The Worldview of Barack Obama

January 13, 2014 Topic: The Presidency Region: United States

The Worldview of Barack Obama

As Obama enters the fifth year of his presidency, the broad outlines of a distinct worldview, if not an Obama Doctrine, have come into focus.

As Barack Obama enters the sixth year of his presidency, the broad outlines of a distinct worldview, if not an Obama Doctrine, have come into focus. Specifically, the administration’s recent response to events in the Middle East – balking at retaliating against Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons, reaching an interim nuclear deal with Iran, emphasizing a narrow focus on regional “core interests” in the president’s recent address to the UN General Assembly – underscores a determination to exhaust diplomatic options and, with memories of a decade of draining, inconclusive war still clear, avoid entanglement in messy conflicts of dubious strategic value.

Decried by some as a retreat, hailed by others as a
prudent effort to bring America’s external commitments into closer alignment with its finite resources, Obama’s overarching strategy of modified retrenchment can be explained by the sort of structural factors typically emphasized by political scientists. In this case, that means strategic overextension, resource constraints, and anti-interventionist popular sentiment. ="#sthash.luarjggd.dpbs">

Yet scarcely any mention has been made of how the president’s personality has shaped his actions. This is an odd omission; the White House’s centralization of foreign policy decision making has enabled Obama to fashion a strategy largely to his own liking. Indeed, consideration of Obama’s beliefs, personality traits, and temperament both sheds light on the path he has charted and points to potential shortcomings in his assumptions.

Obama’s less expansive vision of U.S. power can be directly tied to his formative experiences. Unique among American presidents, Obama’s adolescence had a decidedly cosmopolitan flavor to it, which he highlighted on the campaign trail in 2008 when touting his foreign policy judgment. The bulk of his childhood was spent in his native Hawaii, home to a bewildering array of different cultures and ethnic groups. His stay here was interrupted for about four years when he moved with his mother to Indonesia. Exposure to such diversity could not have failed to shape his perspective on America’s global role as one country among many, rather than the center of the world.

Some observers have taken the argument further, holding that Obama’s political ambitions were fed by a psychological need to atone for the failings of his father, who entertained grandiose hopes for his own career but died an embittered and defeated man, and by a larger sense that this project of redemption would be incomplete without reforming a country that has also fallen short of its ideals. Such theories, of course, can likely never be substantiated. It is plausible to assume, however, that as both a community organizer who worked in low-income neighborhoods in Chicago and an African American all too familiar with the country’s checkered record on racial equality, Obama harbors more nuanced views of American exceptionalism.

He has at times employed remarkably introspective rhetoric for a national leader, demonstrating an awareness of past abuses of American power and the urgency of reining it in, as when he recently warned: “Unless we discipline our thinking…[and] our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states.”

A risk-averse posture that strives to avoid resource-consuming foreign entanglements may also be a natural outgrowth of the passive temperament he has displayed at home. To the bafflement of many commentators, he seems either unwilling or unable to leverage the considerable powers of his office – whether via the bully pulpit or twisting arms on Capitol Hill – to implement his often bold ideas. His discomfort with the give-and-take of politics has often resulted in his ceding of the floor to opponents, allowing them to define the terms of national debate. It may be that boredom or inertia sets in for Obama when he is confronted with the gap between what he hopes to achieve and what prevailing conditions will permit, which accounted for his impatience with the prolonged horse trading that came with being a senator in both Illinois and Washington, D.C.

Obama engages unevenly with the foreign policy process. Self-confident, cerebral, and informed, he assumes the leading role in formulating strategy. His lack of surefootedness in operating the levers of power and his seeming unwillingness to do the heavy lifting required for realizing his objectives, however, have undermined both his leadership and U.S. credibility. The drawbacks to Obama’s ambivalent approach to governance were displayed most recently when he opted to not strike Assad’s regime in response to its use of chemical weapons, a transgression the president had previously insisted would not go unpunished.

Enforcing this red line, even if only for appearance’s sake, could have been accomplished by a cosmetic missile strike. By instead grasping for alternatives to such action, first by soliciting the opinion of Congress and then embracing a Russian plan for disarming Syria of its chemical weapons, Obama inadvertently raised doubts regarding his administration’s capacity or will for meeting its international commitments. There are parallels with his performance at home: Congressional Democrats and party activists have often griped that he lacks the required spine for pressing his agenda. This perception of irresoluteness may have already created headaches for Obama, if one interprets China’s increased saber-rattling in the East China Sea as a testing of U.S. fealty to its defense treaty with Japan, and could create additional ones if Iran concludes that the president’s ambivalence towards a preventive military strike renders far-reaching concessions as part of a long-term nuclear deal unnecessary.

A natural companion to Obama’s political passivity is his aloof personality, which creates complications for an administration attempting to manage the expectations of allies as it redefines America’s global role. Stories abound of his aversion to sustained contact with anyone outside a very small inner circle and to the social conventions required for maintaining relations with campaign donors or striking bargains with Congress. Obama’s similar lack of rapport with many world leaders closes off potential means for alleviating their concerns about U.S. staying power.

Deep Israeli misgivings over the recent nuclear deal with Iran and a wider sense that America will not safeguard its security interests over the long term have opened up a potentially dangerous rift with the US. If Obama is unable to dissuade Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from, say, mobilizing Congressional opposition to a more comprehensive arrangement with Tehran or launching a unilateral attack against Iran’s nuclear installations that roils the entire region, he could come to rue his personal discord with the Israeli leader. Obama’s recently abrupt cancellation of a four-nation tour of Southeast Asia stirred concerns in many Asian capitals of the administration’s interest in engaging the region as it has promised, raising the familiar specter of wayward allies prospectively taking an action that provokes China.

Both examples are reminders that Obama’s hopes for a lighter global footprint depend in large part on the world proving sufficiently placid; allies can serve as either supporters or spoilers in this process, and must be courted and reassured accordingly if they are to serve as the former. Obama’s often detached handling of them undercuts his own objectives.

Underlying Obama’s effort to reconfigure America’s global commitments is an assumption that the country’s hegemony cannot be sustained indefinitely, surely informed by his personal beliefs. A more circumscribed global role for the US calls for more self-denial to which Americans, including many Democrats, are traditionally accustomed when thinking about the world; administration officials concede that the president’s views part from “the indispensable nation” still envisioned by those, many of them holdovers from the Clinton years, whose formative experience was America’s victory in the Cold War.

The post-George W. Bush course correction plotted by Obama seems fitting in an age of austerity and in an international environment free of peer competitors. Yet it may be more in keeping with a cool, at times passive leader who has often seemed uncertain about leveraging his office at home. If so, this raises the question of whether America is now punching below its weight because Obama has misapplied the searing lessons of Iraq and committed the opposite error of his predecessor by exaggerating the obstacles to the use of U.S. military power where it may be needed, as in, for example, arresting the regionalization of Syria’s civil war. Only the judgment of history will render a definitive answer.

Michael Lumbers is a senior analyst at Wikistrat and author of Piercing the Bamboo Curtain: Tentative Bridge Building to China During the Johnson Years.

Image: White House/Flickr.