The form which the Libyan intervention took was guided by the lessons which the interventionists and the political advisors had drawn from the Iraq War. For the liberal hawks, Libya was the “right” way for the United States to intervene: a Democratic administration had received the proper authorizations from the Arab League and the United Nations Security Council; had assembled a real coalition of NATO allies and Arab partners (although the United States ended up absorbing more than 75 percent of the costs); and deposed an Arab tyrant with the aid of a provisional government that espoused democratic ideals. For the political advisers, the near-absolute ban on the deployment of any U.S. ground forces (other than a handful of special operatives) avoided the possibility of the United States being sucked into a new land war in the Middle East. U.S. air power was deemed sufficient to achieve U.S. objectives. Libya seemed to herald the emergence of a new form of low-cost, no (U.S.) casualty intervention which would avoid the mistakes of the Iraq war.

Qaddafi’s fall seemed occur to at a fraction of the cost of Hussein’s, but the former’s removal produced shock waves that proved damaging to U.S. interests. Unlike Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi had renounced terrorism and his weapons of mass destruction program and was generally cooperating with the West on security matters. At the same time, his claims that Islamist extremists were behind the rebellion were not entirely self-serving—there was a genuine radical presence in the eastern part of the country that was empowered as a result of Qaddafi’s removal. While a moderate opposition was the face of the new Libya on the surface, the real power rested in the hands of Islamist fighters and clan militias that were uninterested in any commitment to liberal values or democratic governance. Yet the principal lesson from Iraq—that the fall of an authoritarian regime creates a vacuum defined by disorder and instability unless “boots on the ground” were present in sufficient numbers to guarantee order—was downplayed in Libya, in part to avoid pressures to send U.S. and NATO forces to secure the peace. Thus, the desire to vindicate Democratic interventionism combined with a fear of Iraq-style quagmires produced the worst kind of compromise: a mismatch between grandiose goals and limited resources. The Libyan intervention was neither reduced to a more small-scale operation nor expanded when it became clear that a strategy of “leading from behind” would not produce a successful outcome. Moreover, as Libya began to unravel, it became apparent that the operation did not inspire fear in the hearts of U.S. enemies, testify to American power, revitalize NATO or encourage our partners to spend more on defense. Despite the rhetoric about an Asian pivot, both China and U.S. allies in the region concluded that the United States could still be easily distracted in the Middle East. Washington’s handling of the fate of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in addition to the Libyan operation sent mixed signals to our allies about whether the United States truly “had their back” and accelerated efforts to hedge against U.S. unreliability. Partners and competitors alike concluded that the United States was trying to find a way to take bold action in the service of ambitious goals but was not willing to pay the costs or take the risks to do so. Additionally, the manner in which Qaddafi was deposed ended once and for all any hope that a Libya-style denuclearization deal would ever be embraced by Iran or North Korea: the only agreement that Iran would eventually contemplate signing would be one that legitimized its continued possession of the building blocks of a nuclear program, not the complete dismantling that the Obama administration had claimed in 2009 was its nonnegotiable goal.

The Libyan intervention also soured relations with both Beijing and Moscow. UN Security Council resolution 1973 was ratified as a way to create safe havens for civilians to find refuge from the fighting—a condition Russia and China were prepared to accept in order not to veto its passage in the Security Council. Almost immediately, the Western-led intervention focused not on ending a threat to civilians but entering the Libyan conflict as cobelligerents on the side of the opposition. Eventually, U.S. and NATO airpower overwhelmed Qaddafi’s military—and the Libyan despot ended up being captured and executed by rebel forces. Russia and China, concluding that they were fooled by the Obama administration, have subsequently resisted U.S. efforts to push for humanitarian action in other conflicts, notably in Syria, where the opposition has concluded that if the United States had intervened in Libya to stop a planned massacre in Benghazi, it would take action against the much more tangible crimes of the Bashar al-Assad regime. The Syrian crisis has thus festered for more than four years. Combined with the effective collapse of Libya as a state, spurring a migration crisis which has seriously destabilized the European Union and allowed for militants to find a base from which to spread their influence through Africa, the Libyan and Syrian wars have facilitated the rise of the Islamic State as a new and more potent replacement for Al Qaeda, one that is also developing a reach capable of striking targets in the West, including the U.S. homeland. The same warnings that Brent Scowcroft sounded in 2002 prior to the start of the Iraq war were also voiced in the run-up to the Libya intervention, and dismissed by a Democratic administration almost as quickly. Libya today is no more a model of successful intervention in 2016 than Iraq was in 2007, with the one saving grace that the United States is not expending large amounts of blood and treasure.

 

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION has settled into a pattern of delaying tough choices for as long as possible, and then being not fully on board with owning the results. For instance, a national-security goal is for America to enjoy energy independence by decreasing dependence on the Middle East, and offering an alternative to Russian sources of energy supply to our European allies. An ambitious and expensive program of alternative options (such as biofuels) would be unable to achieve this on its own—but tapping further sources of hydrocarbons in North America might.

Yet there has been sustained opposition on environmental grounds to expanding production and development of unconventional sources, as well as constructing the necessary infrastructure to bring them on the market. The Obama administration delayed making a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline for years for fear of alienating different domestic constituencies, but was also unwilling to make the case that prioritizing environment and climate concerns trumped national-security concerns about global energy markets. The result has been that other countries that choose to be proactive can drive results. A Saudi Arabian decision to increase its oil supply to the international market, followed by a Russian one not to cut supplies, lowered energy prices to levels that made the cost of North American projects like the Keystone XL pipeline prohibitively high. Yet the long-term strategic questions remain unresolved: the United States and its allies are once again becoming addicted to cheap foreign oil, which can kill off alternative-energy programs—and makes it much harder to achieve another announced strategic goal of being able to rebalance from the Middle East at any point in the near future.

The current crop of candidates vying to succeed Obama have all offered variants of the same message: that a change in the occupant of the Oval Office will produce vastly different (and more preferable) outcomes for U.S. foreign policy. If Hillary Clinton succeeds in her quest, she is unlikely to embrace the team-of-rivals approach to governance and seems much more committed to following a more hawkish, liberal-interventionist line. All of the Republican challengers also signal that they would be “different” than Obama. Yet Clinton or any of the Republicans will find it extremely hard to break out of the morass Obama finds himself in. Here’s why.

 

THE CANDIDATES have criticized the Obama administration’s responses to the crises in Ukraine and Syria and to the growing threat of the Islamic State. Yet a closer examination of the accusations does not reveal fundamentally different approaches. Instead, they indicate that a different president would somehow be more effective in carrying out existing policies. For instance, across the spectrum, different politicians continue to express the opinion that the solution to the chaos in Libya and Syria is to find that illusive species of local moderates prepared to fight against extremist forces and establish liberal-leaning, pro-American regimes to obviate the need for a large deployment of U.S. ground forces. The red lines that political advisers that surround the current president and also his potential successors insist cannot be crossed for fear of triggering another Iraq are the same.

Obama has also received tremendous criticism—some of which is justified—for how he has handled Putin and the relationship with Russia. Yet a good deal of the Obama administration’s Russia policy has been shaped by self-imposed U.S. constraints. Beyond the standard trope of Russia as a nuclear superpower that cannot be subjected to much direct pressure, Americans want a policy of confronting Russia that limits the risks they will be asked to bear—for example, the requirement that economic sanctions imposed on Russia to punish it for the seizure of Crimea and its operations in Eastern Ukraine have minimal fallout for U.S. economic and business interests. Additionally, for the Iran nuclear deal to work, Russian cooperation is needed, and there is a growing desire for Moscow to better align its operations in Syria with American preferences—shifting most of its military strikes against Islamic State targets while using its influence to persuade al-Assad to step down. At the same time, while proposals to settle the Ukraine crisis by formally designating Ukraine as a neutral state is a nonviable option because the U.S. does not want to be seen as appeasing Moscow, it is also reluctant to spend the necessary resources to pull Ukraine into the Euro-Atlantic orbit. One principal policy divergence between Obama and his potential successors is the question of providing aid to the Ukrainian military. Yet those who criticize Obama’s refusal to take a more aggressive stance on this issue still search for a way for the United States to supply weapons to Kiev to pressure Russia to reverse its course while being able to disavow U.S. responsibility for how those arms might be used by Kiev. Most of the 2016 candidates’ stance on Russia policy involves some variant of being “tougher” on Putin and showing “resolve,” but not showing much willingness to own the only two plausible policy options: a commitment to renewed and robust containment of Russia—requiring a much higher expenditure than anyone in the U.S. seems willing to pay, plus the risks of losing Russian cooperation on other issues—or a search for accommodation.