Less change than what meets the eye

A few weeks ago, conventional wisdom held that Barack Obama’s second-term cabinet choices were evidence that he envisioned a less interventionist US.

The new Secretaries of State and Defence, John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, respectively, are almost universally viewed as cautious men who, having seen war, are more reluctant to advocate military force than their respective predecessors — Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta.

What, then, are we to make of Obama’s latest foreign policy nominations: The elevation of Susan Rice to National Security Adviser and the choice of Samantha Power to replace Rice as Ambassador to the United Nations?

Rice and Power are a generation younger than Kerry and Hagel. During their years outside government, both emerged as prominent advocates of the use of military power for humanitarian purposes. Rice, who headed the State Department’s Africa bureau during the Bill Clinton administration, has spoken of her regret at not having pushed her bosses to do more to stop the Rwanda genocide of 1994. Power first came to national prominence as the author of a book about genocide.

In the political realm, both have had their ups and downs. Rice endured months of character assassination at the hands of Republicans who sought to make her the scapegoat for the death of four Americans, including the US ambassador to Libya, in last September’s attack on the US Mission in Benghazi. Reasonable observers may ask what relevance Rice’s performance in a series of television interviews had for the larger question of how the Obama administration handled the attack as it unfolded, but politics is rarely fair.

Power was one of Obama’s earliest and closest advisers when, as a senator, he began planning his 2008 presidential campaign. Indeed, early profiles of the Obama team identified her as a strong candidate for the UN job. In the spring of 2008, however, she was forced to resign from the campaign staff after telling a British reporter that Hillary was a “monster”, a gaffe that both ended her time in the campaign spotlight and ensured she would have no place in a Clinton-led State Department. Instead, Power spent the last four years working on the National Security Council staff — a low-profile job, albeit one that gave her regular access to the president on a significant range of issues.

So now Obama has secretaries of state and defence known for their scepticism about foreign military adventures, and a national security adviser and (pending senate confirmation) UN ambassador known for their advocacy of exactly those kinds of operations. What does this bode for the second term in general and, more particularly, for the Middle East’s most pressing humanitarian concern: Syria?

The short answer is: Probably not much. It is worth remembering that Obama is widely reported to have overruled Clinton and Panetta when they advocated a more active US role in Syria last year. The voices on both sides of that debate may have changed at the highest levels of the US government, but Obama’s personal and political calculations have not.

Those are, first, that Americans do not want another war in the Muslim World and, second, that even if it did intervene, it is highly debatable whether the US can actually affect the eventual outcome in Syria in any positive way.

By most accounts, Obama is a leader who encourages vigorous, extended debate among his staff as part of the policy-making process. Having top aides who tend to come down on opposite sides of these momentous questions fits his style. In the end, though, a president who wanted a more interventionist second term would not be setting his cabinet up to resemble a debating society.

That means an administration eager to offer its allies rhetorical, logistical, humanitarian and financial support, but reluctant to put American ‘boots on the ground’. It probably also means that the use of drones will not only continue but increase. It makes war with Iran somewhat less likely, but also decreases the likelihood of serious American involvement not only in Syria, but also in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute or anywhere else in the Middle East beyond the requirements of immediate crisis management.

Americans’ exhaustion with foreign wars played a big role in Obama’s rise to power. Through his first term, he showed repeatedly that he understood his mandate to be fewer wars, not more. It was a message Obama drove home relentlessly during last year’s campaign, when the president and his surrogates repeatedly told voters that a vote for Romney was a vote for more war.

Obama has always presented himself as someone reluctant to fight, but willing to do so if he must. “I don’t oppose all wars ... what I am opposed to is a dumb war,” he famously said during one of his earliest campaigns. It is a statement that implicitly tags most wars as dumb and nothing about the make-up of his new foreign policy team fundamentally changes that.

Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches political science at the University of Vermont.