Restoring American Supremacy

Dov S. Zakheim

February 26, 2015 

America may have shed the illusion that it is an omnipotent power, but that is no reason to conclude that its influence cannot be revived.

PRESIDENT BARACK Obama rounded the bend into his final lap in office with the clear objective of subordinating foreign affairs to his domestic legacy. Given what he can only view as favorable developments—a drop in oil prices, jobs growth and low inflation—Obama will be even less inclined to allow foreign concerns to impinge on his agenda over the next two years. This approach is understandable, convenient—and unfortunate.

Obama’s approach is rooted in a defensive crouch that sees Afghanistan and Iraq as the new lodestars of American foreign policy. Things certainly went badly wrong in both countries. But what went awry does not carry the implication that America should casually emasculate itself, substituting passivity for overreach. Put bluntly, the lessons that Obama drew from Afghanistan and Iraq were scarcely the product of agonized meditations; rather, they were complacent ones that ratified his conviction that America habitually does more damage when it intervenes abroad than when it remains aloof.

Obama clearly prefers to maintain his long-standing policy of sidestepping military commitments—other than to fight the Ebola virus—while seeking to negotiate agreements with Iran and between Israel and the Palestinians. He would maintain, but not intensify, sanctions imposed on Russia; cut a deal with Iran or punt the nuclear matter to the next administration; go slow on arming the Syrian opposition while avoiding any commitment of land forces to the ongoing Middle Eastern wars; complete the withdrawal of all American combat troops from Afghanistan; make much of his “pivot” to Asia; and trumpet his latest initiative, the agreement to normalize relations with Cuba. Unfortunately, the international security environment will continue to demand both his attention and his active participation, whether he likes it or not. What America therefore requires is something much more ambitious—a program of renewal that ensures military, political and diplomatic dominance.

AMERICA’S REORIENTATION must start with its Russia policy. Not since the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had one European nation invaded another until Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. By then Georgia had already effectively lost some 17 percent of its territory to Russia in the form of the puppet states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which had declared their independence in the early 1990s and had since depended on Russian military and economic support. Vladimir Putin formally recognized both states in the aftermath of the war. Putin also supported two other rebel regions, Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, and Transnistria, which declared its independence from Moldova in 1990. Yet no action Putin had taken was as blatant as his annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and his not-so-secret invasion of eastern Ukraine one month later. There are now two puppet “people’s republics” beholden to Russia, Lugansk and Donetsk, both of which have held out against the Ukrainian armed forces thanks to arms and aid furnished by the Kremlin.

Even as Russia was expanding its control in what it terms its “near abroad,” it was also upending long-standing arms-control agreements. True, in 2010 Moscow and Washington signed the New START agreement, which reduced the number of missiles, launchers and warheads on both sides. Yet already, in 2007, Putin had suspended Russian participation in the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, ostensibly because of American plans to base missile-defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. With much less fanfare, Russia also began systematically to violate the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a key accord that signaled the winding down of the Cold War in 1987. In particular, the Kremlin has been testing a cruise missile capable of targeting Western Europe. This is unacceptable. Yet the Obama administration hesitated for months before openly accusing Russia of violating the treaty, waiting until December 2014 to acknowledge what had been widely suspected for some time.

Finally, Putin reached out to China in an attempt to bring the two countries closer together than at any time since the mid-1950s. China became Russia’s second-largest arms-export market in 2013. Moreover, Moscow has indicated its readiness to export of some of its most advanced weapons systems to China, including the SU-35 fighter and the S-400 air- and missile-defense system. Russia and China have begun to conduct joint military exercises, both bilaterally and within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Their naval exercises were an unambiguous joint response to the much-ballyhooed American pivot to Asia. Finally, after years of tentative negotiations, Moscow and Beijing signed a $400 billion deal in which Russia would provide gas to China for thirty years.

By mid-2014 it was clear, even to the Obama administration, that its “reset” policy for Russia was in shambles. Its first attempt at reversing course was a series of sanctions imposed on Russia after the invasion of Crimea by the so-called little green men. These sanctions were so weak as to be laughable. Obama and America’s equally timorous Western allies finally imposed tougher sanctions after Crimea was formally annexed, but it is questionable whether even these sanctions would have hurt the Russian economy had there not been a simultaneous drop in world petroleum prices. With Russia a major petroleum producer, and its budget built to balance when crude oil sells at $100 a barrel, the recent drop to half that price has caused the collapse of the ruble and seriously endangered the Russian economy.

With the Baltic states especially fearful of possible Russian attempts to destabilize them, given their substantial Russian-speaking minorities, Obama also dispatched some land forces to each of the three small NATO allies, thereby reversing the administration’s ongoing process of withdrawing troops from Europe. But these were only company-sized forces, a mere few hundred troops. Once again, Obama was all talk. The forces he dispatched could hardly deter anything more than a major riot, if that, and certainly did not reassure the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians.

Obama’s dilemma is clear: he can neither condone Putin’s adventurism nor accept his revisionist attitude toward arms-control agreements. Nor can he look kindly upon Putin’s growing coziness with China. Yet he knows that he must avoid an all-out confrontation with Moscow. Russia is not the Soviet Union, which was ideologically driven to defeat the West. In truth, Russian foreign policy likely represents more of a throwback to the czarist era. While Secretary of State John Kerry may disapprove of what he has termed Moscow’s “nineteenth century” behavior, it must be confronted not with emotional rhetoric but in cold, hard terms. Russia remains a major military power, and the world’s second-strongest nuclear power at that. Moreover, despite very real differences, there are still major areas of cooperation between Moscow and Washington, notably fighting Islamic terrorism—which has caused more Russian than American deaths—and maintaining a stable Afghanistan.

The administration is not known for its long-range strategy—Obama has all but derided the term—but in the case of Russia it certainly needs one. Obama needs to show Putin that America does not cower before bullies. Washington should maintain its economic sanctions on Russia, and be prepared to levy much tougher new ones should Putin either continue to undermine arms-control treaties to which Russia is a signatory, or threaten further to expand Russia’s borders. The United States should also station a full battalion in each of the Baltic states, with brigade headquarters in one of them. This is not all. An additional brigade should be stationed in Poland. Two brigades would, in effect, replace the two brigade combat teams that the administration precipitously withdrew from Europe and deactivated before Putin’s revanchism in Ukraine.

At the same time, the administration should continue its not-so-secret effort to seek common ground with Russia, whether in terms of cooperation against Islamic terrorists; finding a peaceful solution to the Syrian civil war; coordinating policies regarding North Korea; and maintaining a stable Afghanistan. This will not be easy, and demands a degree of nimbleness not often associated with the Obama team.

IRAN’S NUCLEAR-WEAPONS program has bedeviled the Obama administration since it first took office. If he fails to reach a deal with Tehran, President Obama would dearly like to bequeath the Iranian conundrum to his successor. Endless negotiations could achieve his objective; so too could another interim agreement that would require review only after someone new is ensconced in the White House. Given the continual postponement of deadlines for completing the current negotiations, it certainly is possible to contemplate the likelihood of a two-year delay; the next president would then have to come to grips with the Iranian mullahs.

Obama faces another challenge. He cannot be certain that Israel will refrain from launching an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, with or without first consulting Washington. For the moment, the Israelis seem content to see the Iranians squeezed by the international sanctions that are still in place, coupled with the ongoing drop in the price of petroleum, upon which the Iranian economy heavily depends. But should most of those sanctions be lifted as a result of an interim agreement between the United States, the Europeans and Iran, or should the price of oil rebound so that Iran seems capable of withstanding sanctions while pushing ahead with its program, Israel may decide that the moment has arrived to strike directly.

To say that Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu distrust each other is to understate the problems in their relationship. The Israeli prime minister, who is likely to remain in office after Israel’s elections in March—or be succeeded by an even more right-wing leader—could well decide that he has waited long enough for an agreement that terminates the Iranian program. Or he may simply decide that whatever agreement Obama signs is worthless. Either way, he may carry out his long-standing threat to attack Tehran’s facilities in the hope that the United States will be dragged in to finish the job, whether or not Washington really wants to do so.

Despite years of friction with the Israeli leader, primarily over Netanyahu’s settlements policy and Washington’s strenuous efforts to breathe life into the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Obama can still restore a modicum of businesslike relations with Netanyahu, should he remain at Israel’s helm. Moreover, if Israel elects a new prime minister of whatever political stripe, it should be even less difficult to “reset” relations with Jerusalem.

For a start, the president surely recognizes that Congress would override his veto of any new sanctions that it surely would impose in the wake of an agreement that is unacceptable to the Israelis. Whatever their differences with the Republicans on other issues, and despite their readiness to delay a vote on new sanctions, there will be enough Democratic votes, led by Senators Charles Schumer and Bob Menendez, to combine with new majority Republicans to support an override. So Obama could commit to the Israelis that he will ensure that the terms of the agreement will restrict the number of centrifuges Iran will be permitted to retain to a bare minimum, and will ban its use of newer, more efficient centrifuges. He could also commit to limiting to minimum levels the amount of low-enriched uranium that Tehran will be permitted to retain.

At present, however, the president has continued to sound ever more conciliatory toward Iran. Already he has succeeded in accomplishing something that none of his predecessors has been able to manage since the founding of Israel in 1948: he has brought the Saudis and Israelis together, united in their distrust of his motives. It is time he gave them better reasons to cooperate.

NO ONE, least of all President Obama when he withdrew all American troops from Iraq, anticipated the sudden emergence of the Islamic State as a major destabilizing presence in the Middle East. Unlike many other irregular groups, the Islamic State has seized and held territory—in Iraq and Syria—and threatens Kurdistan, Lebanon and Jordan. Moreover, because its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has proclaimed himself “caliph,” he poses a threat to the entire region, which he hopes to unite under his leadership.

Having virtually wrecked his credibility by failing to carry out his threat of a military response to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Obama has already laid down another self-defeating marker by insisting that there will be no American “combat boots on the ground” in the attempt to roll back the Islamic State. Moreover, in opposing the Islamic State, he has tacitly aligned himself with Iran, which views the Sunni extremist organization as a threat to its own regional hegemony. Finally, Obama’s encouragement of the Syrian opposition to unseat Assad has been long forgotten; preoccupied by the Islamic State, Washington has looked the other way as Assad has effectively neutralized the so-called Free Syrian Army and has continued to ravage his own people. The administration’s promise to arm and train the Syrian opposition has never really been carried out.

Despite its demonstrated ability to amass significant financial resources and to make the most of the weapons it has captured from the Iraqi army and various Syrian groups, the Islamic State can indeed be rolled back. For that to happen, however, Obama will have to pursue a very different set of policies. Because U.S. airpower has proved incapable of defeating the Islamic State without active ground operations, he will have to back away from his commitment to have, in the words of his press secretary, “no combat boots” in Iraq, and probably in Syria as well. Because the Kurds, who have seen some success in holding the Islamic State at bay, still rely heavily on decades-old weapons, the president will have to ensure that the transfer of modern weapons to the Kurds takes place as soon as possible. And because the combination of the Islamic State and Assad’s forces has decimated the Syrian opposition forces, Obama will have to authorize the rapid transfer of equipment to those still fighting Assad, and, at the same time, will need to authorize the establishment of a no-fly zone that would effectively ground Assad’s air capability.

Finally, Obama will have to make clear to those who tacitly support the Islamic State that there is a price to be paid for doing so. American pressure works, if Obama is willing to exert it. After months of ignoring Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s refusal to prevent fighters from crossing into Syria to join the Islamic State, Washington began to exert serious pressure on the Turkish president to support the effort to stop and reverse the Islamic State’s territorial gains. Sure enough, in October 2014, Erdogan finally allowed Kurdish peshmerga reinforcements to cross into Syria from Turkey to support the Syrian Kurds who were fighting to prevent the Islamic State from capturing the strategic northern Syrian town of Kobani. (The Kurds eventually succeeded in retaking the town.) Other nominal friends of the United States who play footsie with the Islamic State should be subjected to the same, if not greater, pressure. Qatar in particular should be informed in no uncertain terms that continued support for the Islamic State will lead to the redeployment of U.S. forces stationed there to bases elsewhere in the region.

Obama has shown no inclination to implement any of the foregoing policies. Until he does, the prospect that the Islamic State will gobble up more territory, and remain a threat both to Lebanon and to Jordan’s King Abdullah in particular, will continue to haunt all of America’s allies in the Middle East. Obama needs to act, and act quickly; it is not at all clear that time is on his side.

CANDIDATE OBAMA once termed the war in Afghanistan “the good war.” President Obama reversed himself during his first year in office, coupling his announcement of a surge in U.S. forces there with a promise to begin the withdrawal of troops in 2011 regardless of conditions on the ground. He then proceeded to implement his promise by completing the withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops by the end of 2014.

Obama had also promised that a small American force would remain in Afghanistan subsequent to the withdrawal of combat troops, most of which would continue to train the Afghan security forces, while some units would be employed in selected counterterrorism operations. Obama did not initially indicate how large the residual force would be, nor did he specify how long it would remain in the country. When he finally announced that the force would total roughly ten thousand personnel, he also stated that it would be halved by the end of 2015 and would be entirely withdrawn by the end of 2016. Once again, conditions on the ground did not seem to enter into the equation. Far more important, it seemed, was the fact that Obama was determined to end his presidency by bringing all troops home from Afghanistan, just as he had once done in Iraq.

American forces are back in Iraq, however, and if Obama proceeds with his plan to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan before the end of his term of office, they could find themselves back there as well. The Taliban and the other insurgents who have continued to terrorize the Afghan countryside and battle government forces show no inclination to reach any compromise with Kabul, much less lay down their arms. With Pakistan unwilling or unable to restrain them, these forces are likely to mount even more serious and widespread offensives in 2015, with no U.S.—or NATO—troops there to oppose them.

Afghanistan is no longer led by the mercurial Hamid Karzai, under whom corruption was as rife as drug production was widespread, and whose relations with the United States had seriously deteriorated during his final years in office. President Ashraf Ghani, a far more stable personality, is committed to curbing both corruption and the drug trade. He deserves maximum support, and should not be abandoned to face the insurgents on his own.

While Obama may be focusing on his legacy of ending American wars, rather than on Afghan stability, a major Taliban victory over the Afghan security forces in 2015 could force him to reverse himself again. He would do well to maintain the current residual force in Afghanistan beyond 2015, and drop plans for a complete withdrawal in 2016. It will hardly redound well to his legacy if Afghanistan once again falls to the Taliban, and the country reverts to being a welcoming base for terrorist attacks on Americans in the Middle East, Europe or, as on 9/11, the United States itself.

SETH ROGEN’S slapstick film The Interview highlighted the unstable temperament of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. But the country’s “Dear Leader” (he could not even think of an original nickname, so he took his late father’s) is no joke. He continues to pursue his nuclear program, test his long-range missiles and maintain his country’s position as a leading, if not preeminent, nuclear proliferator. He blusters against South Korea, Japan and, of course, the United States. And the hack of Sony Pictures was probably not the first time that he had authorized a cyberattack on his perceived enemies. Simply put, the man and his clique embody the spark that could ignite another war on the Korean Peninsula, one that could drag in an unwilling China and the United States.

Despite Obama’s best efforts to develop a Korean strategy jointly with Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader has not committed to anything more than China’s long-standing claim that it does try to influence Pyongyang, though to little avail. China needs to do more—it is North Korea’s economic lifeline—and Obama must press Beijing more openly than before. China does not respond well to public pressure, but it does respond, and the leadership in Beijing is well aware of the danger that North Korea poses to all its neighbors.

Complicating Beijing’s policy toward Pyongyang is its perception that Washington is encouraging Japan to take a more aggressive stance toward China. Chinese officials certainly miss no opportunity to complain about Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Nevertheless, they often go on to assert that he would not be presiding over a more expansive Japanese national-security policy—including participation in more multilateral exercises, supporting Japanese arms sales and visiting the shrine at Yasukuni, where a number of Japanese war criminals are memorialized—without American encouragement.

In fact, with Washington also allied to South Korea, maintaining a close relationship with Mongolia and moving closer to India, Beijing seems convinced that it is being encircled by the United States. Obama’s challenge will be to somehow convince Xi that this is not the case, and that it is as much in China’s interest as in that of the United States to contain North Korea and bring about a settlement on the peninsula. The going will be rough, but if Obama wants to bequeath a serious foreign-policy legacy to his successor, Northeast Asia offers him a real opportunity to do so.

EVEN AS Obama was authorizing the withdrawal of forces not only from Iraq and Afghanistan but also from Europe, his administration was trumpeting its “pivot” (or as it now prefers to call it, its “rebalancing”) to Asia, arguing that America ought to focus its military, economic and diplomatic resources on the world’s most dynamic region. But the pivot has thus far amounted to little more than high-flown rhetoric. That is particularly true in the military sphere. There have been few new deployments to Asia. What has happened is that fewer forces have been drawn down there relative to those returning from Europe and the Middle East.

The forces that have been newly deployed to the region have not amounted to much. 2,500 Marines are to be rotated through Darwin, Australia, thousands of miles away from the South China Sea, the locus of friction between China and some of its neighbors. Four relatively small Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) will be on constant rotation through Singapore, effectively homeported there. Yet the first to arrive there, Freedom, developed electrical problems soon after reaching the island state and encountered numerous other setbacks during its deployment. It did not exactly make a great impression on its new hosts. While the navy expects to encounter fewer glitches on the Fort Worth, which arrived in Singapore in December 2014, it has no sense of what will be the fate of the other two LCS ships soon to deploy there, since they have a completely different hull design. All told, while these deployments represent some degree of American commitment to the region, they hardly constitute a major pivot.

Obama also has made much of his years living in Indonesia, and has trumpeted his desire to solidify relations between the two countries. To that end, in 2010, he and his Indonesian counterpart, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, announced a new “comprehensive strategic partnership,” encompassing trade, investment and military cooperation. While some progress has been achieved since then, here, too, more has been promised than has been delivered.

As for security relations, the major breakthrough that ended the long-standing American ban on training Indonesian forces took place under the George W. Bush administration. Current military cooperation focuses primarily on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. Despite Obama’s pronouncements, it is Indonesia that seeks a more comprehensive military relationship. Indeed, in December 2014, General Moeldoko, the commander of Indonesia’s armed forces, even offered to work with the United States in the fight against the Islamic State. There was no immediate response from Washington.

U.S. relations with Vietnam bear several similarities to those between Washington and Jakarta. In 2013, Obama and Vietnamese president Truong Tan Sang initiated a “comprehensive partnership” that addressed trade, investment and security relations. In May 2014, the two countries signed a bilateral nuclear-energy agreement, under which the United States could export material and equipment to Vietnam.

Yet in other respects cooperation has fallen short of expectations. For example, in economic relations, it is Hanoi and the private sector that have taken the lead, with Vietnam’s favorable tax and other incentives driving new investment. The Obama administration has not worked with Congress to ease restrictions on imports from Vietnam, and it has continued to designate Vietnam as a nonmarket economy, which renders it vulnerable to antidumping rulings.

Similarly, military-to-military cooperation has increased rather slowly since the Bush administration included Vietnam in the International Military Education and Training program. U.S. forces have engaged their Vietnamese counterparts in joint noncombat training and exercises, such as for search and rescue. More generally, however, the pace of cooperation has been rather slow, in part because the United States continues to prohibit sales of lethal weapons to Vietnam.

Obama is right to focus on Asia; his error has been to rely on rhetoric rather than real capability, which does nothing to reassure allies, much less send a clear message to potential adversaries. He needs to do more. The administration has made much of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the keystone trade agreement for the region. But Obama, clearly sensitive to union concerns, has not expended much personal capital in convincing Congress to approve it.

As for the military sphere, he needs to add to the American presence in the region, not merely maintain it at current levels. Nor should he increase force levels in Asia at the expense of America’s presence in other parts of the world. He can only do what is necessary, however, if he takes seriously the warnings from all three of his secretaries of defense that the defense budget must be exempted from the sequester that is part of the 2011 Budget Control Act, which has forced significant reductions in spending on military operations and acquisition. Thus far, the president has shown no inclination to do so, and until he does, his pivot to Asia will not amount to much.

EVER SINCE his first year in office, President Obama has managed to offend many of America’s closest allies. He annoyed the British at the outset of his first term when he returned a bust of Churchill that had been on display in the Oval Office. He upset the Poles with his sudden decision in September 2009 to cancel the “third site” for a missile-defense system in Central Europe; the interceptors would have been based in Poland. He has frustrated the Canadians for more than three years by refusing to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. He deeply offended Tony Abbott in November 2014 by highlighting the need for action on climate change in a speech in Brisbane at the very time that the Australian prime minister was seeking to keep the subject off the agenda of the G-20 summit, which Abbott was hosting.

The German government reacted with outrage to Edward Snowden’s allegations that the NSA was monitoring its cell-phone calls, including those of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Brazilians likewise were angered by Snowden’s disclosures, leading President Dilma Rousseff in September 2013 to postpone her planned state visit to the United States. Obama seemed content to let the issue fester. Rousseff has finally rescheduled her visit, but, as with Merkel, Obama has offered Rousseff neither a personal apology nor an explanation for more than a year.

Nontreaty allies have also been put off by the president’s willingness to reach out to adversaries, seemingly at their expense. As already noted, the Saudis and the Israelis do not trust his approach to Iran. Neither do the Emiratis, who in many respects are America’s closest and most consistent Arabian Gulf allies. Meanwhile, the Moroccans have been offended by the Obama administration’s reluctance to continue the Bush policy of supporting autonomy for the western Sahara within a unified Morocco.

What the president fails to realize is that his outreach to adversaries such as Iran—or, for that matter, Cuba—does little to solidify American leadership of the free world. Alienating America’s allies not only encourages its adversaries, but also increases the likelihood that other states, like India, will hesitate to align themselves too closely with Washington. America’s credibility rests squarely upon its reliability; if the president wishes to restore that credibility, his allies must view him as a reliable partner.

FOR SIX years, the Obama administration has endeavored to focus primarily on domestic affairs and avoid the posture of pursuing American predominance in international affairs. To the extent that it has succeeded, it has done so at the cost of its credibility with allies, friends and adversaries worldwide. Nevertheless, despite his best efforts, the president has found that he cannot remain aloof from foreign developments. Most tellingly, despite all his efforts to avoid military entanglements in the Middle East and elsewhere, the president has sent forces back into Iraq and authorized air-combat or support operations in Libya, Syria, Yemen and West Africa.

Obama must bring about a terminus to the reduction in American defense resources that has eaten away at Washington’s military capability. Obama has long acted upon the belief that defense must contribute its “fair share” toward deficit reduction. This belief was always misplaced, since entitlement programs have had a much greater impact on both deficits and the national debt, but Obama has shown little interest in serious, necessary entitlement reforms. Even so, with the economic recovery gathering force and annual budget deficits leveling off, Obama is now in a perfect position to reach an agreement with Congress to protect defense spending from the impact of the budget sequester. He should seize the opportunity that the economic recovery has handed him.

The whittling away of American preeminence that we have witnessed over the past decade was not foreordained. It was the product of conscious choices that made each new decision to retreat seem inevitable. America may have shed the illusion that it is an omnipotent power, but that is no reason to conclude that its preeminence cannot be restored. Revisiting our policies toward Russia, China and the Middle East to reverse the drift that has prevailed during Obama’s presidency would be a good start.

Dov S. Zakheim was the under secretary of defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004. He is vice chairman of the Center for the National Interest and serves on the Advisory Council of The National Interest.