Obama's Fickle Diplomacy

Is the United States’ image better than it was four years ago? Quite. Does it consider itself to be a safer place? Quite. Did it adapt its leadership to today’s world? Quite. In foreign politics, Barack Obama has been “quite” a good president.

“Seriously,” concede a number of Republicans who had responsibilities in this domain. “Respectable assessment of the international scene,” decided The New York Times, which supports the Democratic president.*

There are reservations about the man. He is too brilliant an orator for his actions not to disappoint. In Cairo, in Prague, on the stage of the Nobel Peace Prize committee — which, based on his good words alone, awarded him the prize in 2009 — Obama painted the ideal portrait of what America should be, where progress is the norm for law, ethics and nuclear disarmament. From the White House, the exercise of power has often borne only a distant resemblance to the idyllic content of the president’s speeches.

Hence the sentiment of relative disappointment in all camps. The ultranationalists of the Republican Party criticize him for his tendency to compromise. They are hardly convinced in front of the man who killed Osama bin Laden. The defenders of human rights stigmatize the secret wars that Obama leads with drone attacks in foreign lands. Partisans of the realist school don’t see what he won by dropping the old Egyptian ally Hosni Mubarak or by meddling with Libya’s affairs. But the interventionists on the left — and the neoconservatives on the right — denounce his passivity in Syria.

It’s because Obama doesn’t belong to any of the major schools of American foreign policy, as the political scientist Justin Vaïsse says very well. In a comprehensive and well-documented book — “Barack Obama and His Foreign Policy” (Odile Jacob, 288 pages, $32.21) — Vaïsse presents the profile of an empire.

For Obama, there is no doctrine: he is sometimes an advocate of realpolitik, which attaches no importance to the nature of regimes with which America must deal, and sometimes he is pushed by the ideal of spreading democratic values, which drives him to side with demonstrators during the riots in Cairo and Tunis.

The objective is what is essential: maintain American supremacy. Barack Obama expresses this with his usual elegance. “[T]he United States continues to be the one indispensable nation in tackling major international problems,” he repeated. But this wish to assure the continual predominance of America is something the 44th president intends to bring up to date.

When he arrived in the White House in January 2009, Obama inherited a disastrous situation. The United States was involved in two foreign wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan where there is no victory to be won. The country’s image was at its lowest in the Arab-Muslim world and elsewhere, tarnished by abuses accompanying the “War on Terror.” Betrayed by Wall Street, the United States entered its most serious crisis since the 1930s. It experienced sharp growth in “defeatism” — convinced it was on the decline.

Obama has a vision: we have to get out of these wars, remove ourselves from the big Middle East to make American diplomacy “pivot” to where the future of the world is playing out — toward developing Asia, where the markets of tomorrow are, where today’s growth is. The United States leads in this region, not in Afghanistan where Obama promised victory before announcing a retreat. America will remain the superpower of the 21st century by being more than ever a power in the Pacific.

Obama carried off this pivot, affirmed Vaïsse, director of research at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. Coming out of Iraq, on the way to leaving Afghanistan, America, “thanks to Obama, has become a central actor in Asia.” American diplomacy has strongly invested in all the big regional Asian forums. At the request of a number of China’s neighbors, who are concerned with the rise of this super-dragon, the United States reoriented their military toward Asia.

Along the way, Obama has lost several illusions. Recognizing the Chinese giant, he initially extended a hand. He hoped for an active partnership with Beijing to deal with North Korea, rebalancing the world economy or global warming. The Chinese did not respond. Likewise, Obama had a moment where he imagined he could rely on the new emerging powers— Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa — to build a multilateralism adapted to the new century. But the G20, which includes the North and South, is a powerless forum. The developing countries still have neither means nor ambition to take charge of world affairs. They are dealing with their development.

Obama fell back on the more traditional and sure allies, the Europeans, whom he had initially neglected. It is with them that he is coordinating his support of the Tunisian and Egyptian Spring; with London and Paris he undertook the take-down of one of the worst dictators in the region, Moammar Gadhafi; again with them he observes a prudent wait-and-see policy in Syria; and with them, finally, he leads a policy of unprecedented sanctions to get Iran to give up nuclear weapons.

Alone, on the other hand, he suffered a resounding defeat: he completely abandoned the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

So goes Obama’s diplomacy, “protean,” as Vaïsse himself writes: “Everyone projects onto this president what he wants to see.”

Flammarion put out a pocket edition of the very serious essay by Zaki Laïdi: “The World According to Obama, American Foreign Policy.” Our correspondent in Washington, Corine Lesnes, under the title, “America, the Obama Years: Chronicles of an Ungovernable Country,” draws a lively, pertinent and subtle portrait of his first term (Philippe Rey, 304 pages, $27.17).

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.