Obama Is a Weak Leader Who Can Be Tested Without Consequences

About his approach to the Islamic State, President Obama recently announced: “We don’t have a strategy yet.” Even if this is true, a president should not say so. The president of the U.S. cannot send planes to the Middle East without knowing what he wants to achieve with the bombardments, and the support [being offered] to the Kurds. If the Kurds win, would he accept a Kurdish state, or would he not tolerate a redrawing of the map of the Middle East yet again?

In an earlier stage, Obama already turned out to be a poor strategic thinker. Even before he became president, he enumerated the pillars of his foreign policy: termination of the war in Iraq, termination of the fights with the Taliban and al-Qaida, keeping nuclear supplies from terrorists, and the formation of alliances with other [nations] to counter threats. Later, this policy came to be known as the Obama doctrine of “no war,” but rather of dialogue and collaboration.

The Obama doctrine in itself was a logical response to the derailed intervention policy of his predecessor Bush that led to a “no war” attitude among the American people. Nevertheless, it won Obama the Nobel Peace Prize.

Strategic Errors

Back then, my response to Obama’s vision was that it was based in large part on naive shortsightedness. That is exactly why I never wanted to regard Obama as the new messiah — because in those days, that is how he was perceived in the West. Without much joy, I too noticed that he did not amount to that. Rather, he is now being harshly confronted with the consequences of his own policy decisions.

Bush’s intervention in Iraq was a strategic error, but so was Obama’s retreat. The departure from Iraq meant that the Islamic State could fill the power vacuum and bring new life to worldwide jihad — because jihadis considered Obama’s retreat a victory for them.

Another example of blundering was the red line for Assad. If Assad was going to deploy chemical weapons, Obama would have intervened by force of arms. Announcing a red line sounds tough but is rather clumsy. Because what would you do if that red line were really crossed? In this case Secretary of State Kerry rescued Obama; he maintained that Assad could prevent bombardment by giving up his chemical weapons. Assad turned out to be smarter than Obama because he actually surrendered them, thereby strengthening his standpoint.

Commentator

Obama’s declaration that the Russian conflict with Ukraine is not something worth going to war over is just as peculiar. This may be the case, but rule one in the book of coercive diplomacy is to keep all options open. When the option of military intervention is explicitly thrown out, the risks Putin takes by interfering with the business of Ukraine are greatly reduced, economic sanctions become ineffective, and the chance of an escalation increases.

Even though Obama spoke with strong words in Estonia, his opponents consider him a weak leader: one that can be tested without consequences. Obama sometimes acts more like a commentator than a political leader. I can say that America does not have a strategy to deal with the Islamic State, and that the Ukraine is not worth fighting over; Obama cannot.