was the case when Obama came to office in January 2009. These other six key national interests are preventing regional inroads by hostile powers, security of friends and allies, regional stability, counterterrorism, nuclear non-proliferation, and freedom-human rights. One could argue that the July 2015 Iran deal is a gain for non-proliferation, but even if Iran adheres to the deal, it will emerge in 10-15 years with a modern nuclear infrastructure and the capacity to make a nuclear weapon at a moment of its own choosing.
The question then becomes whether any of these outcomes could have been improved by different US policy choices. Here one has to recognize that the most important foreign policy decisions are often made in the midst of incomplete information and uncertainty about outcomes. Nonetheless, one can make the case that instead of policies of retrenchment, the Obama administration could have made different policy choices leading to better outcomes. Here are several examples.
IRAQ: Precipitous withdrawal of all US troops at the end of 2011 opened the doors to Prime Minister Maliki’s abuses, renewed sectarian warfare, and the collapse of the Iraqi army in the face of ISIS attacks (e.g., capture of Mosul). Instead, alternative choices by the US, including not having supported Maliki’s appointment as Prime Minister earlier, plus a more determined negotiating stance on seeking a Status-of-Forces agreement and using US aid as a lever, might have led to much better outcomes.
SYRIA: Choices here were among various bad options, but there are differences between bad and worse. Early Obama action to support moderate rebels in 2011-2013 might have led to Assad’s downfall and a takeover by more moderate elements. The egregious Obama failure to enforce his “red line” after Assad used chemical weapons also damaged US credibility and signaled to hostile foreign leaders that more assertive actions (e.g. Putin in Ukraine, Xi Jinping in the East & South China Seas) would not meet US countermeasures (whether diplomatic or otherwise). The actual horrific outcomes in Syria have spilled over not only to neighboring states, but have also led to mass refugee flows into Europe, with destabilizing effects there in terms of populists politics and damage to the European Union.
LIBYA: US and allied failure to aid the Libyans post-Gaddafi led to chaos and a failed state.
IRAN: Obama deliberately failed to support mass Iranian popular protests in June-July 2009 over the regime’s stealing of the presidential election. Obama did so because he was courting a change in conduct by the regime and sought the nuclear agreement. The mullahs also drew lessons from the red line fiasco. Moreover, Obama did not drive as hard a bargain as he might have in view of Iran’s weakness and greater need for the agreement and the ending of sanctions. Since the agreement (the JCPOA), Iran has not altered its behavior. The US State Dept. classifies it as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, and the regime and the militias it supports have intervened in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Of course, in looking at each of these cases, none of the more favorable outcomes are certainties, but each of them suggests plausible outcomes that might have occurred had the Obama administration followed other policies.
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