The American System: Rear-Wheel Drive

Assad’s slaughter of his people has yet to move even one American aircraft carrier from its position. Obama seems to fear the Libya effect and prefers to fuel the Syrian revolution with words rather than actions.

In March 2009, about two and a half years ago, two quite senior American officials set off for Damascus. One was State Department veteran Jeffrey Feltman; the other, a face we had better become accustomed to: Dan Shapiro, starting this week as United States Ambassador to Israel.

After four years without a senior official’s foot having stepped in Syria, the two conducted what has been called “constructive discussions” with Syrian officials. President George W. Bush had decided to boycott the Syrians; his successor Barack Obama decided to lift the ban. “We found a lot of common ground today,” Feltman said at the time. Without clarifying further, he added that it was an attempt at a “sustained and principled engagement to achieve results.”

Historians will have a chance for future argument on the question of whether these are the “results” meant to be reached by the “engagement.” More than two years of engagement had mainly left feelings of disappointment in the American administration. And then the Syrians came and launched a different type of engagement — one whose results could be measured in dead bodies and blood.

The questions for the Obama administration remained open, abandoned. This week, Ambassador Robert Ford appeared for the continuation of the hearing set for him in the Senate. He is the guy whom the president sent to Damascus as a signal of the seriousness of his intentions to not carry on his predecessor’s policy of disconnection. But Obama has not appointed Ford to a permanent position as ambassador. The president used his authority to send Ford to the Syrian capital on a temporary appointment. And this “temporary” role is set to expire at the end of the year; in the meantime, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has to interview the ambassador and appoint him on a permanent basis — or not.

One may have anticipated that the appointment of an ambassador to Syria would evoke a great deal of interest in the American capital during a week when Bashar Assad is slaying his people and while the Security Council mulls the issue of whether and how far to go in an attempt to discipline the Syrian president; however, such interest did not arise. The day after the saving compromise [formula] was found for the American debt ceiling crisis, legislators were apparently way too exhausted to care about happenings on the streets of Hama. Only one righteous showed up for Ford’s expected questioning: Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania.

Casey’s colleagues in the Senate — three of them, incidentally, the most prominent of the pro-Israeli senators — filed a new bill this week that would ban the United States from trading with any company having commercial ties with Syria's energy sector. Ford did not see much sense in this law, though Senators Joe Lieberman, Kirsten Gillibrand and Mark Kirk have not argued with him. “The big companies working in the energy sector in Syria are from Europe or Syria's neighbors,” elaborated Ford. American sanctions, of the kind of the suggested in the Senate, would not have that large of an impact, he claimed.

What is likely to have an impact? There were answers, not necessarily satisfactory. The administration enhanced the pressure of its sanctions on the Syrian higher-ups, and their language became more blatant, too. Early this week, Obama said that what the Syrian president is doing “is disgusting, is abhorrent.” Does this mean that Assad must go? At Ford’s hearing, the answer has not been unequivocal yet. Ford stuck with the administration's position that he “has lost legitimacy [in the eyes of his people]” concluding that “...this regime is unwilling or unable to lead the democratic transition the Syrian people are demanding.” But what he did not say is that it is time to say goodbye.

A Good Question

On Tuesday, Elliott Abrams, former advisor to President Bush, published in the neo-conservative magazine The Weekly Standard the “10 questions” senators should have asked Ford in the hearing, though they did not. “If the United States is to have an ambassador in Damascus,” wrote Abrams, then “Ford is an excellent man for that post.” The first question out of 10: “Why does the United States not call for Assad’s departure, given that we did call for that of our long-time ally Hosni Mubarak?”

I posed the question this week to an acquaintance well familiar with the American Foreign Service. Of course, he got that this was not about a question but rather a criticism. Anyway, he came up with an answer of the sort that sounds especially interesting during a week in which the former Egyptian president was brought to his show trial locked in a cage. “Perhaps because of what happened when we called on Mubarak to go, we don’t want to repeat the same mistake?” he both asked and answered.

The most acceptable option proposed points to the American involvement in Libya, something that at the moment deters the government from an additional mess-up in an intervention whose end is not guaranteed in advance. In Egypt, at least the ruler was replaced; even if the outcome has not been particularly successful, at least the Americans have not bet on the wrong horse. In Libya, the situation is more complicated: The Americans have gambled, invested, promised — to no avail. Moammar Gadhafi is still sitting on his seat — albeit a rickety one — and Obama’s promises of a short-lived action have dissolved in the Middle Eastern heat wave [khamsin].

Caution or Defeatism

“[To be precise,] leading from behind is a style, not a doctrine,” columnist Charles Krauthammer sharply differentiated a few months ago. This is how he responded to the claim of a New Yorker magazine writer who had defined leading “from behind” as “something resembling a doctrine,” the doctrine that is a key to understanding President Obama’s foreign policy.

Leading from behind means that the United States is not spearheading, but rather supporting someone else. One example is the European NATO troops running the war operation in Libya; another, the Syrian opposition, several of whose leaders met Ford and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week, just to hear from them: Syria is “your country,”* that is to say, you are to call the shots whether Assad falls or not. Your deeds will determine whether Syria looks forward to a continued dictatorship, civil war or a new democracy; you — meaning not us.

Obama is ready to bolster forces working to improve citizens’ lives all around the globe; nonetheless, he is no longer willing to put America first in line on the police force supposed to impose democratic regimes on the world. Either way, the point of the debate is not only about whether this is a “doctrine” or a “style,” but also the matter of whether this is a circumspect and calculated policy or cowardly defeatism.

The Obama administration argues that it does not stand to reason that America alone is to get Syria off the hook. It has Arab neighbors that could pull together; there are rich and strong countries in Europe that can make a difference; there are giants emerging in Asia. When America enforces the order, it wastes its vital resources and gives the rest of the world an excuse to resent and hate it. When it “leads from behind,” Obama believes it can arrive at the similar results without leaving an incriminating signature on the radar, without supplying ammunition to the opponents of the change.

Obama “must be cautious,” explained Blake Hounshell, the editor of Foreign Policy, this week. “Nobody feels good about watching helplessly as Syrian tanks gun down protesters on the streets of Hama. But pundits almost always tend to overestimate U.S. power to shape events.” Here’s a trap President Obama is not going to be caught in: He may tend to very much overestimate his power to reshape the domestic American arena, but from the beginning of the journey, he has adopted modesty in relation to the United States’ capability to influence the entire world.

Is this the right thing for him to do? His proponents say yes and point to the turmoil caused by his predecessor. His rivals say no and remind that if the United States president does not believe in his country’s power to shape the world, it may be a prophecy destined to become true even if erroneous. In other words: Obama will not be able to attribute to himself the credit for liberation of Syria, if and when it comes. It looks like he does not want it either.

*Proofreader’s Note: This quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.