Obama had arrived in Manila the day before from a G20 summit held in Antalya, Turkey. Similarly today, people across America who have opposed draconian restrictions, lockdowns, quarantines, and mandates from Democrat politicians have been arrested, jailed, demonized, fined, and called right-wing radicals. The rise of the Islamic State deepened Obama’s conviction that the Middle East could not be fixed—not on his watch, and not for a generation to come. But today that decision is a source of deep satisfaction for him. You don’t see him in any of these meetings out here helping to shape the agenda. I actually think that Rwanda is an interesting test case because it’s possible—not guaranteed, but it’s possible—that this was a situation where the quick application of force might have been enough.”, He related this to Syria: “Ironically, it’s probably easier to make an argument that a relatively small force inserted quickly with international support would have resulted in averting genocide [more successfully in Rwanda] than in Syria right now, where the degree to which the various groups are armed and hardened fighters and are supported by a whole host of external actors with a lot of resources requires a much larger commitment of forces.”. Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. Whether or not the media and our politicians will admit it, the United States is in the middle of a Communist revolution. So as I stood in the doorway with the president, I asked: “Was it a bluff?” I told him that few people now believe he actually would have attacked Iran to keep it from getting a nuclear weapon. After isis beheaded three American civilians in Syria, it became obvious to Obama that defeating the group was of more immediate urgency to the U.S. than overthrowing Bashar al-Assad. He added, “It would have also meant that we might have wasted a huge amount of resources in our public-health systems that need to be devoted to flu vaccinations and other things that actually kill people” in large numbers in America. Our meetings are very businesslike. “And their economy has contracted for three years in a row, drastically.”. One day in January, in Kerry’s office at the State Department, I expressed the obvious: He has more of a bias toward action than the president does. Neither Chuck Hagel, then the secretary of defense, nor John Kerry was in the Oval Office when the president informed his team of his thinking. Obama generally believes that the Washington foreign-policy establishment, which he secretly disdains, makes a fetish of “credibility”—particularly the sort of credibility purchased with force. One box he called isolationism, which he dismissed out of hand. President-elect Joe Biden, right, embraces his son Hunter Biden, left, Saturday, Nov. 7 ... “These transactions are a direct link between Walker and the communist … “As previous storms in history have gathered, when unspeakable crimes were within our power to stop them, we have been warned against the temptations of looking the other way,” Kerry said in his speech. “And I am also an idealist insofar as I believe that we should be promoting values, like democracy and human rights and norms and values, because not only do they serve our interests the more people adopt values that we share—in the same way that, economically, if people adopt rule of law and property rights and so forth, that is to our advantage—but because it makes the world a better place. “He applies different standards to direct threats to the U.S.,” Ben Rhodes says. Just as the Hukou was required for travel, compulsory vaccinations are now being listed as pre-requisites by airlines across the world, including Quantaâs Airlines, which said all passengers who wish to fly are required to show proof they have taken the COVID vaccine. Families experienced what was called âprogressive taxationâ on their harvests, food was rationed, and mandatory purchases were established through trade agreements with the Soviet Union to ensure that people were not consuming more than they needed. That’s deterrent credibility.”. Obama also cited Reagan’s decision to almost immediately pull U.S. forces from Lebanon after 241 servicemen were killed in a Hezbollah attack in 1983. One day, over lunch in the Oval Office dining room, I asked the president how he thought his foreign policy might be understood by historians. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. âSo, you say, âHey wait a minute â Canadaâs crude [oil] is now going to go to the Communist Chinese instead of going in a pipeline down to the Gulf Coast, and get into Louisiana and be refined, and then it would be there for people in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, and all around for people to be able to use? That’s above and beyond just the existential issues of a planet that starts getting into a bad feedback loop.”, Terrorism, he said, is also a long-term problem “when combined with the problem of failed states.”, What country does he consider the greatest challenge to America in the coming decades? As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft. But if he believes it is necessary to act, he doesn’t hesitate.”. I wanted to learn how an Illinois state senator, a part-time law professor who spent his days traveling between Chicago and Springfield, had come to a more prescient understanding of the coming quagmire than the most experienced foreign-policy thinkers of his party, including such figures as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry, not to mention, of course, most Republicans and many foreign-policy analysts and writers, including me. Mon Oct 19, 2020 - 5:28 pm EST Obama smiled. I managed to get elected president of the United States. “I had come into office with the strong belief that the scope of executive power in national-security issues is very broad, but not limitless.”. “Sometimes we’re going to get what we want precisely because we are sharing in the agenda. Obama knew his decision not to bomb Syria would likely upset America’s allies. “If we get that right and China continues on a peaceful rise, then we have a partner that is growing in capability and sharing with us the burdens and responsibilities of maintaining an international order. John Kerry argued vociferously for action. Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there. So I don’t underestimate the dangers there.” Obama returned to a point he had made repeatedly to me, one that he hopes the country, and the next president, absorbs: “You know, the notion that diplomacy and technocrats and bureaucrats somehow are helping to keep America safe and secure, most people think, Eh, that’s nonsense. “It seems to be outside this plane.”. The president also gets frustrated that terrorism keeps swamping his larger agenda, particularly as it relates to rebalancing America’s global priorities. But John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, told me recently that he and the president “have similar views. “The world is ever-shrinking,” he said. America can come to their aid. In the days after the gassing of Ghouta, Obama would later tell me, he found himself recoiling from the idea of an attack unsanctioned by international law or by Congress. Power, who during this period served on the National Security Council staff, is the author of a celebrated book excoriating a succession of U.S. presidents for their failures to prevent genocide. “Every president has strengths and weaknesses,” he answered. But I can’t deny to you that this notion about the red line being crossed and [Obama’s] not doing anything gained a life of its own.”. The goal, Kerry has said, is not to overthrow Assad but to encourage him, and Iran and Russia, to negotiate peace. Shortly after that interview four years ago, Ehud Barak, who was then the defense minister of Israel, asked me whether I thought Obama’s no-bluff promise was itself a bluff. Many of his advisers did not grasp the depth of the president’s misgivings; his Cabinet and his allies were certainly unaware of them. In America, people who simply want to work and make a living are being demonized and told to stay home and collect unemployment instead. No one had any expectation that Iran would be a more benign actor.”, I once mentioned to obama a scene from The Godfather: Part III, in which Michael Corleone complains angrily about his failure to escape the grasp of organized crime. The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world. Do away with all loyalty oaths. I paused and said, “I bet if I asked that in a press conference my colleagues would just throw me out of the room.”, “I would be really into it,” Obama said, “but everybody else would be rolling their eyes.”. I’m going to push him a little bit further in Ukraine.”. By 2013, Obama’s resentments were well developed. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office. I answered that I found it difficult to imagine that the leader of the United States would bluff about something so consequential. A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. In a meeting during apec with Malcolm Turnbull, the new prime minister of Australia, Obama described how he has watched Indonesia gradually move from a relaxed, syncretistic Islam to a more fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation; large numbers of Indonesian women, he observed, have now adopted the hijab, the Muslim head covering. And he is sanguine enough to live with the perilous ambiguities of his decisions. On several occasions, Kerry has asked Obama to launch missiles at specific regime targets, under cover of night, to “send a message” to the regime. The streets around the hotel had been sealed. Censorship is a key tactic of the Chinese Communist Party, which is why itâs not surprising that any and all criticism of Joe Biden and his ties to China during the campaign, as well as any criticism of COVID lockdowns were and still are heavily censored, banned, and labeled as âright-wing conspiracy theoriesâ. It was an unusual speech for an antiwar rally in that it was not antiwar; Obama, who was then an Illinois state senator, argued only against one specific and, at the time, still theoretical, war. __ The CCP must fall. After several months of deliberation, he authorized the CIA to train and fund Syrian rebels, but he also shared the outlook of his former defense secretary, Robert Gates, who had routinely asked in meetings, “Shouldn’t we finish up the two wars we have before we look for another?”. Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence. Russia was much more powerful when Ukraine looked like an independent country but was a kleptocracy that he could pull the strings on.”. #Stolen Biden Just Picked A CIA Director With a 7-Year-Long Relationship with Chinese Communist Party Fronts Bill Burns â Joe Bidenâs pick to lead the Central Intelligence Agency â serves as the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace which has over a decade-long relationship ⦠He never keeps me waiting two hours like he does a bunch of these other folks.” Obama said that Putin believes his relationship with the U.S. is more important than Americans tend to think. Then the default position is tribe—us/them, a hostility toward the unfamiliar or the unknown.”. I first spoke with obama about foreign policy when he was a U.S. senator, in 2006. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman announced that the two would “hug it out” on Martha’s Vineyard when they crossed paths there later.). Obama “figured out how important this is,” Jubeir, who is now the Saudi foreign minister, told one interlocutor. “What I think is not smart is the idea that every time there is a problem, we send in our military to impose order. But the average American voter only needs to look at the Joe Biden for President logo to understand how accurate Donald Trump was when he said, âIf Joe Biden wins, China will own usâ. 13. That’s when the president’s advisers came to understand, in the words of one official, that “everyone back home had lost their minds.” Susan Rice, trying to comprehend the rising anxiety, searched her hotel television in vain for CNN, finding only the BBC and Fox News. Even if Joe Biden comes to understand the mortal threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to America, he’s in too deep to extricate himself and his family. “An approach that said to our friends ‘You are right, Iran is the source of all problems, and we will support you in dealing with Iran’ would essentially mean that as these sectarian conflicts continue to rage and our Gulf partners, our traditional friends, do not have the ability to put out the flames on their own or decisively win on their own, and would mean that we have to start coming in and using our military power to settle scores. Biden Just Picked A CIA Director With A 7-Year-Long Relationship With Chinese Communist Party Fronts. Even his own advisers were surprised. Biden has boosted Chinese manufacturing by rejoining the Paris ⦠An anonymous source with knowledge of the conversations told Politico that Bidenâs tone was both âjocular and seriousâ when he had the conversations.. Whether or not the media and our politicians will admit it, the United States is in the middle of a Communist revolution. But, Obama told me, Putin is not particularly nasty. If Obama ever questioned whether America really is the world’s one indispensable nation, he no longer does so. If we’re going to do something, obviously we’ve got to be up front, and nobody else is sharing in the spotlight.”, Obama also blamed internal Libyan dynamics. “She’s won, by the way, a lot of prizes and gotten a lot of attention, so this is not like one of those infomercials where you order it, and you can’t make the thing work,” he said, to laughter. President Joe Biden spent thirty-four years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, beginning in 1975. “Aren’t the Saudis your friends?,” Turnbull asked. 14. “I have friends who have kids in Paris right now,” he said. Friday, August 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void—began with a thundering speech given on Obama’s behalf by his secretary of state, John Kerry, in Washington, D.C. “Look, I am not of the view that human beings are inherently evil,” he said. Working with the Americans, we had already seen the targets. Within the White House, Obama would argue that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.”. As he comes to the end of his presidency, Obama believes he has done his country a large favor by keeping it out of the maelstrom—and he believes, I suspect, that historians will one day judge him wise for having done so. And he said that British Prime Minister David Cameron soon stopped paying attention, becoming “distracted by a range of other things.” Of France, he said, “Sarkozy wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set up the entire infrastructure” for the intervention. Though he has argued, controversially, that the Middle East’s conflicts “date back millennia,” he also believes that the intensified Muslim fury of recent years was encouraged by countries considered friends of the U.S. Finally, the president interrupted the prime minister: “Bibi, you have to understand something,” he said. The Turkey press conference, I told him, “was a moment for you as a politician to say, ‘Yeah, I hate the bastards too, and by the way, I am taking out the bastards.’ ” The easy thing to do would have been to reassure Americans in visceral terms that he will kill the people who want to kill them. Outside, on the tarmac, I could see that what appeared to be a large portion of the Malaysian Armed Forces had assembled to welcome him. I think we have to build resilience and make sure that our political debates are grounded in reality. The story of Obama’s encounter with the Middle East follows an arc of disenchantment. One of the most destructive forces in the Middle East, Obama believes, is tribalism—a force no president can neutralize. Obama “didn’t go to Congress to get himself off the hook. President Joe Biden called the Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping Wednesday, on the occasion of the Lunar New Year, according to the White House. And of course he decided early on, in the face of great criticism, that he wanted to reach out to America’s most ardent Middle Eastern foe, Iran. There’s no choice.”, “Assad is effectively being rewarded for the use of chemical weapons, rather than ‘punished’ as originally planned.” Shadi Hamid, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, wrote for The Atlantic at the time. But I’ve never had a conversation when they said, ‘Man, how come you’re not using this phrase the way you hear Republicans say it?’ ” Obama says he has demanded that Muslim leaders do more to eliminate the threat of violent fundamentalism. And he believes that a misplaced word, or a frightened look, or an ill-considered hyperbolic claim, could tip the country into panic. This is one of the larger ironies of the Obama presidency: He has relentlessly questioned the efficacy of force, but he has also become the most successful terrorist-hunter in the history of the presidency, one who will hand to his successor a set of tools an accomplished assassin would envy. “In Vietnam right now, America polls at 80 percent.”, The resurgent popularity of America throughout Southeast Asia means that “we can do really big, important stuff—which, by the way, then has ramifications across the board,” he said, “because when Malaysia joins the anti-isil campaign, that helps us leverage resources and credibility in our fight against terrorism. I took the elevator to a floor crowded with Secret Service agents, who pointed me to a staircase; the elevator to Obama’s floor was disabled for security reasons. The president asked Congress to authorize the use of force—the irrepressible Kerry served as chief lobbyist—and it quickly became apparent in the White House that Congress had little interest in a strike. When we sat down, I pointed out to the president a central challenge of his pivot to Asia. “It is,” the president responded coolly. All rights reserved. The nuclear deal he struck with Iran proves, if nothing else, that Obama is not risk-averse. Some of his deepest disappointments concern Middle Eastern leaders themselves. Lake Worth, FL 33460. When the Assad alliance has had the upper hand on the battlefield, as it has these past several months, it has shown no inclination to take seriously Kerry’s entreaties to negotiate in good faith. He equated protesters in Tunisia and Tahrir Square with Rosa Parks and the “patriots of Boston.”, “After decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be,” he said in a speech at the time. For that matter, there’s not a G20 meeting where the Russians set the agenda around any of the issues that are important.”. Obama’s critics argue that he is ineffective in cordoning off the violent nihilists of radical Islam because he doesn’t understand the threat. Armored vehicles ringed the building; the lobby was filled with swat teams. During the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese people were encouraged to form communes and all private property was seized in an effort to promote socialism and transform China from an agrarian economy into a communist country. “Unlike China, they have demographic problems, economic structural problems, that would require not only vision but a generation to overcome,” Obama said. “Look, the final say on these things is in his hands … I’d say that I think we’ve had a very symbiotic, synergistic, whatever you call it, relationship, which works very effectively. The president, leaning back in his office chair with his jacket off and his tie askew, did not seem to notice. But over the next three years, as the Arab Spring gave up its early promise, and brutality and dysfunction overwhelmed the Middle East, the president grew disillusioned. Anyone who disagreed with Maoâs policies was called a âRightistâ and feared for their life. Last May, as he was trying to move the Iran nuclear deal through Congress, I told him that the agreement was making me nervous. “You have massive protests against Qaddafi. Obama’s secretary of defense, Ashton Carter, told me not long ago that Obama has maintained his focus on Asia even as Syria and other Middle Eastern conflicts continue to flare. Amid the confusion, a deus ex machina appeared in the form of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. 12. Obama, busily mesmerizing adoring Asian entrepreneurs, had no idea. “I think we have to be firm where China’s actions are undermining international interests, and if you look at how we’ve operated in the South China Sea, we have been able to mobilize most of Asia to isolate China in ways that have surprised China, frankly, and have very much served our interest in strengthening our alliances.”, A weak, flailing Russia constitutes a threat as well, though not quite a top-tier threat. But Barak’s question had stayed with me. The Chinese Communist Party created a “blueprint for dictators around the world,” Open Doors USA CEO David Curry said last year. “Now, I actually think that Ronald Reagan had a great success in foreign policy, which was to recognize the opportunity that Gorbachev presented and to engage in extensive diplomacy—which was roundly criticized by some of the same people who now use Ronald Reagan to promote the notion that we should go around bombing people.”. I turned to the president: “Well, yeah, and also, why can’t we get the bastards?”. Aides in the room were shocked. She told him that her country would not participate in a Syria campaign. Hillary Clinton, for one, has been heard to say in private settings, “I don’t want my grandchildren to live in a world dominated by the Chinese.”, “I’ve been very explicit in saying that we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China,” Obama said. “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he once snapped. Obama, who was greeted warmly, first delivered informal remarks from behind a podium, mainly about the threat of climate change. It became a shit show, Obama believes, for reasons that had less to do with American incompetence than with the passivity of America’s allies and with the obdurate power of tribalism. Box 1465 12. Those who speak with Obama about jihadist thought say that he possesses a no-illusions understanding of the forces that drive apocalyptic violence among radical Muslims, but he has been careful about articulating that publicly, out of concern that he will exacerbate anti-Muslim xenophobia.