In recent months, national security experts from Henry Kissinger on down have criticized the Obama administration for lacking a grand strategic plan. The absence of a grand design, however, is not the cause of Obama’s foreign policy problems. It is the administration’s inability to learn from its mistakes and adapt to unexpected circumstances that is to blame for the president’s grand strategic shortcomings.
Despite the publication of a long-delayed National Security Strategy earlier this month, Obama signaled in a recent interview that his foreign policy vision is not based on an overarching design to accomplish a long-term goal. As he readily admitted to Vox, he aims for small incremental changes rather than the pursuit of a grand design: “…you take the victories where you can. You make things a little bit better rather than a little bit worse.” Contrary to what many strategy scholars contend, Obama’s emergent approach to grand strategy is actually more sensible than the pursuit of an overarching design. In general, the connection between grand designs and successful grand strategies is far less clear than many experts simply assume.
For example, even during the Cold War, America’s grand strategy came more from an emergent process rather than being the product of farsighted designs. Scholars have shown how George Kennan’s original designs had far less influence in shaping containment than today’s pundits and policymakers assume. There was no single “grand design” that guided U.S. policy during the Cold War, but rather a continuous process of formulating and implementing strategies (plural, as John Gaddis famously titled his study of containment) by different administrations, based partly on their respective “lessons learned” from crises in Greece, Turkey, Berlin, Korea, and Vietnam, among others. Any good strategy must evolve with the context in which it is applied, and containment was no different, as Kennan himself recognized.
It’s not the incremental process of strategy-making that plagues Obama’s foreign policy, it is rather the administration’s failure to learn and adapt as effectively as previous U.S. policymakers did during the Cold War. An adaptive strategy approach, somewhat similar to Obama’s own understanding of how to navigate today’s fluid international environment, is exactly what top management consulting firms like the Boston Consulting Group recommend. These ideas challenge the national security orthodoxy by showing that, in turbulent environments, “successful strategies emerge from practice rather than from analysis and design.” However, successful strategizing in the absence of long-term plans is dependent on how well policymakers learn from their actions. “The most important thing a government can do is learn,” the Boston Consulting Group argues. The Obama administration, alas, showed a remarkable inability to learn from some of its early mistakes and misconceptions about how the world works. That needs to change if the president wants to leave behind a world “a little bit better” than he found it, to use his own definition of his goals.
The latest National Security Strategy rightfully notes America’s unique responsibility as the sole liberal global superpower, and the administration used the word “leadership” almost to a fault in its efforts to rebut the “leading from behind” criticism. Much like all the other post-World War II grand strategic frameworks, the National Security Strategy hints at the unique role the United States must play to maintain the current American-led liberal world order. However, when the strategy goes on to discuss how we lead, it reveals Obama’s initial vision of “equitable burden-sharing” has not changed despite six tumultuous years in office:
American leadership means wherever possible leveraging other countries, other resources, where we’re the lead partner because we have capabilities that other folks don’t have. But that way there’s some burden-sharing and there’s some ownership for outcomes.
This restrained vision of global leadership is about as far as one can get from the Kennedy-esque “pay any price, bear any burden” approach to lead the free world during the Cold War. Obama’s approach sounds more reasonable in theory, but in practice it did not bring the expected results.
Indeed, the biggest grand strategic shortcoming of the president’s six years in office is failing to learn that the “burden-sharing” theory of global leadership is ineffective when it comes to the most important decision a president needs to make: the use of force. The administration still believes that effective global leadership is possible without having to shoulder a large and disproportionate amount of the costs of global security requirements. In Libya, the administration achieved its short-term objectives with minimal costs due to “burden-sharing,” but that approach also meant there would be no long-term U.S. leverage and hence set the stage for Benghazi, a raging civil war, and a haven for myriad terrorist groups. In Syria, the administration failed to learn that waiting on the sidelines, practicing “strategic patience” as the new National Security Strategy calls it, in fact reduced U.S. options down the road rather than preserving or expanding them, something that is also evident in Ukraine. As long as the administration continues to refuse to provide NATO military assistance to Kiev, Putin and his paramilitary allies will continue the carnage and further destabilize Eastern Europe, a region that since the fall of the Berlin Wall has served as an exemplar for a transition from decades of tyranny to peace, prosperity, and a pro-Western orientation.
On all of these issues, Obama could profitably learn from another Democratic president who had a tough time initially with his use of force decisions, and who was similarly criticized for “ad-hocism.” President Bill Clinton learned from his early failures, however, and eventually understood that America’s European allies will not be able or willing to stop the carnage in Bosnia without decisive U.S. leadership, including sustained airpower and eventually 20,000 U.S. peacekeeping troops as part of a NATO contingent. Later on, Clinton did not wait as much to launch military strikes on Kosovo and set up a chain of events that removed Serbian dictator Milosevic and finally brought relative peace to the Balkans. Clinton’s justification of the intervention showed his ability to adapt and change some of his initial views on the use of force: “We learned that in the Balkans inaction in the face of brutality simply invites more brutality, but firmness can stop armies and save lives. We must apply that lesson in Kosovo before what happened in Bosnia happens there, too.”
The Clinton administration, thus, started with a theory of “assertive multilateralism” and “burden-sharing” with the United Nations and others, but a learning process led them to a very different view of the security responsibilities of a leading global superpower by the end its tenure. It is not too late for the Obama administration to learn this lesson as well.
Dr. Ionut C. Popescu is an Assistant Professor in the Robertson School of Government. He earned a PhD in international relations from Duke University, where he wrote a dissertation on design and emergence in the making of American grand strategy. His articles appeared in Orbis, Armed Forces Journal, Joint Force Quarterly, and Contemporary Security Policy.
Tom 
Aaron 
Randy 
H. H. GAFFNEY 
Mitch Negres 
Richard Bennett 
“The absence of a grand design, however, is not the cause of Obama’s foreign policy problems. It is the administration’s inability to learn from its mistakes and adapt to unexpected circumstances that is to blame for the president’s grand strategic shortcomings.”
These two phenomena are not mutually exclusive. An administration can suffer from both a failure to learn from its mistakes and adapt to unexpected circumstances, and the absence of a grand design. Furthermore, while successful strategies adapt to changing circumstances, the author fails to acknowledge that the adaptive strategies of the Cold War which he praises all existed under the umbrella of a prevailing strategic imperative: the marginalization and defeat of Soviet Communism. As such, the author’s comparison of the Obama and Clinton administrations is a bit anachronistic – Clinton had the good fortune to inherit a national security environment that was adjusting to the void left by the Soviet Union’s collapse. As such, the fact that President Clinton never really developed a noteworthy grand strategy was a stroke of luck for the 42nd C-in-C.
Successful strategies involve a specific, often simple political goal, and a set of flexible, situationally adjustable priorities and action items focused on its achievement. While it is possible that we will look back in twenty years and see President Obama as a strategic genius who was unappreciated in his time, I remain skeptical. The Obama White House has appeared to react to foreign policy crises as they emerge, rather than proactively setting priorities and addressing emerging challenges accordingly. The National Security Strategies which the author references have been widely regarded as being based more upon a domestic electoral narrative than upon actually guiding the nation’s foreign affairs agenda. One of my mentors, himself a thirty-plus year professor of strategy, once described President Obama as “strategically illiterate”, and I have yet to find a better descriptor.
I strongly hesitate to suggest that Kosovo was a strategic success. Many of the probles with Russia today stem from how that conflict was handled.
The strategic communication of the President’s strategy is weak. And incrementalism is great, but there should be important philosophical road posts. And these are largely missing.
Tom and Aaron have hit the nail on the head. They have pointed out one of the key aspects in “leadership”. Without a vision, everyone from your position down through the ranks is wondering, “what is our goal?” Obama continues to keep his own people guessing as to what is next. Unfortunately, many things are based on intended direction, weapons procurement, requirements and application. I’ll be glad when we return to a “Leadership President”, one with a vision.
Well, we know what this author’s grand strategy is: it’s “boots on the ground.” We should, of course, keep 100,000 in Afghanistan for as long as it takes to move them from the 10th century to the 21st. We should not have left Iraq, despite Bush having signed a formal Executive Agreement to have U.S. troops out by the end of 2011 (we now know that any successor U.S. Administration can ignore such agreements). He should have bombed Syria with the 200 Tomahawks on hand, to take out Bashir Assad, and all would have been well. (We dropped 19,000 weapons in Iraq in the first few weeks of the war in Iraq in 2009 — may be appropriate now.) Now we will have to send in at least 500,000 troops into Iraq/Syria to defeat ISIS, defeat all the other militias in Syria, defeat the Alawites, and push back the Iranians while we’re at it. We should have poured at least 200,000 troops into Libya to achieve stability. We should also plan at least 300,000 troops for Yemen to settle things there. That adds up to 1.1 million troops out there, and since they’ll have to stay indefinitely THIS TIME, that implies active U.S. ground forces of 3 million. And I haven’t even mentioned our occupation of Ukraine. And to do all that, as the new Budget Resolutions say, we should dismantle the American social safety net — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Affordable Health Insurance, etc.– since 47 percent of the population are moochers and takers anyway. Now that’s “Grand Strategy,” at least as I read it in this article. That’s what I call “paying any price.” I await this author’s price calculation.
First of all, because I’m a Romanian, “Domnule Popescu, felicitiari pentru un articol interesant”. To the English-speaking folks out there, it means “congratulations on an interesting article” in Romanian.
From my perspective as a former rifleman, strategy is something leaders are not supposed to discuss in public because the enemy can read and listen too, so if President Obama does in fact have a grand strategy for the U.S. government, I seriously doubt we will see it outside of history books some 50 years from now.
Having said that, there are a lot of problems with this article, starting with Tom’s assertion that Bill Clinton inherited a different strategic environment after the end of the Cold War, as opposed to what Obama got from George Bush Jnr., so it stands to reason Obama’s choices would not only be confused by the multitude of things going wrong in the Middle East, but also the constraints placed upon him and his government by the extremely high expenditure in U.S. public morale and financial resources during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I believe that in such a situation, no president would easily form a strategy or escape criticism for either avoiding drafting and implementing it, or appearing to have none because it’s just taking too long to do it.
Nevertheless, the burden of leadership Obama chose to bear dictates that he and his subordinates draft and implement a strategy which will secure the American politico-military supremacy on the world stage and if they think that “la noblesse oblige”, then act according to it and save the disaster zones of our less than free world from the consequences of their self-destructive acts.
Ultimately, it is my belief that while sharing the global burden of military and humanitarian intervention is in the current national interests of the United States of America, human nature dictates that somebody, somewhere, must be the ultimate decision maker and driver of a cooperative effort. Therefore, I would say “by all means have a coalition, but if the American president drives it, then he ought to damn well lead it or face the prospect of failure”.
The term strategy is supposed to imply the consideration of goals but also the limitations of resources. The grand strategy fails on this level as we continue to throw money after world problems on impulse vice reason and push the tab onto our progeny.