"How many times did one of your friends (or even your own otherwise sensible mind) hint that the election of Barack Obama would further the cause of international harmony? Maybe not in so many words, and maybe not with the same fervor that warmed the freezing throng at last month’s inaugural. But with George Bush advertising our fears as if they were virtues and offering up American lives on the battlefield in greater numbers than any other president in recent memory, you were ready to believe that, yes, we could.
Never mind that whatever Obama’s proclivities or inclinations, in matters of national security he can hardly be said to have evinced firm principles. Never mind that for all of its calamitous turns, the Bush administration was presented with a series of challenges that it could hardly have anticipated and to which it was obliged to respond. Never mind, finally, that the scope of action implied in Obama’s foreign-policy rhetoric — really a simple narrative of material progress and moral improvement—is as familiar as it is illusory. He offered an escape clause. And we took it.
Never mind that whatever Obama’s proclivities or inclinations, in matters of national security he can hardly be said to have evinced firm principles. Never mind that for all of its calamitous turns, the Bush administration was presented with a series of challenges that it could hardly have anticipated and to which it was obliged to respond. Never mind, finally, that the scope of action implied in Obama’s foreign-policy rhetoric — really a simple narrative of material progress and moral improvement—is as familiar as it is illusory. He offered an escape clause. And we took it.
The belief that a change of presidential administration can, by itself, sweep up the detritus of the last eight years, much less that of the last century, is of course ludicrous. Obama may believe he can undo what he calls “a foreign policy based on a flawed ideology,” but what if the moralism and militarism embedded in that ideology are, far from being a decisive break from American tradition, a continuation of it? What if this legacy creates an interest in maintaining the status quo, and Obama enjoys less room to maneuver than he desires?
In this sense, even the title of David Sanger’s quick-paced chronicle, “The Inheritance,” offers a corrective: Obama will not craft anew; he will inherit. “The world he is inheriting from Bush will constrain his choices more than he has acknowledged, and certainly more than the throngs of supporters believed as they waved their signs proclaiming CHANGE,” Sanger writes, with justifiable asperity.
Will American normalcy be restored? Absolutely not. It is “illusion” to imagine that “with George W. Bush retired in Texas, America will now sheath the Big Stick.” Will there be a respite abroad? Probably not. Only a naïf “thinks the Iranians will give up their nuclear program without the lingering concern that bombers may appear over the skies” of their reactors. Can nothing budge the habits of American statecraft? Not really, given that “the crises may be too plentiful and the accompanying expectations may be too high” for Obama to steer an honestly new course. His more excitable lieutenants, with a conviction that things are the other way around, are just as likely to perpetuate Washington’s strategic bankruptcy.
Custom may oblige the president and his chief associates to offer assurances that they can competently guide the fortunes of our superpower. But, as Sanger’s reports of the Bush years make clear, that custom is contrived and largely fanciful. American presidents tend to enter office with a sense of historical agency, and usually too much of it. Such hubris often ensnarls them in troubling moral and strategic complications. Abraham Lincoln, for one, had a different sense of the world around him: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” he wrote to a friend in 1864.Obama, Sanger seems to suggest, would do well to heed the caution of his fellow legislator from Illinois.
Sanger does not invite us to indulge in the conceit that the United States needs no grand strategy (he spells out a dozen or so). But he does invite us to duck and cover. Iran’s nuclear program offers a case in point. Plots in Washington, the C.I.A.’s “science experiments” to throw a wrench in Tehran’s plans, Israel’s evident willingness to bomb Iran outright — these schemes leave Sanger cold. “If we stay on the current path,” he concludes, “Iran is getting the bomb.”
In Sanger’s telling, a comparable disconnect between claims and reality has characterized almost every diplomatic or military venture the Bush administration has undertaken. In Afghanistan, where Sanger watches a nation coming apart at the seams, we meet Gen. Dan McNeill. A chart in his office illustrates “what America’s allies were unwilling to do — go out on patrol far from camp, or travel beyond their assigned sector, even if fellow NATO troops were in trouble in a firefight.”
In Pakistan, too, the United States has become caught in a bind of its own devising. In the murky aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration pinned its hopes on Pervez Musharraf. Reviled at home and increasingly suspect in Washington, Musharraf found his writ was eventually supplanted by United States air strikes. “The problem of Pakistan comes down to this,” a Bush aide tells Sanger. “How do you invade an ally?”
Sanger has a knack for getting administration officials to leak like sieves, though he never advertises his access. His discussion of North Korea’s lunatic kingdom is especially revealing. Even as United States spy satellites were orbiting in search of Iraq’s stockpiles, Koreans were erecting a nuclear reactor less than a hundred miles away in Syria. “Had a few other things on our mind,” an American official concedes.
Sanger has the eye of a journalist. He does not have the depth of a historian. In one slip, he writes that by 2005 the Iraq war “was about to become America’s longest military commitment, save for the American Revolution.” Which is true enough, if one exempts Vietnam, World War II, the Philippine war and a few others. Too often, Sanger’s analysis shades into cliché — credibility lost, opportunity squandered. Observations like these may go down smoothly with a brandy and C-Span, but they do not advance our understanding.
As the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, Sanger had the luxury of flying at a high level of abstraction — occasionally, the cover suggests, on Air Force One. Perhaps the president’s airplane did not linger long enough on the tarmac in Baghdad, or perhaps the whole business of the war exasperates Sanger. But if a writer intends to make the case that Iraq has wrecked everything else, then he really ought to tackle the war on its own terms. Sanger discusses Iraq in terms of “the huge costs of distraction” and leaves it at that. An enterprise that kills and mangles tens of thousands of young Americans is many things. A distraction is not one of them, and this assertion is not the product of principled analysis. It is a glib slogan.
In any case, and per Sanger’s main point, “The Inheritance” merits close reading because Obama has become the heir and custodian of many legacies besides Iraq. In speaking of Obama’s victory address in Chicago’s Grant Park, Sanger singles out his “neat separation of the world into builders and destroyers” as an echo of “the man leaving the White House.” Exactly so: there will be more continuity than not between Obama and Bush, just as there was between Bush and Bill Clinton, and between every president going back to America’s arrival on the international scene. There will be no arguments about first principles. The changes, if they come, will happen around the edges. The world will allow nothing more."
THE INHERITANCE
The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power
By David E. Sanger
Illustrated. 498 pp. Harmony Books. $26.95
