The Long Game Read Online Free Page B

between the two. In a fiesty speech at American University in August 2015, he laid out his critique of this “mindset,” intentionally calling out his critics:
    When I ran for president eight years ago as a candidate who had opposed the decision to go to war in Iraq, I said that America didn’t just have to end that war—we had to end the mindset that got us there in the first place. It was a mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy; a mindset that put a premium on unilateral US action over the painstaking work of building international consensus; a mindset that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence supported. Leaders did not level with the American people about the costs of war, insisting that we could easily impose our will on a part of the world with aprofoundly different culture and history. And, of course, those calling for war labeled themselves strong and decisive, while dismissing those who disagreed as weak—even appeasers of a malevolent adversary.
    In public and private, Obama would frequently express frustration with what passed for smart thinking from Washington’s unceasing chorus of commentary. While Obama was open to ideas and liked to engage his critics—and at times, quietly hosted them at the White House for informal discussions to hear them out—he was usually left underwhelmed by what they recommended he do differently (he engaged both sides; for example, two of the more notable critics he met with privately were conservative Robert Kagan and liberal Andrew Bacevich). Obama would decry that the foreign policy debate was not, as he often put it, “on the level,” meaning it sought to elide complexity and deny trade-offs just to score points or win the news cycle, with little consequence for being wrong. Sober reflection hardly attracts attention. Proving the point, the DePaul speech was barely noticed at the time, garnering scant coverage in the national press (this despite Obama having delivered it three times that day).
    Obama’s views as president are aptly summed up by an observation he made in 2007 as a candidate at DePaul: “Conventional thinking in Washington has a way of buying into stories that make political sense even if they don’t make practical sense.”
    A LTHOUGH O BAMA FRAMED his candidacy against the establishment, he was hardly a fringe candidate or some reincarnation of George McGovern. He still drew upon the ideas of leading foreign policy thinkers, and benefitted from the tough lessons Democrats had learned during the Bush years. While the 2008 primary debatebetween Obama and Clinton became quite bitter (especially among their rival camps), their actual policy differences were exaggerated.
    In fact, Democrats found themselves more unified and ready to debate foreign policy in 2008 than in any other election since the end of the Cold War. To be sure, some of this confidence was a result of Bush’s foreign policy failures, and the fact that Obama’s 2008 opponent, John McCain, could be tied to so many of those policies, especially the war in Iraq. But just as important, Democrats had coalesced around a set of ideas to bring bold changes to American foreign policy.
    To understand the foreign policy debates of the Obama years—and to appreciate better Obama’s perspective on American foreign policy and how he set out to change it—one must consider the broader historical context.
    A SECOND CHANCE
    Obama’s Long Game approach was far more than a knee-jerk response to the Bush years and America’s post-9/11 policy decisions. It was another chapter in the quarter-century-long struggle to define American leadership after the Cold War.
    For the quarter century since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, conservatives and liberals have grappled with the very nature of the world order and America’s place in it. The core questions included: How much should the United