@newspaperarticle {67686,
	title = {Wanted: A Grand Strategy for America},
	year = {2011},
	month = {Feb 14, 2011},
	publisher = {Newsweek},
	abstract = {{\textquotedblleft}The statesman can only wait and listen until he 
hears the footsteps of God resounding through events; then he must jump 
up and grasp the hem of His coat, that is all.{\textquotedblright} Thus Otto von Bismarck, 
the great Prussian statesman who united Germany and thereby reshaped 
Europe{\textquoteright}s balance of power nearly a century and a half ago.Last week, for the second time in his presidency, 
Barack Obama heard those footsteps, jumped up to grasp a historic 
opportunity {\textellipsis} and missed it completely.In Bismarck{\textquoteright}s case it was not so much God{\textquoteright}s coattails he caught
 as the revolutionary wave of mid-19th-century German nationalism. And 
he did more than catch it; he managed to surf it in a direction of his 
own choosing. The wave Obama just missed{\textemdash}again{\textemdash}is the revolutionary wave
 of Middle Eastern democracy. It has surged through the region twice 
since he was elected: once in Iran in the summer of 2009, the second 
time right across North Africa, from Tunisia all the way down the Red 
Sea to Yemen. But the swell has been biggest in Egypt, the Middle East{\textquoteright}s
 most populous country.In each case, the president faced stark 
alternatives. He could try to catch the wave, Bismarck style, by lending
 his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to ride it in a 
direction advantageous to American interests. Or he could do nothing and
 let the forces of reaction prevail. In the case of Iran, he did 
nothing, and the thugs of the Islamic Republic ruthlessly crushed the 
demonstrations. This time around, in Egypt, it was worse. He did 
both{\textemdash}some days exhorting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave, 
other days drawing back and recommending an {\textquotedblleft}orderly transition.{\textquotedblright}The result has been a foreign-policy debacle. The 
president has alienated everybody: not only Mubarak{\textquoteright}s cronies in the 
military, but also the youthful crowds in the streets of Cairo. Whoever 
ultimately wins, Obama loses. And the alienation doesn{\textquoteright}t end there. 
America{\textquoteright}s two closest friends in the region{\textemdash}Israel and Saudi Arabia{\textemdash}are 
both disgusted. The Saudis, who dread all manifestations of revolution, 
are appalled at Washington{\textquoteright}s failure to resolutely prop up Mubarak. The 
Israelis, meanwhile, are dismayed by the administration{\textquoteright}s apparent 
cluelessness.Last week, while other commentators ran around 
Cairo{\textquoteright}s Tahrir Square, hyperventilating about what they saw as an Arab 
1989, I flew to Tel Aviv for the annual Herzliya security conference. 
The consensus among the assembled experts on the Middle East? A colossal
 failure of American foreign policy.This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was
 the predictable consequence of the Obama administration{\textquoteright}s lack of any 
kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few 
veterans of U.S. foreign policy making have long worried. The president 
himself is not wholly to blame. Although cosmopolitan by both birth and 
upbringing, Obama was an unusually parochial politician prior to his 
election, judging by his scant public pronouncements on foreign-policy 
issues.Yet no president can be 
expected to be omniscient. That is what advisers are for. The real 
responsibility for the current strategic vacuum lies not with Obama 
himself, but with the National Security Council, and in particular with 
the man who ran it until last October: retired Gen. James L. Jones. I 
suspected at the time of his appointment that General Jones was a poor 
choice. A big, bluff Marine, he once astonished me by recommending that 
Turkish troops might lend the United States support in Iraq. He seemed 
mildly surprised when I suggested the Iraqis might resent such a 
reminder of centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule.The best national-security advisers have combined 
deep knowledge of international relations with an ability to play the 
Machiavellian Beltway game, which means competing for the president{\textquoteright}s 
ear against the other would-be players in the policymaking process: not 
only the defense secretary but also the secretary of state and the head 
of the Central Intelligence Agency. No one has ever done this better 
than Henry Kissinger. But the crucial thing about Kissinger as 
national-security adviser was not the speed with which he learned the 
dark arts of interdepartmental turf warfare. It was the skill with which
 he, in partnership with Richard Nixon, forged a grand strategy for the 
United States at a time of alarming geopolitical instability.The essence of that strategy was, first, to 
prioritize (for example, d{\'e}tente with the Soviets before human-rights 
issues within the U.S.S.R.) and then to exert pressure by deliberately 
linking key issues. In their hardest task{\textemdash}salvaging peace with honor in 
Indochina by preserving the independence of South Vietnam{\textemdash}Nixon and 
Kissinger ultimately could not succeed. But in the Middle East they were
 able to eject the Soviets from a position of influence and turn Egypt 
from a threat into a malleable ally. And their overtures to China 
exploited the divisions within the Communist bloc, helping to set 
Beijing on an epoch-making new course of economic openness.The contrast between the foreign policy of the 
Nixon-Ford years and that of President Jimmy Carter is a stark reminder 
of how easily foreign policy can founder when there is a failure of 
strategic thinking. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, which took the 
Carter administration wholly by surprise, was a catastrophe far greater 
than the loss of South Vietnam.Remind you of anything? {\textquotedblleft}This is what happens when you get caught by surprise,{\textquotedblright} an anonymous American official told The New York Times
 last week. {\textquotedblleft}We{\textquoteright}ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years 
on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in 
the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None.{\textquotedblright}I can think of no more damning indictment of the 
administration{\textquoteright}s strategic thinking than this: it never once considered a
 scenario in which Mubarak faced a popular revolt. Yet the very essence 
of rigorous strategic thinking is to devise such a scenario and to think
 through the best responses to them, preferably two or three moves ahead
 of actual or potential adversaries. It is only by doing these 
things{\textemdash}ranking priorities and gaming scenarios{\textemdash}that a coherent foreign 
policy can be made. The Israelis have been hard at work doing this. All 
the president and his NSC team seem to have done is to draft 
touchy-feely speeches like the one he delivered in Cairo early in his 
presidency.These were his words back in June 2009:America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. 
Instead, they overlap, and share common principles{\textemdash}principles of justice
 and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.Those lines will come back to haunt Obama if, as 
cannot be ruled out, the ultimate beneficiary of his bungling in Egypt 
is the Muslim Brotherhood, which remains by far the best organized 
opposition force in the country{\textemdash}and wholly committed to the restoration 
of the caliphate and the strict application of Sharia. Would such an 
outcome advance {\textquotedblleft}tolerance and the dignity of all human beings{\textquotedblright} in 
Egypt? Somehow, I don{\textquoteright}t think so.Grand strategy is all about the necessity of 
choice. Today, it means choosing between a daunting list of objectives: 
to resist the spread of radical Islam, to limit Iran{\textquoteright}s ambition to 
become dominant in the Middle East, to contain the rise of China as an 
economic rival, to guard against a Russian {\textquotedblleft}reconquista{\textquotedblright} of Eastern 
Europe{\textemdash}and so on. The defining characteristic of Obama{\textquoteright}s foreign policy 
has been not just a failure to prioritize, but also a failure to 
recognize the need to do so. A succession of speeches saying, in 
essence, {\textquotedblleft}I am not George W. Bush{\textquotedblright} is no substitute for a strategy.Bismarck knew how to choose. He understood that 
riding the nationalist wave would enable Prussia to become the dominant 
force in Germany, but that thereafter the No.~1 objective must be to 
keep France and Russia from uniting against his new Reich. When asked 
for his opinion about colonizing Africa, Bismarck famously replied: {\textquotedblleft}My 
map of Africa lies in Europe. Here lies Russia and here lies France, and
 we are in the middle. That is my map of Africa.{\textquotedblright}Tragically, no one knows where Barack Obama{\textquoteright}s map 
of the Middle East is. At best, it is in the heartland states of 
America, where the fate of his presidency will be decided next year, 
just as Jimmy Carter{\textquoteright}s was back in 1980.At worst, he has no map at all.\&nbsp;\&nbsp;},
	url = {http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/13/wanted-a-grand-strategy-for-america.html},
	author = {Ferguson, Niall}
}
