Obama’s Power Problem, and Ours

I have an op-ed in Politico today that explores what I call President Obama's power problem, a common theme in my work (my book is now in a Kindle edition!).

Simply stated, when a country has more military power than it needs to defend itself and its core interests, it will expand its definition of "the national interest." This will, in turn, lead it to intervene militarily in places and disputes that have no connection to the country's security. That certainly has been the pattern for the United States for at least the last two decades. The problem is nicely encapsulated in the famous exchange between Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell, which Powell recounted in his memoir.

Madeleine Albright, our ambassador to the UN, asked me in frustration “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” I thought I would have an aneurysm. American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board.

This brings us to Libya, and to a new group of people who likely said something similar to Mike Mullen and Bob Gates. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's disagreements with Gates were on public display last Sunday, but reports of a whisper campaign within the administration, in which Clinton and her advisers were frustrated by President Obama's unwillingness to deploy the U.S. military on yet another mission, have been flying around for weeks.

In the end, the Valkyries got their war. Clinton's advice, along with that of Samantha Power and Susan Rice, who have all loudly called for U.S. military intervention in the past, convinced President Obama to override Gates and Mullen's objections, and to launch what Colorado Congressman Mike Coffman aptly characterized yesterday as "just the most muddled definition of an operation probably in U.S. military history." Anne-Marie Slaughter, who recently returned to Princeton after a stint at State's policy planning staff, was sniping from the sidelines.  Pressure from our European allies, especially France's Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron in the UK, also appears to have been decisive.

This is not so unique a set of circumstance, however, as I discussed with Cato Audio's Caleb Brown a few days ago. Near the end of the interview, I focused on the particular challenges that confront the leader of a country whose military capabilities seem almost limitless:

I agree that it is difficult, it is very difficult, for the President of the United States to resist the impulse to intervene when he has people, many people, calling on him to do something. But it's precisely because we have so much power, and because the temptation to use it is almost overwhelming, that a president has to have extraordinary discipline and say: "No. I was elected by the people of the United States to protect them, to keep this country safe and security, and if a mission does not advance those ends I will not do it."

That is not the counsel of despair, and the counsel of inaction. On the contrary, there are many other countries, especially those in Libya's immediate neighborhood, that have both a compelling  national security rationale and a moral rationale [to intervene]. And it's precisely the combination of those factors that we, the United States, should have encouraged in the past, and we could have encouraged in this particular case. Instead, other countries waited for the United States to act,...

Caleb Brown, Cato Audio: And just the possibility the U.S. will act probably puts a lot of countries on the sideline...

Me: That's correct.... Because of the expectation that the United States will act, it causes other people to wait it out. And sometimes, tragically, they wait it out too long. Because, again, the United States does not always intervene. There are a number of cases where we have not. And I fear that we have set up a system where, if the United States doesn't act, nothing gets done, and I don't think that's the right approach. I think there are alternatives that will use other countries' legitimate security interests to advance humanitarian ends.

You can listen to the whole clip here.