Mattis Shines a Poor Light on the Obama White House

My previous post focused on the unnoticed irony involved in the appointment of James N. Mattis as President Trump’s Defense Secretary, given the Obama administration’s treatment of him when he was head of the U.S. Central Command.  But the Mattis story also underscores two other themes articulated in a number of earlier posts.  The first point regards the utter disingenuousness of President Obama’s once-regular threats to use military force to stop Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.  The second is about the dysfunctional character of the Obama national security process.

A recent Washington Post report about the relationship between General Mattis and the Obama White House emphasizes the overriding priority Mr. Obama put on reaching an accommodation with Iran over its atomic ambitions.  In the summer of 2011, Mattis proposed to undertake a military strike against Iran in retaliation for the causalities Tehran-backed militias were inflicting on U.S. forces in Iraq.  The plan reportedly prompted “heated discussions” in Washington that “stretched out for weeks” before it was ultimately rejected by President Obama.  As the newspaper notes, Mattis concluded from the episode that “Obama White House was unwilling to take the fight directly to the Iranians, even when they drew American blood.”

More ructions between Mattis and the White House soon followed.  A second “heated debate” took place during late 2011 and early 2012 when Mattis asked for contingent permission to take preemptive action against any Iranian attempt to mine the strategically-critical Strait of Hormuz.  As the Obama team began to engage in multilateral talks with Iran in the summer of 2012, Mattis further raised hackles by “relentlessly [drilling] the U.S. military’s war plan for Iran” and by emphasizing in his reports to Washington the destabilizing role Tehran was playing in the Middle East, including its support for terrorism.

By early 2013, tensions had grown such that Mattis was unceremoniously removed from his post.  Although the Obama administration did not present his ouster as a rebuke, Mattis is reportedly convinced that “he had been dismissed early for running afoul of the White House.” Dennis Ross, who was then Obama’s point person on Iran policy, is also quoted in the newspaper as saying:

It was a kind of culture clash.  There was such a preoccupation in the White House with not doing things that would provoke Iran or be seen as provocative. Mattis was, by definition, inclined toward doing those things that would be seen as provocative. And as time went by, this became increasingly less acceptable to them [emphasis added].

It is, of course, a president’s prerogative to choose his own military commanders and dictate the perimeters of their conduct.  But note the striking disjunction between what was going on behind the scenes with Mattis and what Mr. Obama was publicly saying in 2012.  In that year’s State of the Union address, the president stated that “America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.”  In a media interview shortly afterwards, he emphasized that he was not bluffing about the military option and that “when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.”  “I don’t bluff,” he emphatically insisted. Obama then followed this up with a hard-hitting address to the American Israel Political Action Committee, an influential lobbying group in Washington, stressing that “when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say.”

This blog has long been suspicious (see here and here) of the sincerity of the threats President Obama was making at this time about his willingness to undertake military action, if necessary, to curb Iran’s nuclear program.  The Washington Post report further reinforces these doubts.

The Mattis story also exemplifies a regular criticism made about the Obama policy-making process – that his national security inner team was not above squelching dissenting views or insulating him from unpalatable news.  Commenting on Mattis’s ouster from CENTCOM, Thomas E. Ricks, a defense journalist generally sympathetic to the administration, exclaimed at the time that “The message the Obama Administration is sending, intentionally or not, is that it doesn’t like tough, smart, skeptical generals who speak candidly to their civilian superiors.”

A number of previous posts (here, here, here and here) have detailed the Obama White House’s intolerance of critical advice, even when it came from inside the administration.  And the Washington Post article bolsters this point, quoting Leon E. Panetta, who was Defense Secretary at the time, as saying about the debate triggered by Mattis’s plans for retaliating against Iran:

There were clearly White House staff who thought the recommendations he was making were too aggressive.  But I thought a lot of that was, frankly, not having the maturity to look at all of the options that a president should look at in order to make the right decisions [emphasis added].

Senate Democrats heaped high praise on Mattis during his confirmation hearing because they saw his experience as something that will add stability and balance to the new Trump team.  But they showed no awareness that his story also illuminates the real deficiencies of President Obama’s national security policies.

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The Irony of the Mattis Appointment

The easy confirmation of James N. Mattis as President Trump’s Defense Secretary entails no small amount of irony.  Senate Democrats perceive the retired Marine general as someone who will speak unvarnished truth to a new White House team they fear will try to insulate Mr. Trump from unpalatable news and disagreeable perspectives.  But left unremarked upon is that his earlier tenure as the head of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, was cut short by the Obama administration for doing precisely that.

Read the full essay at Fair Observer.

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Obama’s Disinterest in Europe: An Update

Two earlier posts (here and here) argued that President Barack Obama has largely been disinterested in America’s European allies.  Although this view attracted criticism from those insisting I exaggerated the case, evidence has continued to roll in buttressing my position.

The newest piece of proof comes courtesy of DC Leaks, a website that has posted materials purloined from, among others, the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.  Included in its collection are emails hacked from the personal Gmail account of General Philip Breedlove, who until recently served as NATO’s supreme military commander.

Two of Breedlove’s notes are particularly striking.  In the first, he writes to Colin Powell in September 2014, six months after Russia’s seizure of the Crimea peninsula, seeking the former U.S. Secretary of State’s assistance in re-energizing the Obama administration’s focus on European affairs.  Breedlove confides that “I do not see this [White House] as really ‘engaged’ on Europe/NATO.”

A second note in March 2015 concerns the extraordinary snub Mr. Obama had just delivered to Jens Stoltenberg, who months earlier had been appointed as NATO’s secretary general.  Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Susan Rice, Obama’s national security advisor, all passed up a chance to confer with Stoltenberg during his visit to Washington even as Russian depredations against Ukraine continued.  According to a media report, Stoltenberg requested a meeting with Obama well in advance of the visit but never heard back from the White House.

Commenting on the incident, Breedlove laments to a friend that “This is a mess.  I do not understand our [White House].”

At a NATO summit two months ago, Obama declared that “in good times and in bad, Europe can count on the United States – always.”  But many of his actions have registered the opposite message, so much so that the chairman of the German parliament’s foreign affairs committee even blames the president for begetting Donald Trump’s skepticism of the NATO alliance.  (For a similar view by a U.S. foreign policy pundit, see here.)

Eight years ago, Mr. Obama won over European hearts by promising not to conduct himself like George W. Bush and the continent gratefully responded by awarding him a Nobel peace prize in the mere anticipation he would live up to his promise.  He has indeed been true to his word, though very much not in a way European leaders had hoped.  Reflecting on Obama’s legacy for U.S.-European relations, Ana Palacio, a former foreign minister of Spain, recently concluded that “the lasting impression that Barack Obama will leave us [Europeans] with is one of disenchantment.”

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Obama and Europe’s Lament

My post a year ago about the breakdown in President Obama’s relations with European leaders elicited pushback from those insisting I exaggerated the discord.  But on-going developments have only bolstered my case.

Consider the report a few months ago by John Vinocur, formerly executive editor of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune (now re-named the International New York Times).  He noted a growing disenchantment among European political and policy elites with the caliber of Mr. Obama’s leadership on policy toward Russia as well as an increased willingness to give public expression to this view.  “The U.S. president is getting openly dissed,” is how he put it.  Moreover, the absence of American leadership was causing European officials to see no alternative but to make accommodations with Moscow.

A similar assessment is offered by Roger Cohen, formerly the New York Times’ foreign editor and Berlin bureau chief, who now writes an op-ed column.  In a piece earlier this month, he excoriated President Obama’s approach toward Syria for, among other things, contributing to “a potential unraveling of the core of the European Union as internal borders eliminated on a free continent are re-established as a response to an unrelenting refugee tide…”

Cohen quotes a senior European diplomat as saying: “The Syrian crisis is now a European crisis.  But the president is not interested in Europe.” Cohen adds: “That is a fair assessment of the first postwar American leader for whom the core trans-Atlantic alliance was something to be dutifully upheld rather than emotionally embraced.”

Likewise, Josh Rogin at Bloomberg View reports that the consensus among European officials and experts attending this year’s Munich Security Conference is that the Obama administration is simply unwilling to do anything substantial to address the multiple crises gripping the region.  He quotes a French policy leader as stating: “There is a growing sense that this U.S. administration is focused on establishing a legacy on what has already been achieved rather than trying to achieve anything more.”

Rogin adds…

During the first day of the conference, the U.S. role in Europe was hardly mentioned in the public sessions. In the private sessions, many participants told me that European governments are not only resigned to a lack of American assertiveness, they also are now reluctantly accepting a Russia that is more present than ever in European affairs, and not for the better.

Nine years ago, when Mr. Obama first embarked on his presidential campaign he differentiated himself from George W. Bush by stressing a determination to rebuild U.S. alliances with other countries.  And on the night when he was elected to the Oval Office he pledged that “a new dawn of American leadership” was at hand.  European leaders these days must wonder whatever happened to that guy.

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Obama’s Disingenuousness on Iran: A Postscript

This blog has regularly thrown doubt on the sincerity of President Obama’s past vows about being prepared to resort to military force in order to prevent Iran’s nuclear ambitions.  So it’s worth noting a New York Times article the other week surveying the various factors that could have pushed Tehran toward the just-implemented nuclear agreement with the United States.

The newspaper credits the inducements held out by Secretary of State John Kerry’s diplomatic engagement, as well as the coercive effects of economic sanctions and covert programs aimed at sabotaging Iran’s nuclear weapons effort.  Another factor, according to the Times, was the threat of preventative military action – though by Israel but not the United States.

The Israeli factor was tangible enough.  Ehud Barak, who served as defense minister in Prime Minister’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s government from 2009-2013, revealed last year that Israel came close on several occasions to launching unilateral military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

According to an October 2014 report in The Atlantic, U.S. officials were convinced in 2010 and again in 2012, that “Netanyahu and his then-defense minister, the cowboyish ex-commando Ehud Barak, were readying a strike on Iran….the fear inside the White House of a preemptive attack (or preventative attack, to put it more accurately) was real and palpable.”

Referring to these occasions, the New York Times piece quotes Michael Morell, who recently retired as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, as saying “Before the negotiations for the nuclear deal began [in 2013] we were closer to war with the Islamic Republic than at any time since 1979.”  The newspaper also notes:

Mr. Obama had little doubt that if Israel started a conflict, the United States would be unable to stay out. That was the conclusion of a series of classified war-gaming exercises conducted at the National War College, at the Pentagon and inside American intelligence agencies.

It is difficult to discern what effect the fear of Israeli action had on Tehran’s calculus.  But its impact on Washington is already known.  In the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations two years ago, President Obama announced that the U.S. would no longer intercept the communications of allied leaders.  But a secret exception was made for Mr. Netanyahu, since the White House was convinced he would attack Iran without first bothering to consult with Washington.

Satellite surveillance of Israeli military bases was also stepped up after the U.S. concluded that Israeli aircraft had probed Iranian air defenses in preparation for a commando raid on Iran’s most heavily guarded nuclear facility.  And the U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military forces in the Middle East, began monitoring weather patterns and the phases of the moon over Iran, trying to predict the exact night of the coming Israeli attack.

All of this evidence further reinforces my earlier conclusion that Obama’s threat to pick up the cudgel of military action was a rhetorical device aimed more at restraining the Israeli government than pressuring the Iranian one.

This post is jointly published at International Policy Digest.

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Obama’s Disingenuousness on Iran

Depending on one’s perspective, President Obama’s address at American University earlier this month was either a rousing defense of the Iran nuclear agreement or an egregious instance of political demagoguery. But one thing the speech underscores with certainty is that Mr. Obama’s earlier vows that he was prepared to use military force to prevent Tehran’s atomic ambitions were disingenuous.

Now that the Iranian nuclear agreement is complete, Mr. Obama’s lack of sincerity is equally apparent in his insistence that the deal’s rejection would put America on the path toward another major conflict in the Middle East.

Read the rest of the essay at The Diplomat.

In a series of posts in 2012 and 2013 (see here, here, here and here), I voiced my skepticism about the credibility of the Obama administration’s tough talk.  As I noted then, a chorus of distinguished Middle East experts insisted I had it wrong.  Dennis Ross, who oversaw White House policy toward Tehran for a good part of Mr. Obama’s first term, commented that “I think there’s the stomach in this administration, and this president, that if diplomacy fails [to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons] — to use force.”  Elliott Abrams, a former deputy national security advisor to President George W. Bush and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, concurred, as did James F. Jeffrey, who oversaw Iran policy in the Bush White House before serving as the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad from 2010-2012.  And Michael Crowley at Time magazine took the same line, describing Obama as “entirely prepared for war with Iran.”

But in light of events over the past few years, I claim vindication on this point.

UPDATE, August 26: Writing today in Real Clear World, Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert who has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, argues that President Obama’s policy in the region is characterized by “high-flying rhetoric” and “making commitments upon which he cannot deliver.”  He notes:

When you do not or will not act, words become substitutes for deeds. Part of the problem may be that the administration sees the world the way it wants it to be, not the way it really is. Perhaps part of the issue is a desire to deflect pressure by the use of bold words. Whatever the explanation, to have credibility in foreign policy you must say what you mean, and mean what you say. Sadly, far too many times, the Obama administration has done exactly the opposite.

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Obama’s NATO Snub is a Familiar Story

This month’s headlines chronicling the breakdown in U.S.-Israeli affairs and the personal disdain between President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have overshadowed the continuing dysfunctions in Washington’s relations with its traditional allies in Europe.

Josh Rogin at Bloomberg View reports that Mr. Obama has delivered what can only be regarded as an extraordinary snub to Jens Stoltenberg, who became the head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization six months ago.  Obama is one of the few Western leaders not yet to have met with Stoltenberg and has deliberately passed up a chance to see him this week when Stoltenberg is in Washington.  Rogin notes that the NATO chief was able to arrange a last-minute meeting with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, though he requested a meeting with Obama well in advance of the visit but never heard back from the White House.

The upshot is that Obama is missing a good opportunity to firm up NATO solidarity in the face of Moscow’s on-going predations against Ukraine.  As Rogin concludes, “the message Russian President Vladimir Putin will take away is that the White House-NATO relationship is rocky, and he will be right.”  Moreover, given that Stoltenberg is a two-time prime minister of Norway, a meeting would have sent a powerful message to Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Denmark that are facing increased Russian provocations (here, here and here).

As I noted in an earlier post, Mr. Obama’s disinterest in America’s European allies is a long-standing story.  Beyond the foreign policy consequences of how the president has mismanaged relations with the continent, a surfeit of irony is also at work.  His promise to repair the damaged ties caused by the acrimony over the Iraq war guaranteed him euphoric welcomes in Berlin in July 2008 and in Prague the following spring.  Speaking before a massive crowd assembled in Berlin’s “Tiergarten” (speech text here; video here), he grandly vowed to “remake the world once again,” this time in a way that allies would “listen to each other, learn from each other and, most of all, trust each other.”  That pledge is now so yesterday that some European leaders are reportedly longing for the days of George W. Bush.

[UPDATE, April 1: A more detailed version of this post is now up on The National Interest‘s website.]

[UPDATE, February 15, 2016: According to a new Bloomberg View report, the consensus among European officials and experts attending this year’s Munich Security Conference is that the Obama administration is prepared to continue sitting on the sidelines as the continent grapples with a series of critical issues.

Also worth noting is last week’s column in the New York Times by Roger Cohen, the newspaper’s former foreign editor.  He quotes a senior European diplomat as saying that Mr. Obama “is not interested in Europe.”  Cohen adds “That is a fair assessment of the first postwar American leader for whom the core trans-Atlantic alliance was something to be dutifully upheld rather than emotionally embraced.”]

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Obama’s National Security Orphans

Even before he arrived at the White House, much was made about President Obama’s readiness to seek out wide-ranging opinions and employ a “Team of Rivals” for his decision-making.  But as my last two posts (here and here) argue, his reliance once in the Oval Office on an ever-tighter circle of advisers has actually stifled the flow of creative ideas and alternative perspectives that are vital to a well-functioning policy apparatus in the White House.  Two recent news items further underscore this point.

The first is a cover story in The Atlantic’s January/February issue.  It relates that in the spring of 2011 Mr. Obama asked Gary Hart, the former U.S. Senator and military reform expert, to bring together a small working group to generate proposals on reshaping the Pentagon in the event he won re-election.  Among other experts whom Hart roped in was Norman R. Augustine, the widely-respected former chairman & CEO of Lockheed Martin who earlier in his career served as acting Secretary of the Army.  The group produced its report and then never heard back from Obama.

This is a regular theme for Obama.  Ahmed Rashid, a distinguished Pakistani journalist, recounts that Obama’s first presidential campaign recruited a strong expert team on AfPak issues (including Rashid) and then all but ignored it.  He did even not bother to consult it prior to his July 2008 trip to Afghanistan during which he made the amateurish mistake of meeting first with one of Hamid Karzai’s political rivals, needlessly antagonizing the insecure Afghan leader and setting the tone for his administration’s deeply strained ties with its wartime partner in Kabul.

A few weeks following his November 2008 election, Obama announced the formation of a high-level panel of private citizens, chaired by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, to advise him on economic policy.  Explaining the group’s mission, the president-elect declared:

The reality is that sometimes policymaking in Washington can become too insular. The walls of the echo chamber can sometimes keep out fresh voices and new ways of thinking–and those who serve in Washington don’t always have a ground-level sense of which programs and policies are working for people, and which aren’t.

But once the board started work, Volcker became disillusioned with the White House’s propensity to use it as a public relations exercise rather than a mechanism for policy ideas.  In early 2011, the board was reconfigured.  Volcker was not consulted on this step and he was unceremoniously replaced as chairman by General Electric’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt.  The new group, however, was not especially active – a condition the White House press secretary said was due to the fact that Mr. Obama was too busy to meet with it.  In the end, the administration decided not to renew its charter and its existence came to an unheralded end once the president was re-elected.

The second news item worthy of note is a post on The National Interest’s website by Lawrence J. Korb, who very early signed on to the first Obama presidential campaign and helped lead its military policy advisory team.  He notes that the 300 national security experts who served on a volunteer basis with the campaign took a considerable career risk since the Hillary Clinton campaign threatened to marginalize them if she ended up in the Oval Office.  Yet for all of their troubles, almost none of them were subsequently drafted into the Obama administration.  Instead, the new president opted to fill the national security bureaucracy with Clinton supporters and Bush holdovers.  A media account back then reported that Korb wrote the president to encourage him to look toward his own bench but never heard back.

Instead of tearing down the walls of the echo chamber, as Mr. Obama once pledged, his administration’s instinct has been to build them up higher.  Domestic affairs and foreign policy have suffered alike as a result.  Unfortunately, the problem is only becoming worse, since the president has now stopped interacting with all but his most loyal staffers.

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The Real Problem in Washington is Obama’s Management Style

Steven Brill, a distinguished journalist with liberal political leanings, was on National Public Radio last week giving an overview of his new book about Obamacare’s bitter politics and disastrous rollout.  His remarks (audio and transcript here) reinforce the points I’ve made in my last post about how the management problems long undermining the Obama White House will derail the president’s hope of using the next two years to shore up his policy legacy.

Brill is particularly critical of the White House’s role in overseeing Obamacare’s botched launch in the fall of 2013.  He related in the radio interview that he received seven different answers from administration officials when he asked in the months leading up to the rollout who was ultimately in charge.  He exclaimed that “there have [sic] never been a group of people who more incompetently [launched] something.”  He emphasized that Obama’s tightly-knit inner circle – and especially Valerie Jarrett, who seems to function as Obama’s consigliere – shielded the president from numerous signals warning that all was not well.  As a result, Obama failed in the most basic task as a manager, since “he did not know what was going on in the single most important initiative of his administration.”

I’ve noted earlier that there are common themes connecting the Obamacare fiasco and the White House’s dysfunctional national security apparatus.  Brill’s remarks underscore a major one: The president’s closest confidants squelch the flow of bad news and dissenting advice into the Oval Office.

Criticism of Jarrett’s extraordinary influence on policymaking has risen as administration setbacks multiply.  Early on, a long profile in the New York Times magazine dubbed her “the ultimate Obama insider” while a review in the New Republic two months ago called her the “Obama Whisperer.”  Brill reports he’s heard from five senior administration officials that Jarrett is the “real chief of staff” in the White House on many issues.  And according to a top Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill, she is “not only Rasputin” – referring to the mystical figure who served as a private adviser to the last Russian czar – but also “the Berlin Wall preventing us from even getting messages to the president.”

It’s similar story for Denis R. McDonough, a former Obama campaign official who now serves as the White House chief of staff.  Two years ago I questioned whether he was the right choice for the job given that the criticism he attracted for running a very sloppy and politicized shop when he was the president’s deputy national security advisor.  Several months before the Obamacare launch, Time magazine reported that the West Wing under McDonough was fully focused on the rollout and that McDonough himself was spending two hours a day on it.  Brill adds that on the evening before the October 2013 launch, McDonough was reassuring everyone in sight that the website would work even more spectacularly than advertised.

In the weeks following the bungled rollout, Obama acknowledged that “We have to ask ourselves some hard questions inside the White House.”  Ron Fournier at the National Journal opined that the president needed “to fire himself.  Not literally, of course, but practically.  He needs to shake up his team so thoroughly that the new blood imposes change on how he manages the federal bureaucracy and leads.”  Given his central role, some observers speculated that the axe would fall quickly on McDonough though in the end he managed to emerge from the episode unscathed.

The sharp rebuke the White House suffered two months ago in the midterm congressional elections occasioned a similar spat of advice.  A piece in Politico counseled the president to dump Jarrett, while Dana Milbank at the Washington Post urged him to sweep the White House clean of the yes-men culture personified by McDonough and Jarrett.  Instead, Obama has now reportedly stopped interacting with most of his advisers in favor of closeting just with McDonough and Jarrett.

As I wrote last week, the problem with all the talk about Obama now being free to pursue the policy agenda he’s always wanted is that he is only as good as the people he relies upon and the management style he’s installed in the White House.  Until the president realizes this, he’ll find the next two years to be as frustrating as the previous ones.  Domestic affairs will suffer, but so will U.S. foreign policy.

UPDATE, January 15: Writing today on the Daily Beast website, Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, underscores the points made above.  He argues that the White House’s failure to send President Obama or Vice President Biden to last weekend’s Paris unity march …

… demonstrated beyond argument that the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national security policy in the next two years. It’s simply too dangerous to let Mr. Obama continue as is—with his current team and his way of making decisions.

He advises that “Mr. Obama will have to excuse most of his inner core, especially in the White House. He will have to replace them with strong and strategic people of proven foreign policy experience.”  He adds that …

… Mr. Obama will have to thank his senior National Security Council team and replace them. The must-gos include National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, chief speech writer/adviser Ben Rhodes, and foreign policy guru without portfolio Valerie Jarrett.  He will have to replace them with strong and strategic people of proven foreign policy experience.

UPDATE, January 20: In a television interview today, Denis McDonough took responsibility for the decision not to send a high-level representative to the Paris unity march.

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Why Should We Expect Obama to be Any Better in 2015?

The new narrative among political pundits is that President Obama finished 2014 on an unexpected high note that will carry over into the new year.  Yet as I argue in an essay now up on Fair Observer’s website, this view overlooks the leadership dysfunctions and management problems that have long plagued the Obama administration and which will surely trip it up going forward.  The president has done little to suggest that he will fix the policy-making machinery inside the White House that has been widely criticized as chaotic and excessively centralized.

Nor does Mr. Obama recognize how deficient his leadership skills are.  Leon E. Panetta, the Democratic Party’s elder statesman who served as his second Pentagon chief, highlighted this inadequacy in the memoir he published last fall, particularly what he calls the president’s “most conspicuous weakness” – “a frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause.”  Obama, he added, sometimes lacks fire, preferring instead to rely “on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.”  As a result, Obama “avoids the battle, complains, and misses opportunities.”

Just before the memoir’s release, a senior administration official conceded Panetta’s point, acknowledging that the president’s leadership style was “much more that of the lawyer than the CEO.”  Indeed, as I’ve noted in earlier posts (here and here), Obama’s detachment from the policy process and his inability to build personal rapport with counterparts and allies continue to bedevil his administration.

Recent testimony of this was contained in a series of media accounts that laid bare the tensions existing between the White House and Capitol Hill Democrats.  A New York Times report in August, for example, noted that “nearly six years into his term, with his popularity at the lowest of his presidency, Mr. Obama appears remarkably distant from his own party on Capitol Hill, with his long neglect of would-be allies catching up to him.”  The extraordinary public grumbling by Senate Democrats after the disastrous mid-term elections only reinforced this view.

All of this does not bode well for the president.  A Washington Post columnist notes that “As he looks toward his final two years, Obama is looking toward a Congress with few friends, and many enemies, on both sides of the aisle.”  The foreign policy implications of this are stark.  As one observer argues, Obama’s domestic weakness sends…

“… a message to allies and rivals alike around the world that the president will not necessarily be able to keep any promises that he or his team might make. He will not be seen therefore, as credible when he asserts plans or proposes initiatives that require Congressional funding or approval.”

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