For a president who ran as the opposite of his predecessor, Barack Obama has conducted a remarkably similar foreign policy. When he left office, former US president George Bush was winding down America's war in Iraq; Obama is following much the same timetable. Bush turned the Iraq war round via a surge of extra troops; Obama is trying the same trick in Afghanistan.
Bush sent the CIA's drones to kill Islamists in Pakistan; Obama has multiplied those attacks. Bush wanted to close Guantanamo but could not answer the practical question of what to do with its remaining inmates; ditto Obama. Bush ratcheted up sanctions on Iran, to stop its nuclear programme, while keeping ‘all options' on the table; no change there.
If one person symbolised the continuity in national security affairs, it was Robert Gates, the former CIA director whom Bush appointed as defence secretary in 2006 in place of Donald Rumsfeld. By keeping a Republican appointee (who also ‘considers himself' a Republican) at the Pentagon, Obama reassured the top brass and disarmed Republican leaders, such as Senator John McCain, who were itching to pounce on the mistakes of a president with no experience in national security. In return, Obama heeded Gates's advice, such as his advice to replace America's commander in Afghanistan with Stanley McChrystal, the general whose career came to a sticky end last year when a magazine article portrayed him as arrogant and insubordinate. Still, all good things come to an end. Gates gave warning last year that he would leave at some point in this one. Now it is confirmed that he will depart at the end of June, and on April 28 Obama unveiled the chain-reaction of staff moves his retirement will trigger. Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, will take over as defence secretary. David Petraeus, the architect of Bush's successful surge in Iraq, and the general Obama sent to run the war in Afghanistan after General McChrystal's implosion, will end his military career and replace Panetta at the CIA. General John Allen will take over from General Petraeus in Afghanistan. And Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador in Iraq, will become America's new ambassador in Kabul.
Prickly ties
A senior White House official says that Obama has been planning this shuffle for months and is delighted with the result. All the men who are moving are deeply experienced and expected to breeze through the Senate's confirmation hearings. As the leading soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan, General Petraeus has had to work closely with the CIA and should slip seamlessly into an agency that has become increasingly involved in military operations in the decade since Al Qaida attacked America. The general's relationship with the White House has been prickly at times, but by giving this registered Republican a big job in Washington Obama has artfully removed the possibility of his being drafted by a Republican Party still short of good presidential candidates for 2012. That said, the forces in Afghanistan must endure yet another transfer of command at a time when the war is still far from easy.
As for Panetta, two years running the CIA mean that he is already familiar with the main theatres of war and with the foreign officials and leaders he will deal with as defence secretary. It is, after all, the CIA that runs the drone attacks in Pakistan. As for the civilian side of the Pentagon's work, Panetta can draw on four decades of experience in public service, including stints as a Democratic congressman for California and later as budget director and chief of staff in Bill Clinton's White House.
Though changes in the national security team matter, their impact is often exaggerated. It has been clear at least since his mighty Afghanistan cogitation in the summer of 2009 that in foreign policy Obama is a details man, a decider and not a delegator. America's counter-insurgency plan in Afghanistan was in large part drafted by the president himself after his generals failed to provide one he liked. The decision to embark on a half-war in Libya was in the end also very much his own. Much as parts of his own party hate it, Obama has been right to stick with the broad trajectory Bush had settled on by his second term: an orderly withdrawal from Iraq and strategic patience in Afghanistan. It is fine when events change foreign policy — the Arab spring, say. A foreign policy that changes with the routine rotation of officials in Washington is in trouble.
