Obama's Grand Strategy

[Bill Moore]

The four enduring U.S. national security interests are security, prosperity, international order, and values. Looking first at values first due to the understandably high interest in the unspeakable human atrocities taking place in Syria currently. This how the 2015 National Security Strategy addressed this sub topic of values. Bold areas are my emphasis.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/def...y_strategy.pdf

Prevent Mass Atrocities
The mass killing of civilians is an affront to our common humanity and a threat to our common security. It destabilizes countries and regions, pushes refugees across borders, and creates grievances that extremists exploit. We have a strong interest in leading an international response to genocide and mass atrocities when they arise, recognizing options are more extensive and less costly when we act preventively before situations reach crisis proportions. We know the risk of mass atrocities escalates when citizens are denied basic rights and freedoms, are unable to hold accountable the institutions of government, or face unrelenting poverty and conflict. We affirm our support for the international consensus that governments have the responsibility to protect civilians from mass atrocities and that this responsibility passes to the broader international community when those governments manifestly fail to protect their populations. We will work with the international community to prevent and call to account those responsible for the worst human rights abuses, including through support to the International Criminal Court, consistent with U.S. law and our commitment to protecting our personnel. Moreover, we will continue to mobilize allies and partners to strengthen our collective efforts to prevent and respond to mass atrocities using all our instruments of national power.

They authors certainly got the strategic context right, not only is this slaughter an affront to our humanity, it is creating a set of second and third order security issues. The mass migration is creating security challenges well beyond the borders of Syria, and the situation is creating an opportunity for extremists to exploit in ways we probably haven't seen fully manifest yet.

Is this is a case of strategic under reach on the U.S.'s part? Where do we even stand right now in regards to policy as it relates to Assad's and Russia's deliberate assault on civilians? Are we being wise to stay disengaged from preventing further atrocities (establishing no fly zones, safe zones, drawing red lines), or strategically foolish?

[Bill Moore]

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...ctrine/471525/

The Obama Doctrine

The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world.

Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told me). Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union;

Obama flipped this plea on its head. “When you have a professional army,” he once told me, “that is well armed and sponsored by two large states”—Iran and Russia—“who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict …” He paused. “The notion that we could have—in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces—changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”

Why he didn't reinforce the red line in Syria:

“We had UN inspectors on the ground who were completing their work, and we could not risk taking a shot while they were there. A second major factor was the failure of Cameron to obtain the consent of his parliament.”

The third, and most important, factor, he told me, was “our assessment that while we could inflict some damage on Assad, we could not, through a missile strike, eliminate the chemical weapons themselves, and what I would then face was the prospect of Assad having survived the strike and claiming he had successfully defied the United States, that the United States had acted unlawfully in the absence of a UN mandate, and that that would have potentially strengthened his hand rather than weakened it.”

The fourth factor, he said, was of deeper philosophical importance. “This falls in the category of something that I had been brooding on for some time,” he said. “I had come into office with the strong belief that the scope of executive power in national-security issues is very broad, but not limitless.”

The following is well in said IMO,

“For all of our warts, the United States has clearly been a force for good in the world,” he said. “If you compare us to previous superpowers, we act less on the basis of naked self-interest, and have been interested in establishing norms that benefit everyone. If it is possible to do good at a bearable cost, to save lives, we will do it.”

Those who speak with Obama about jihadist thought say that he possesses a no-illusions understanding of the forces that drive apocalyptic violence among radical Muslims, but he has been careful about articulating that publicly, out of concern that he will exacerbate anti-Muslim xenophobia. He has a tragic realist’s understanding of sin, cowardice, and corruption, and a Hobbesian appreciation of how fear shapes human behavior.

We have seen this in spades in the U.S., often driven by political leverage to gain support during elections.

This a lengthy, but important article to gain a deeper understanding of decision making at the national level in the Obama administration. Decisions were preceded by substantial debate. I think the President makes many sound points, but as the article tends to argue, the President has also under reached and that has resulted in more risk to our national interests in the long run. At least that is on argument, one I tend to agree with.

The article covers Libya, East Asia, etc.