[Yet over the past year, there has been a broad sense that the
effort has stalled, along with several others. And in his speech on Wednesday,
Mr. Obama said nothing about the opportunity cost of his strategy: How would he
ensure that 60 percent of America’s military might is in the Pacific — the goal
the Pentagon has laid out — while ramping up the fight in Iraq and Syria? How
would he square that with the commitment he made just a week ago to bolster
NATO in Eastern Europe, part of another long-term effort, to contain Vladimir
V. Putin’s Russia? Or his desire to focus the world on longer-term threats like
global warming and cyber attacks?]
By David
E. Sanger
 |
|
Shiite militia members in Amerli, Iraq, last week. The fight
against ISIS has reordered
President Obama’s global priorities. Credit Andrea
Bruce for The New York Times
|
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s decision to engage in a lengthy
battle to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria reorders the global
priorities of his final years in office. The mystery is whether it will deprive
him of the legacy he had once hoped would define his second term, or enhance it
instead.
Until now, Mr. Obama’s No. 1 priority in the Middle East has
been clear: preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Israeli officials, who by happenstance arrived in Washington
this week for their regular “strategic dialogue,” immediately argued that ISIS
was a distraction from that priority. Their fear is that the Iranians, finding
themselves on the same side of the fight against ISIS as the United States,
would use it as leverage to extract concessions from the president.
“ISIL is a five-year problem,” Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s
strategic affairs minister, said a few hours before Mr. Obama addressed the nation on Wednesday night, using the acronym
the Obama administration employs to describe the Sunni extremist group. “A
nuclear Iran is a 50-year problem,” he said, “with far greater impact.”
Other Israeli officials warned the Obama administration that the
new American operation would bolster Iran’s ambitions for regional dominance.
Mr. Steinitz may prove to be right. The Bush administration’s
decision to invade Iraq 11 years ago distracted it from many things — notably
the war in Afghanistan — and Iran used that time to vastly expand its capacity
to produce nuclear fuel. But there is a counter theory as well: that a
president who for five years made clear that he was looking for a way out of
the bog of the Middle East may have a chance to re-establish American
credibility in the region if the strategy he described on Wednesday night is
well executed.
“If this goes well, and the United States is seen as acting
effectively, it could generate political capital,” said Richard N. Haass, who
served in the administration of the first President George Bush — the
coalition-builder Mr. Obama says he most admires — as well as that of George W.
Bush. “There’s the chance it will be something of an investment in the region.
But that is going to require constant rudder checks, to make sure the
administration’s broader goals do not go off course.”
It is the fear of veering off course that most haunts Mr.
Obama’s current and former top national security aides. Even before the rise of
ISIS, they looked at the calendar and worried.
Mr. Obama once saw the reorientation of American focus to the
Pacific as his greatest long-term contribution to “rebalancing” American
priorities. Tom Donilon, a former national security adviser to Mr. Obama, often
described it this way: “We inherited a world in which we were overinvested in
the Middle East and underinvested in Asia.”
In setting out to conduct the rebalancing, Mr. Obama argued that
America’s long-term economic interests and prosperity lie in how it manages
China’s rise. By implication, the Middle East was an economic drag and a
military sinkhole.
Yet over the past year, there has been a broad sense that the
effort has stalled, along with several others. And in his speech on Wednesday,
Mr. Obama said nothing about the opportunity cost of his strategy: How would he
ensure that 60 percent of America’s military might is in the Pacific — the goal
the Pentagon has laid out — while ramping up the fight in Iraq and Syria? How
would he square that with the commitment he made just a week ago to bolster
NATO in Eastern Europe, part of another long-term effort, to contain Vladimir
V. Putin’s Russia? Or his desire to focus the world on longer-term threats like
global warming and cyberattacks?
So far, Mr. Obama’s national security team has suggested that
the efforts are not mutually exclusive. They note that the Pentagon has
maintained a counterterrorism program in Yemen and Somalia, the two efforts Mr.
Obama compared to the operation against ISIS, while the C.I.A. has run a larger
operation, under covert-action authorities, against Al Qaeda and the Pakistani
Taliban inside Pakistan.
But the goal of degrading and ultimately destroying ISIS
requires an effort of a different scale. It goes beyond the “light footprint”
strategy that the president used in his first term, which included hundreds of
drone attacks against targets in Pakistan and Yemen, a cyberattack on Iran’s
nuclear facilities, and the use of special forces against pirates, terrorist
cells and Osama bin Laden.
Mr. Obama on Wednesday described a far more sustained effort, in
which building and sustaining a coalition, and training Arab forces at a new
base in Saudi Arabia, will take time and constant attention.
For the Chinese, this is most likely good news. One recently
retired Chinese general noted during the Iraq war that America always seems to
let the urgent blowups in the Middle East distract it from the slow, grinding
shifts of power in Asia. Unless Mr. Obama backs away from his commitment to
shrink the Pentagon budget, it is hard to understand how the United States will
be able to do all he would like to do.
How this will affect Iran is a far more complex question.
Mr. Obama never mentioned Iran in his speech. But it has been a
frequent subject of conversation inside the Situation Room and at the
off-the-record previews of his strategy that Mr. Obama has held for a stream of
foreign policy experts and journalists. The new effort, senior administration
officials say, certainly puts them on the same side of the fight as the
Iranians, who reportedly have put their elite Quds Force on the ground.
“We don’t plan to be Iran’s air force in this battle, any more
than we plan to be Assad’s air force,” one senior official said on Wednesday,
referring to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
But the Iranians are already testing whether America’s newest
imperative will give it maneuvering room in the negotiations over its nuclear
program. With a reported new energy and trade deal, Iran is trying to split
Russia away from the coalition of six powers that are negotiating with Tehran.
The Iranians have missed deadlines to turn over material about
suspected military dimensions of their program to the International Atomic
Energy Agency. And Iran’s leaders have made clear that they do not plan to give
ground on the main issue that is supposed to be resolved by a Nov. 24 deadline:
the fate of Iran’s ability to enrich uranium.
“The Iranians may well
think we need them to help defeat ISIS and that this will make us more
accommodating in the nuclear negotiations,” said Robert Einhorn of the
Brookings Institution, who had responsibility for enforcing sanctions. “If they
do think that, it is an illusion.”
The administration so far is trying to keep the issues
compartmentalized. It says it is “communicating” with Iran about ISIS, but not
coordinating action. There is a “commonality of interest” in defeating Sunni
extremists, one administration official said, that should give Tehran and
Washington a mutual cause.
But the dance required in confronting Iran’s nuclear ambitions
and taking the same side in a regional battle is complex, just part of a
foreign policy agenda for Mr. Obama’s last 28 months in office that looks
little like the one he had imagined.
