Ambassador is a former U.S. special representative for Syria engagement and former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq; from 2013-2018 he was the Philip Solondz Distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute. He currently chairs the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program.
Articles & Testimony
The latest NSS reiterates the president's longstanding aversion to military force, but his views are more problematic than ever in the wake of recent challenges to the global security order.
The Obama administration sent to Congress last week its second report on national security strategy. These updates are mainly a dry inventory of our aspirations, what's happening in the world and what the United States can do in response, rather than a true strategy. That was the case for this one as well, but bits of it reveal much about how President Obama views the world. Combined with his recent interview by Fareed Zakaria on CNN, his State of the Union address last month and his speech last May at West Point, we can glean a good summary of the president's basic principles for security policy. Unfortunately, that summary is troubling.
Although Obama's goals are consistent with mainstream U.S. foreign policy since the onset of the Cold War, his dismissive approach to military force represents a clear departure from that consensus. But that's nothing new. What's new is that Obama is strongly reaffirming this approach despite 12 months dominated by military threats to the global security order -- from Russia, the Islamic State, Iran and China. Yet the two-page summary of major global developments in the introduction of the national security strategy (NSS) included only a brief mention of Russia's threat and nothing on the others. Rather than highlight these new threats, the president consistently repeated four interrelated security themes: First, those who use military force are destined for the ash heap of history because force is inherently counterproductive...
