Category Archives: Election 2012

The third debate could be The One for President Obama. A strong, confident performance could give him his most successful night since the debates began and leave him poised for a strong finish in a close race.  But it comes at a difficult time; President Obama would have had a much easier time winning a foreign policy debate before September 10, when the world seemed to be going his way. Now the picture is messier, and it is going to be harder to use his experience and track record as a steward of the nation’s foreign policy to convince voters to stick with the devil they know.

This is not about the murder of four Americans by terrorists in Benghazi, and not even about the fumbling and mumbling with which the administration addressed the event. That event and the subsequent controversy (including CIA documents that appear to support key contentions coming from the White House) are less important for the election than the questions they raise about the state of President Obama’s grand strategy and it is the larger questions rather than the sequence of blunders that the President needs to address if he is going to make foreign policy work for him on November 6.

Campaigns aren’t the best forum for this kind of discussion, but the President has or at least had a grand strategy, and it isn’t, as these things go, a bad one. Looking at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the danger that radicals and fanatics in the Muslim world could capitalize on anti-American feeling to succeed where Bin Laden failed and unite a sizeable portion of the Islamic world behind the idea of a civilizational conflict with the United States, the President set about reducing America’s military profile in the Middle East and attacking the radical strategy by narrowing the gap between the United States and the Muslim masses as much as he could. He also set about repairing relations with leading European countries, partly with an eye to assembling a broader diplomatic coalition to deal with Iran.

By working more closely with regional partners and moderate Islamists (like the Turks), the President wanted to reduce America’s direct exposure to the region’s dangerous, messy conflicts while steering the region toward more democratic forms of governance, more moderate forms of religion – and all within a geopolitical framework that protected vital American interests.

It was a strategy of withdrawal because the President believed that under George W. Bush if not before, the United States was overstretched and overcommitted. He sought to reduce America’s commitments and liabilities in the region while protecting our vital interests by shifting to the role of an offshore balancing power. Continue reading →