Barack Obama will visit Asia in early November determined to show friends and critics alike he’s committed to the importance of the region, and to pursuing business as usual. He will visit India, South Korea, Japan, and Indonesia to discuss, among other things, economic co-operation, Afghanistan, and the rising power of China. During his visit to Indonesia he will return to the theme of outreach to the Muslim world which he addressed in his high-profile speech in Cairo in June 2009.
But he will be a president who has been weakened in two important ways. First, the visit will come only a few days after the US mid-term elections, in which the Democrats are expected to take a drubbing. The Republicans, for all their own divisions, are trying to capitalise on voters’ disenchantment with a president whom they blame for the difficulties of an economy struggling to emerge from recession, and whom they consider has failed to live up to the high expectations engendered by his election almost two years ago.
Second, the entrails of the administration have been exposed, in unlovely detail, in Obama’s Wars, the latest book by the investigative journalist Bob Woodward. Using the same techniques he employed with such telling effect to show the splits and feuds within the Bush administration over Iraq, Woodward reveals how the president and his top civilian and military advisers spent much of last year agonising, in often tense and quarrelsome debate, over what to do about Afghanistan.
The decision to send an extra 30,000 troops – fewer than the military were demanding – was only reached after an interminable series of policy reviews that left President Obama feeling exhausted, isolated, and under intense pressure to give the generals most of what they wanted – pressure he felt, in the end, unable to resist. According to Woodward’s account, resistance to the troop ‘surge’ came not only from the vice-president, Joe Biden, but from the inner circle of the president’s aides – the people he feels close to and who helped him get elected in 2008.
The picture that emerges is of a well-intentioned, intelligent, even rather scholarly man who never wanted to be a foreign-policy president – yet is haunted by the fear that failure to turn round the war in Afghanistan will deny him re-election in 2012. Hence his desperate pleas to the generals to give him an exit strategy – which in the end, after constant badgering from the president’s men, they did. The result, as Woodward makes all too clear, is an unhappy compromise: the extra troops will go in, but will start to withdraw in July 2011 – a date, as Woodward comments sardonically, “with some meaning and none at all”.
Why does it all matter? It matters, first, because it reinforces the feeling among some voters – Democrat and Republican alike – that Barack Obama is out of his depth, struggling with a daunting foreign-policy agenda which is dominated by issues he is unable to control and master (Afghanistan, the Middle East, Iraq, Iran). The second implication is that there is a serious mismatch between a foreign-policy timetable – in which difficult issues need time and patience to resolve – and a presidential timetable driven by the political needs of the moment. This mismatch is not new, but it could undermine a presidency which began with great promise and already finds itself mired in difficulty and disappointment.
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