Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 on being — especially in foreign policy — the anti-George W. Bush. As a humanitarian and refugee crisis spills out of the Middle East, the question now is what the anti-Obama foreign policy looks like.
The famous (and now reportedly staged) photo of the lifeless body of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi on a beach in Turkey has focused attention on the catastrophe in Syria. As heartbreaking as that image is, to be shocked by it requires one to have ignored the rest of that country’s 4-year-old civil war. I mean the reports that Bashar al-Assad’s forces repeatedly used not only chemical weapons, but such barbaric “conventional” weapons as the barrels of nails and other shrapnel rained down on civilian areas. I mean the drownings of scores of other refugees, and the flood of thousands across European borders.
Meanwhile, the debate Obama oversaw regarding Syria is illustrative of his disastrous foreign policy.
First, Obama drew an ill-advised “red line” at the use of chemical weapons in Syria. After a year passed with zero effort to prepare Congress or our allies for a possible response, Obama was caught flat-footed when his tough talk didn’t dissuade Assad. He first said he didn’t need congressional authority to act, then sought congressional support for an effort infamously described as “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
In the end, he made no credible case for action; many of us who recognized the consequences of inaction simply could not trust that Obama’s plan was worth supporting. His “just enough” approach looked like the road to Libya, a land that already stood in lawless, deadly ruin by then. The administration’s approach to countering ISIS has been equally uninspiring.
All of which points to this question: If not Bush’s invasion of Iraq or Obama’s half-hearted efforts to avoid mockery, then what?
There were other options. We failed to identify early on the Syrian rebels who might have been worth backing and to arm them. We failed to build an international consensus about how to proceed; in its place, the likes of Russia and Iran are filling the void. We have failed to employ a slate of sanctions of the type that brought Iran to the negotiating table. Speaking of Iran: We negotiated a nuclear deal that not only lacks the teeth to prevent Tehran from getting the bomb, but gives the regime billions of dollars to help support Assad.
Two leading presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, are associated with these histories of fecklessness and recklessness. To date, neither they nor their competitors have outlined a credible alternative.
We deserve better than that. Rather than the one-minute bumper-stickerism we usually get from the debates, we need to see candidates wrestle with these issues in ways that show the thoughtfulness, or lack thereof, with which they would address them. We need to ask Clinton about the fruits of the foreign policy she oversaw, Bush about the familiar cohort of advisers he’d likely bring back to Washington, and so on.
We saw what happened with the last two approaches. Our consciences should demand something better.
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