Having just finished Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, I appreciated the chance to get his perspective on the years of his first administration. Perhaps the most consistent substantive point that struck me is the difficult and ambiguous balance between pressing a decision maker to go further on an issue like climate change and hampering that person by fracturing their support or rejecting the best available compromise. As Obama himself points out several times, it isn’t a question with a single straightforward answer. He both expresses his frustration with people who sapped support for his best efforts by demanding more and acknowledged that the science of climate change demanded more than he was able to do. He certainly provides a great deal of insight into the practical and political constraints, including the major barriers that climate change has been of lower priority to almost everybody than more immediate and practical issues like economic performance, and the difficulty in getting people to see effort and resources expended to avoid a bad outcome when compared with efforts to achieve short-term and immediate purposes.
The book documents with dismay the breakdown between verifiable facts and both public opinion and political reporting, without suggesting much about what could be done about it. Ominously, he quotes Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh saying: “In uncertain times, Mr. President, the call of religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating. And it’s not so hard for politicians to exploit that, in India or anywhere else.” In a century where our destabilized climate is sure to produce more and more instability, we need to find a way to cooperate and take the long view.
Was there an Obama grand strategy? Not really. In its place we find a kind of incremental ad-hocism, a pragmatic tendency to take things as they come, one by one, together with a wariness of unforeseen consequences and a recognition of America’s limited ability to remake the world. Yet a certain faith in American exceptionalism also seeps through the pages. “This much was true, though,” he writes. “At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States could legitimately claim that the international order we had forged and the principles we had promoted—a Pax Americana—had helped bring about a world in which billions of people were freer, more secure, and more prosperous than before” (329). And elsewhere: “[A]t every international forum I attended…even those who complained about America’s role in the world still relied on us to keep the system afloat” (339).
As our reviewers make clear, even at seven hundred pages, A Promised Land is far from a full-fledged account of Obama’s early interactions with the world. On nuclear policy, for example, the book is mostly silent, even though it consumed abundant time and attention in the administration’s first years. In the same way, key aspects of the US response to the Arab Spring go unaddressed. Readers hoping for an in-depth or even a cursory assessment of Obama’s fraught relationship with Richard Holbrooke will come away disappointed. (The former top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gets but one passing mention.) Most important, we learn not nearly enough about Obama’s late 2009 decision to escalate US military involvement in Afghanistan. “Why did Obama settle on a half-way solution that gave none of the major contenders what they wanted?” Lebovic rightly asks. “Even as Obama opted for additional troops, he had his eye on withdrawal. So, why the troop increase?”
https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/10079498/h-diplo-roundtable-xxiii-33-obama%C2%A0-promised-land