Kerry’s flip-flopping message hurt his bid for the Oval Office and cost Democrats the House. As the Democrats geared up for the 2006 midterms, grassroots antiwar activists highlighted the fact that highly visible mainstream Democrats had been prowar. It was clear that the party’s chances for future electoral success would be greatly diminished if an internecine conflict between interventionists and noninterventionists continued. Rather than settle the question of what Democrats were for, it was easier to form a coalition of voters and candidates who agreed that President Bush was the problem. Focusing on Bush’s blunders worked for both the anti-interventionist and pacifist wings, but it also covered those Democrats who argued that if they had been in charge, they could have made intervention work.

This strategy allowed the Democrats to have a caucus that encompassed the two Independent outliers—Senators Bernie Sanders and Joseph Lieberman. Democratic opponents of missile defense could join with supporters who disagreed with specifics of Bush’s plans for implementation. Democrats who felt that John Mearsheimer and Stephen F. Cohen’s reading—that the West provoked Russia by supporting NATO expansion—was right could embrace the Democrats who argued that Bush was too trusting of Putin. On a whole set of issues—from how to cope with Iran’s nuclear program, whether to pursue free-trade agreements, whether to rapidly withdraw from Iraq, the best way to deal with a rising China—Democrats who could not find a common unifying approach could still unify to oppose the Bush administration’s policies. As an electoral strategy, it worked, delivering control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats. But a “not Bush” approach could not provide a template for an alternative set of workable foreign policies.

 

OBAMA, ON THE other hand, opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, while supporting the military actions taken to degrade and destroy Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Unlike other candidates who were still attempting to “Kerry straddle” when it came to the Iraq war, Obama voiced his opposition clearly and with conviction. Similar to Governor Bush in 2000, Senator Obama laid out a restrained, focused foreign-policy vision, most notably in his 2007 address to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, but it was not yet clear how committed the senator was when it came to implementing this vision were he to be elected, just as Governor Bush’s humble restraint disappeared shortly after he became president. It was also uncertain whether Obama’s campaign staff wanted him to develop a binding foreign-policy approach beyond citing differences with Hillary Clinton and President Bush to mobilize his base of supporters. Indeed, Obama himself acknowledged that he was a “political Rorschach test”—with different groups of voters projecting their policy expectations onto him. He could, based on his audience, reflect the ideas of a noninterventionist, a pragmatic realist or a Wilsonian idealist. This impression was reinforced by his staffing choices. Obama selected a foreign-policy team that was drawn from a variety of different foreign-policy perspectives, yet the palpable relief that the new president was “not Bush”—and the anticipation of renewal created by the announcement of policy reviews and fresh starts in relationships with America’s European allies, the Middle East, Russia and the states of the Asia-Pacific—allowed the Obama administration to enjoy a domestic and international honeymoon that culminated in a Nobel Peace Prize.

If Obama was ever committed to any sort of progressive-realist vision he did not use those principles to guide the selection of his national-security team. His “team of rivals” was only united in their determination to walk the United States back from what they agreed had been the principal mistakes of the Bush administration (at least until 2006); they, in turn, had to filter their policy recommendations through a group of campaign operatives brought into the White House whose guiding star was preserving the president’s poll numbers, reelection chances and overall legacy. There would be, under their watch, no new Iraq-level commitments to distract from a domestic agenda and destroy the president’s credibility.

The campaign trail—where Obama’s rhetorical gifts and his skills as an orator were crucial in winning both the primary and general elections—also colored the approach to foreign policy. Obama’s close advisers from the campaign had an inordinate faith that the power of Obama’s speeches would bring about major changes. Inspired by the president’s soaring rhetoric, other governments would voluntarily comply with American preferences. Because Obama was “not Bush,” NATO allies would be prepared to increase their contributions to the war in Afghanistan and to defense spending to secure the European continent; Iran would come to the table to settle the nuclear dispute, the Kremlin would reset relations with the United States and the Chinese would embrace an American vision for regional and global order. If the right words were said, policy would fall into place.

 

WHEN THIS strategy failed, however, problems arose, and the unresolved schism in Democratic foreign-policy thinking further complicated matters. Aside from the main speech, there was a disunity of voices. For instance, Chinese leaders wondered whether the secretary of state’s criticisms of Chinese policy or the national-security adviser’s quiet reassurances reflected the real position of the United States. The vaunted “reset” with Russia disappointed the Kremlin when the substance of many U.S. policies did not change, but it also aggravated America’s Central European partners’ concerns about the strength of the U.S. commitment to their security and well-being.

The debate on whether to increase military presence in Afghanistan exemplified this problem. The president approved what appeared to be a satisfying compromise between two coalitions. Eschewing the limited mission-set focus on counterterrorism advised by Vice President Joseph Biden, Obama embarked instead on a broader set of transformative objectives in Afghanistan and increased U.S. troop commitments and expenditures to satisfy those in his administration who maintained that under Democratic stewardship a major exercise of U.S. power could produce effective results. At the same time, the compromise incorporated the concerns of the political team, which did not want the Obama administration involved in a long, drawn-out escalation in the Middle East, so strict limits on the number of troops and time allotted for the mission were established. The result was a compromise that satisfied no one. For the advocates of intervention, the surge was halfhearted—not enough forces, resources or time to undertake a major transformation of Afghanistan. For those who wanted to refocus the mission on more limited, achievable aims, the surge would end up being an eighteen-month-long waste of resources and energy with no lasting results.

Similarly, the announcement that relations with Russia would be reset did not produce an internal consensus within the administration over what the United States was to do to make it happen. The main reason that U.S.-Russia relations soured in the second term of the Bush administration was because of the United States’ inability to reconcile the expansion of Euro-Atlantic institutions into the former Soviet space—viewed, rightly or wrongly, by the Kremlin as a threat to Russian interests—with the previously stated objective to maintain a partnership with Russia. One of the Obama administration’s early actions—the cancellation of the land deployment of components of a theater ballistic-missile-defense system vehemently opposed by Russia in September 2009—was denounced by both Republicans and Central European leaders as Kremlin appeasement. But the subsequent announcement that a sea-based system remained on track infuriated Moscow, who saw this as the old system in a new configuration. The U.S.-Russia reset could only gain momentum once elections in Ukraine and Georgia—the key flash points in U.S.-Russia relations during the Bush administration—brought new, more pragmatic governments to power. Indeed, the lack of any substantial resolution of these festering issues was made all too clear when the Maidan movement swept the Ukrainian regime of Viktor Yanukovych from power in spring 2014—empowering a new pro-Western government and immediately returning Ukraine to the geopolitical chessboard.

 

THROUGHOUT OBAMA’S first term, the administration attempted to balance its interventionist, idealistic voices with a more pragmatic approach rooted both in the limits of American power and a deep concern on the part of the political advisors to avoid any foreign-policy ventures that might drag the Obama administration into new quagmires and distract from its domestic agenda. The Arab Spring, however, upset this balancing act. As authoritarian governments began to fall all across the Middle East, it seemed that a Democratic administration was being presented with its own version of the annus mirabilis of 1989 and the rapid collapse of the Soviet bloc. Obama would do for the Middle East what George Bush the elder had done twenty years earlier in Eastern Europe: preside over the collapse of authoritarianism and the triumph of democracy across a critical region of the world. The voices of those within the Obama administration warning about the need for measured transitions could not resist the same siren song that had so captivated the younger Bush administration—the prospect of U.S. power aiding and abetting a sweeping, massive transformation in the Middle East, with the hopes that this time, it would be under Democratic administration. President Obama would succeed where Bush and his Republicans had failed. Nowhere was this more apparent than the decision to intervene in Libya. In places like Bahrain and Azerbaijan, security concerns had led the United States to side with existing authoritarian governments even when faced with popular pressure for democratization. But once Muammar el-Qaddafi, the last remaining poster child for bloody tyrants in the Arab world, issued his bombastic threats to wipe out the civilians in Benghazi who had facilitated rebellion against his rule, it seemed an appropriate time to unleash American power against him.