TO AMERICANS who despise Barack Obama—and even to some who admire him—it is jarring to hear the 44th president refer to himself as commander-in-chief. Mr Obama leaves office with critics convinced that he is a passive observer of a chaotic world. That notion is enthusiastically advanced by Donald Trump, who charges that a soft Obama administration has stupidly—and he has even hinted, treasonously—refused to keep the country safe, notably by attacking Islamic State (IS).
Mr Trump promises to end nation-building overseas and start spending money on American roads, bridges and airports. He pledges to be more self-interested, obliging feckless allies to pay for their own security. Above all Mr Trump, a skilful storyteller, has a tale to tell patriotic Americans about why the country they love has been fighting terrorism worldwide for 15 years without winning. His story involves elites (and he includes President George W. Bush in this group) who naively toppled autocrats—“foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with,” as he puts it—when they should have been hunting down terrorists with pitiless, single-minded violence.
Mr Trump’s yarns about hand-wringing Mr Obama fire up his supporters, who long to hear that with a more ruthless president in the Oval Office America will instantly become safer. But his tales are a distortion of the real Obama military doctrine. If parts of the world are drenched in bloody, tragic chaos, as in Syria, the softness of the outgoing president is not the cause.
Mr Obama is no nation-builder. As the years passed he became coldly pragmatic about working with far-from-democratic leaders. He is intently focused on American national interests. Mr Obama broods about possible unintended consequences when he hears calls to intervene. His focus on domestic politics makes him wary of putting American boots on the ground. He has issued strict executive orders about avoiding civilian casualties. But he is no pacifist. Mr Obama is willing to order enemies killed, whether by drone strikes, special forces, local allies or ideally a combination of all three.
The Obama way of war can be seen with unusual clarity at Qayyarah West, a fortified air base newly risen from the Iraqi desert 35 miles south of Mosul, where as many as 5,000 IS fighters are engaged in brutal combat with Iraqi forces. Lexington visited this base on December 11th with the outgoing defence secretary, Ashton Carter, during a two-week, 25,000-mile farewell tour of the world. “Moon dust” is one American soldier’s description of the fine beige dirt on which the base is built. As a cold winter sun sets, the otherworldly atmosphere is enhanced by freshly installed concrete blast walls that block all views of the country beyond. “Q-West”, as the Pentagon calls it, was IS-held territory as recently as July. Back then it was a “dot on the map”, as Mr Carter reminds troops there, spotted as a potential base for co-ordinating the fight in Mosul. To repair a runway blown up by IS fighters American engineers trucked in 1.9m pounds of cement, welcoming their first fixed-wing aeroplane in late October.
The base betrays the casualty aversion of the Obama doctrine. Mr Carter and his party are driven around within the base in mine-proof armoured vehicles. Just under 900 coalition troops, most of them American, sleep in two-man bunks made of thick concrete slabs, within tents made a bit less austere by sporting banners and children’s drawings and, outside, a Christmas tree made of green webbing round a pyramid of heavy chains. Behind another ring of blast walls an anonymous tent houses a Combined Joint Operations Centre, manned by Iraqi officers and earnest American troops with laptops at long plywood desks. When journalists are not present, large screens show live streaming video from unmanned aerial vehicles and other intelligence platforms. A whiteboard bears the label “Open Strike Requests”.
A clinical calm conceals a machine for delivering violence from the sky. That involves some risks for American advisers near the front lines, who can call in air strikes and artillery fire and offer guidance on ground movements. It involves grave risks for Iraqis fighting block-by-block, who—according to American officers—have so far taken back between a quarter and a third of eastern Mosul and killed or seriously wounded 2,000 IS fighters. Pinning medals on soldiers and black-clad members of the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service, an elite unit, Mr Carter notes that they have braved snipers, mortar fire and car-borne improvised explosive devices. Asked when Mosul might fall, he hedges: “It’s a war: the answer is, as soon as possible.”
No we can’t
When Mr Trump denounces the waste of hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan on ambitious nation-building, he is both correct and out of date. Interviewed on December 9th, just before visiting Afghanistan, Mr Carter describes today’s narrow American objectives for that unhappy country: “To make sure that a 9/11 never emerges again from Afghanistan and to have a stable counter-terrorism platform there.” The Obama doctrine also includes pressure on others to take more of the burden. If Americans substitute for local forces, Mr Carter argues, that might cause local people to “sit on the sidelines or even fight the coalition”. Sending Americans as infantry among foreign populations squanders America’s advantages in air power, intelligence-gathering and special forces. Finally, he says, it invites the question of who will govern territory taken back from IS.
President Trump may be less squeamish than his predecessor. Expect him to downplay the importance of civilian casualties, for instance. Mr Trump says he plans to work with Russia against IS, even though to date Russian talk of fighting terrorists is mostly cover for backing the Assad regime in the Syrian civil war. But Mr Obama’s military doctrine is already unsentimental. In that, the two men may be more similar than they care to admit.
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