Obama's Grand Strategy

It is easy to ridicule President Barack Obama's admission "We don't have a strategy yet" in answer to questions about how his administration would deal with the Islamic State. Another way of looking at his answer is to see a deliberate effort to carefully calculate all options before rushing into a decision.
By now, it is clear that Obama is the opposite of George W. Bush in his method of leadership. Bush's grand strategy ended up with two wars waged with unilateralist resolve and not enough time spent thinking over long-term consequences. Obama's grand strategy favors multilateralism and engagement. And yes, he takes his time before committing the United States to military action. Obama is also much more conscious about the limits of US power. He believes all problems do not have an American solution. More importantly, he believes US involvement can often make things worse, not better. In that sense, he genuinely believes that not doing "stupid stuff" is a good starting point for a grand strategy.

If one has to put Obama's worldview in the framework of international relations theory, it is abundantly clear that he is a realist who sees the world as it is, and not as it should be. Although he believes in American exceptionalism -- in the sense that America is a force for good -- he is also bitterly aware that the world doesn't see America this way. This is the reason why he wants to act very carefully before taking military action in parts of the world where taking unilateral military action would create more problems rather than less.

Think about all the foreign policy crises his administration has faced during just the last month. As The Washington Post put it: "Short of world war, it's rare that a chief executive goes through a foreign policy month like President Obama's August. US warplanes struck in Iraq for the first time in years, as US diplomats struggled to establish a new government in Baghdad. Islamic State militants beheaded an American journalist in Syria and spread their reach across the Middle East. War raged between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. In Afghanistan, US plans for an orderly exit at the end of the year teetered on the brink of disaster. Russia all but invaded Ukraine and dared Obama to stop it. Libya descended into violent chaos."

One should candidly ask whether there is a magical grand strategy besides engagement and multilateral diplomacy to solve all these problems. As far as the Islamic State is concerned -- the only case where America has taken military action -- we should ask if air strikes alone will defeat the enemy. It is also possible to argue that Obama actually acted quickly in Iraq with the air strikes, and that the Islamic State has over-reached and overextended itself, both in terms of the territory it has tried to claim and the number of enemies it has managed to make. Limited air strikes and the formation of a more inclusive government in Iraq will encourage Sunni Arab states to work together and convince the frustrated Sunni segments of Iraq that supporting the Islamic State is not their only alternative.

At the end of the day, one has to look at the enormous foreign policy challenges facing the White House and understand the political context in places like Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China, just to name the most important ones. Obama's inability to convince his critics that he is following a prudent diplomatic strategy has more to do with the complexity of the problems than the president's leadership style. Unlike the bipolar Cold War dynamics, he is dealing with messy problems. He is also facing a weaker economy and a skeptical public. Obama is probably right in his admissions in that sometimes he will not have all the solutions and all the answers. He wants to diminish the expectation that the US can control events and provide magic solutions to solve impossibly complex problems.

ÖMER TAŞPINAR (Cihan/Today's Zaman)