Obama’s Foreign Policy Ghosts Could Return to Haunt in Biden Admin
By: Oubai Shahbandar
Tags: Election 2020, Syria, Trump, Biden, Obama

Syria, Idlib province (photo by author)

Beware of the Obama 2.0 Foreign Policy Doctrine

Former President Obama’s senior aides are out in force as of late criticizing what one called President Trump’s “disastrous lack of any coherent policy to advance U.S. interests”.

Interestingly (and dare we say unintentionally ironic), that broadside came from one of the lead negotiators of Obama’s failed nuclear deal with Iran.

The criticisms leveled against President Trump’s foreign policy have in general been lobbed by a shadow cabinet of former foreign policy bureaucrats bristling with contempt at Trump’s neutralization of what they had hoped to be the crowning achievement of their own foreign policy legacy.

Just weeks earlier another Iran nuclear deal alumn recently published an op-ed decrying the “destruction of U.S. Power and influence” as a result of President Trump’s foreign policy. That grandiose admonishment was co-authored with a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana in what one can rightly assume to be a poorly disguised attempt to boost his budding political CV.

All this brings to focus a central question: is a return to the pre-Trump foreign policy status quo ideal for American national security interests?

The reality is that it doesn’t matter what decision President Trump makes on the foreign policy stage. The core of Obama’s foreign policy wiz kids will continue to argue that President Trump pulling out of the nuclear deal would open a path to war with Iran.

Yet precisely the opposite has happened. Outright war with Iran is nowhere on the horizon no matter how many Foreign Affairs longform warnings are published on the matter. That the Obama nuclear deal with Iran included provisions that would lift an international arms embargo and make it easier for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and their militant proxies to kill more Syrians and Iraqis never received due full attention by the international media. And the Trump administration’s commitment to ensure that the arms embargo remains has not been met with proportionate praise despite the gravity of the matter that would impact millions throughout the middle east.

Newly (alleged) covert actions and creative spycraft have wrecked Iran’s ability to advance its nuclear weaponization efforts. Explosions have hit oil refineries and strategic ports — adding to Tehran’s long list of economic woes and newly reimposed sanctions have pushed Iran’s economy on a steep death spiral that is amping internal unrest.

The specter for a catastrophic war has been reduced rather than amplified due to the Trump administration’s reversal of Obama’s flagship Iran-centric foreign policy initiatives. It is a stark reality that may be too painful to accept or even prove to be inherently counter-intuitive to many of President Trump’s detractors.

Obama launched his foreign policy trajectory with a speech in Cairo’s famed al Azhar university, meant to reassure the Muslim world with lofty words reflecting on the importance of freedom and tolerance.

But six years later, the Obama deal with Tehran arguably paved the way to one of the most destructive and horrific slaughters in the Muslim world by giving Iran’s leading general Qasim Soleiman a functional blank check to spread his oppression over large swaths of the Arab and Muslim world from Beirut to Allepo to Baghdad and beyond.

It would take the election of the very antithesis of Obama — President Donald Trump — to finally seriously challenge one of the greatest threats that ever came to face the Muslim people of the region: an empire built by Soleimani, fueled by Obama’s historic folly.

President Trump’s decision to eliminate General Soleimani was also widely condemned by the Obama/Biden foreign policy alumn as a disastrous mistake that would surely do more harm than good.

If anything, the drone strike that sent Soleimani to kingdom-come has proved to be a masterful strategic move. The strike was celebrated by countless Syrians, Muslims throughout the region that I met with who viewed Soleimani as the mastermind of their slaughter. Dare anyone say it ?

And take for instance Musa Daqduq, a protege of the now late Soleimani and one of Hizballah’s most dangerous terrorists who was captured in Iraq by U.S. forces only to have his release facilitated by Obama’s then special envoy to Iraq.

Years later, Daqduq would eventually oversee a string of continuous disastrous policy decisions in Syria. Daqduq now leads Hizballah operations in Syria and oversees the attempted expansion of Hizballah special operations along the border with the Golan heights as part of a strategic initiative by the Iranian backed Shia militant group to establish a new Syrian frontline against Israel.

Even the dramatic resignations of Trump’s former Secretary of Defense General Mattis and Obama-holdover Brett McGurk who served as special Iraq and Syria envoy have now in hindsight proven to be overblown. Their protests over Trump’s Syria policy received much fanfare, but the substance on whether their warnings have proven valid has not received much, if any, scrutiny. The Islamic State remains functionally defeated, and Trump dispatched his new envoys on Syria earlier this year to back a Turkish backed campaign in the rebel held province of Idlib earlier this year that directly challenged Russian and Iranian forces.

And in contrast to Obama, Trump’s administration has also demonstrated a serious commitment to passing and enacting sanctions on Syria’s genocidal ruler Assad and his inner circle. Many Syrian Americans I’ve spoken with have told me how the Obama staffers outright rejected supporting the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, named after a Syrian defector code-named Caesar who smuggled thousands of photographic evidence that clearly demonstrated a systemic mass killings of detainees being carried out by Assad’s security services. Trump’s administration has wholeheartedly supported the Caesar Act and has been busy vigorously implementing it.

Syria, West Allepo countryside (photo by author)

As someone who has directly observed the destruction and death caused by the Assad regime’s forces on the ground in Syria, the shift in Washington’s foreign policy on Syria under this current administration is something to be welcomed and praised.

It is perhaps unsurprising that foreign policy pundits overlook the grave consequences impacting U.S. and international security as a direct result of President Obama’s global policy paradigm.

This is particularly true when it comes to dealing with Vladimir Putin’s resurgent Russia. Again, the punditry class and many foreign affairs correspondents fail to grasp the resonating enormity of Obama’s foreign policy miscalculations on this front.

There are serious glaring contradictions of the Obama foreign policy troubadours (doubling as Biden’s shadow foreign policy staff) that the media has overlooked:

Trump is criticized for not working with allies and for simultaneously giving Russia a free pass. Yet when the Trump administration takes Chancellor Merkel’s government to task for moving forward with the NordStream 2 energy deal with Russia, he is pilloried for pressuring Berlin.

Then when Trump orders the removal of thousands (but not all) of U.S. troops from Berlin (but redeploying over a thousand U.S. soldiers to Poland which feels directly threatened by Russia), the same bureaucrats frame the decision as a concession to Moscow.

So which is it to be ?

Headlines are rife about President Trump’s supposed refusal to confront Russia when it comes to Kremlin covert support to the Taliban. But as a recent New York Times report citing leaked intelligence makes clear, Putin decided to take the extraordinary step of gradual outreach and then measured support to some Taliban factions in 2013, in the midst of Obama’s two-term Presidency.

Obama was surely briefed on this development and we can only conclude that Putin decided to escalate the scale of support to the Taliban because he came to (rightly) conclude that Obama wouldn’t take any meaningful action that would exact a disproportionate cost.

The same calculus emboldened Putin in 2015 to take yet another gamble and deploy a massive Russian military expeditionary force in Syria right under the nose of U.S. forces that had begun operating in the eastern part of the country against the Islamic State a year prior.

The Obama administration often left the task of publicly scolding Russia to then U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Powers. But the administration privately understood that these condemnations did little to nothing.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration persisted in its stated policy of ‘naming and shaming’ the Russians for horrific war crimes being committed by the Russian military and their Assad proxy in Syria. The Kremlin was not deterred by the slightest.

Administration officials even joked about the futility of the constant condemnations in a scene caught on camera for the Netflix documentary

‘The Last Year’ on Obama’s foreign policy doctrine. Ben Rhodes insisted to the cameras that Putin’s policies were not in the best interests of Russia.

Needless to say, Putin has yet to receive the memo.

That moment, perhaps more than anything, perfectly captured the sheer hollowness of a doctrine that was heavy on moral rhetoric and pedantic musings on an international order that Obama — perhaps naively — gravely misunderstood.

It was little surprise then, that Putin decided to launch multiple audacious moves, from Crimea to entering Syria through airspace that the U.S. could have blocked, to attempted U.S. election interference, all under Obama’s disproving- yet ultimately unmoved — watch.

That of course did not stop John Kerry, who served as Obama’s last Secretary of State, penned an op-ed in the Times earlier this year titled “diplomacy was working until Trump abandoned it”. An extraordinary piece of tone deaf revisionism from a man who confidently once claimed that “Hizballah is not plotting against us” (it is).

Kerry’s capitulation to the Russian position in Syria also stands in stark contrast to the fact that it was under President Trump that for the first time Russian military assets were directly pushed back and that Assad regime airbases, some of which had Russian military advisors, were struck on multiple occasions.

These were bold actions taken by this administration that Kerry & Co. would have arrogantly dismissed as sheer madness and a prelude to a wider war.

Yet somehow it is these flag bearers of the ancien régime seeking redemption for the Obama legacy that are being offered the moral high ground in framing the narrative on the ideal American foreign policy.

Could it be that they are the ones in the wrong?

President Trump may not have had an ‘al-Azhar moment’ outline a foreign policy in romantic rhetoric as his predecessor, but the American people may be better off for it.

And while the media is flaying Trump for not reportedly directly confronting Putin for the alleged bounties paid to the Taliban by Russian military intelligence operatives, choosing the timing to counter the Kremlin in a plausibly deniable and meaningful manner is strategically the wise course of action for a leader to take.

That criticism of Trump’s Russia and Iran foreign policies, and the accompanying self perpetuating media echo chamber, originate from the very same people who were either too cowered or ill-prepared to confront Russian and Iranian malign actions years ago should raise serious red flags for everyone.

Henry Kissinger once sagely wrote that “‘a great leader is not so much clever as lucid and clear-sighted.” In that light, Obama was too clever by half; his hesitancy and belief that he could usher in a new era in international relations allowed Putin and the Ayatollah the space to challenge international norms, encouraging adversarial forces to expand, and ultimately encourage direct attacks on U.S. interests with even more abandon.

Kissinger described Russia as “a weak country with a large military establishment, and a very determined leadership.” And as chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov aptly put it, “ Vladimir Putin had a weak poker hand, but Obama fell for his bluff”. The Obama foreign policy establishment , which Biden is set to inherit, and their media cheerleaders will never admit to this. Instead they are content to cast opprobrium on President Trump’s foreign policy approach.

Some humility and perspective is in order to set the record straight. As unwieldy as the current foreign policy outlook may seem on the surface, a return to a ‘Obama Doctrine 2.0’ in any future administration will likely prove more destructive and costly, both for the American people and the Middle East, more than ever before.

Oubai Shahbandar is a former Pentagon analyst with multiple deployments in the Middle East. He directed and produced the award winning documentary on the Syrian conflict, “A Butcher by any Other Name”