Judging Obama’s White House on engagement

Amidst the punditry’s incessant debates over whether the White House’s various "engagement" gambits have succeeded, might still succeed, or have not and will not succeed, often missing has been a deeper assessment of the strategy behind the rhetoric and images of extended hands and clenched fists. Tom Wright of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (whom I count a friend) has produced a welcome corrective in this regard, with a comprehensive and sophisticated analysis of the Obama administration’s foreign policy in the current issue of CSIS’s Washington Quarterly. Now that President Obama has been in office for a year and a half, he has had the opportunity to install his national security team, attempt to translate campaign rhetoric into specific policies, launch a multitude of new initiatives, and even attempt a few course corrections. Final evaluations must await the disposition of events and the verdicts of history, but enough has now transpired to suggest some preliminary assessments, and here Tom’s article is an important contribution.

Going beyond the hackneyed "should we talk to bad people or not" debate, the article identifies the main contours, principles, and assumptions of the administration’s foreign policy. Judiciously, Tom first endeavours to understand the White House’s strategic doctrine on its own terms, as a worldview developed over the past decade and grounded in President Obama and his team’s reading of history, international relations, and human nature. Tom labels their policy "strategic engagement" and identifies five primary components of it: "Engaging civilizations, allies, new partners, adversaries, and institutions." This doctrine is "premised on the assumption that most states increasingly share the same interests" and can be either reasoned or incentivized into cooperating to address common threats and advance common goals.

The article’s conclusion is fair but unsparing: "strategic engagement has largely succeeded in meeting its ambitious goals in only one category — engaging civilizations. … In light of this evidence, the United States should change course." Specifically, the doctrine of "cooperative strategic engagement" should be replaced by a doctrine of "competitive strategic engagement." The reason for these failures — and the need for a new strategic doctrine — is embedded in one of the administration’s problematic core assumptions: that powerful states necessarily share common interests. 

Rather, as demonstrated most vividly and repeatedly by China and Russia, but by a range of others as well (e.g. Turkey, Brazil, Iran), nations can look at the same world and decide that their goals are very different from those of the United States. Unfortunately, as Tom concludes, "the administration has done little to think through how it might deal with the fact that the member states of the international order have fundamental differences of interest." Instead, he argues that the White House should understand the competitive and relative-sum nature of geo-politics, generate more leverage to bring to bear on negotiations, and shift its emphasis towards partners who share common views rather than just capabilities. 

The article is not flawless. For example, it gives a prematurely positive grade for the Administration’s "civilizational" engagement, targeted at Muslim communities.  Obama’s Cairo speech last year and a number of follow-up initiatives may mark a promising start, but their success is not guaranteed in addressing the maladies besetting many Islamic communities — especially given the administration’s lukewarm support for human rights and democracy in the region. Nor is the Obama administration’s approach necessarily original. Engaging Muslim communities (rather than just governments) on issues other than terrorism was in fact one of the core strategies of the Bush Administration, reflected in initiatives such as the Broader Middle East and North Africa initiative (BMENA), Forum for the Future (both in conjunction with the G-8), and the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI). Such programs reflected a strategy of going beyond security concerns and state-to-state relations to engage with Muslim civil society and reformers, and support economic development, women’s empowerment, and improved governance.

The article also suggests, but doesn’t fully explore, that a related cost of the White House’s strategy has been a relative neglect of America’s allies. Thus while the Obama Administration pursued engagement with the likes of Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, and Sudan, America’s relations with allies and partners as disparate as India, the United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, Japan, Georgia, Poland, Czech Republic, and Colombia all suffered. To the point that each of these bilateral relationships are arguably weaker now than under the Bush administration.    

It seems that one of the core challenges — perhaps even contradictions — at the heart of the White House’s strategic doctrine lies in the unresolved tensions between its liberal internationalist impulses and its neo-realist impulses. The pragmatic orientation of Obama’s purported realism exists uneasily within his liberal internationalist framework that assumes common interests in a cooperative international order. Hence the problem: what if the nations that you try to talk into a cooperative international order have very different purposes in mind for that same international order? Or don’t even believe in that international order?

As Mike Green points out, in the case of China it seems that the administration is now pivoting towards a more realistic assessment and more sober-minded policy consonant with power realities in Asia. The U.S.-ROK joint naval exercises are a welcome development. Hopefully they herald a strategic trend.