The Long Game Read Online Free

Obama’s Long Game grand strategy has been all about—and, despite all the world’s challenges, it has left America stronger at home and abroad, in a better position to lead.

    T HIS BOOK IS a personal reflection on Obama’s effort to redefine America’s role in the world, drawing on my experience of over six years serving at the State Department, the White House, and the Pentagon. It is not intended to be a comprehensive narrative history of Obama’s foreign policy—several important memoirs and excellent first drafts of that history have already been written, andmany more will come. Instead, by exploring some of the toughest, most consequential, and controversial national security decisions of the Obama administration—focusing specifically on its handling of the “Arab Spring” crises in Syria, Libya, and Egypt; its approach to powers like China and Russia; its response to the war in Ukraine; and its effort to deal with Iran’s nuclear threat—this book examines the intellectual foundations of Obama’s foreign policy. It also aims to shed light on why policymakers navigated the course they did and how they struggled with the choices that confronted them.
    In doing so, this book is also an exploration of the broader debate about America’s role in the world and the politics that infuse these arguments. One must see the Obama presidency in the context of the policy debates that followed the end of the Cold War and shaped American foreign policy and politics in the post-9/11 years. This includes the George W. Bush administration’s fateful choices, as well as the efforts of Democrats to forge a coherent foreign policy agenda in the 2000s—to be seen as “strong” and to overcome their perceived weakness on national security. This history has influenced the choices Obama has made, and helps explain how he has tried to redefine America’s global role—and the resistance he has had to confront while doing so.
    The late diplomat Richard Holbrooke observed that “a memoir sits at the dangerous intersection of policy, ambition, and history,” warning of the temptation to see events as linear and outcomes as foreordained—especially the decisions that turned out well. 13 Depending on one’s perspective, successes are credited either to sheer brilliance or dumb luck, while failures are seen as the result of either honest mistakes or gross incompetence. To learn from history, one must try hard to understand what actually happened, appreciating the full context in which decisions were made and all the uncertainties and risks involved. That is the approach taken by this book.
    Policymaking is the collision of aspirations and limits, in which leaders are rewarded for aligning their goals with resources, and punished when they become out of balance. When approaching issues, leaders must constantly make difficult decisions and manage unpleasant trade-offs, often with little information and no time.
    Henry Kissinger describes the making of foreign policy as “an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important,” observing that the central struggle for policymakers is “to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.” 14 This struggle is particularly difficult in today’s world, where the pressure of circumstance seems so overwhelming. And nowhere is that more evident than in the Middle East, the region that has been America’s twenty-first century crucible, and therefore where this story of the Obama administration’s foreign policy begins.

CHAPTER 2
    THE FOREIGN POLICY BREAKDOWN
    B arack Obama arrived in 2008 with some entrenched criticisms of his own about how Washington handled America’s role in the world. His skepticism of the foreign policy establishment was rooted in more than the political expediency of needing to take on Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.