understanding that military policymaking had proved toxic.
THE LESSON DIDN’T STICK. In a haze of nostalgia, liberal commentators sometimes frame Barack Obama as a champion of diplomacy, worlds apart from the pugnacious Trump era. They remember him in a packed auditorium at Cairo University offering dialogue and calm to the Muslim world. “Events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible,” he said in that speech. And the Obama administration would, especially in its second term, yield several examples of the effectiveness of empowering diplomats, with the Iran deal, the Paris climate change accord, and a thaw in relations with Cuba. But it also, especially in its first term, accelerated several of the same trends that have conspired to ravage America’s diplomatic capacity during the Trump administration.
Obama, to a lesser extent than Trump but a greater extent than many before him, surrounded himself with retired generals or other military officers in senior positions. That included National Security Advisor General Jim Jones, General Douglas Lute as Jones’s deputy for Afghanistan, General David Petraeus as head of the CIA, and Admiral Dennis Blair and General James Clapper as successive directors of national intelligence. Growth in the State Department budget continued to flow from Overseas Contingency Operation funds, directed explicitly toward military goals. Defense spending continued its rise. The trend was not linear: sequestration—the automatic spending cuts of 2013—ravaged both the Pentagon and the State Department. But the imbalance between defense and diplomatic spending continued to grow. “The Defense Department budget is always very much larger, and for good reason, I mean I agree with that, but the ratio between the two keeps getting worse and worse,” Madeleine Albright said.
Over the course of his presidency, Barack Obama approved more than double the dollar value of arms deals with foreign regimes than George W. Bush had before him. In fact, the Obama administration sold more arms than any other since World War II. When I pressed Hillary Clinton on those facts, she seemed taken aback. “I’m not saying it was perfect,” she told me. “As you made out, there were decisions that had increased military commitments associated with them.” In the end, however, she felt the Obama administration had gotten “more right than wrong,” when it came to the militarization of foreign policy. She cited, as an example, the emphasis on diplomacy that accompanied the Afghanistan review in which she participated. But that review was held up, by both State Department and White House officials, as a deep source of regret and an acute example of the exclusion of civilians from meaningful foreign policymaking. In secret memoranda sent directly to Clinton as that process unfolded and made public in these pages, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, ostensibly the president’s representative on Afghanistan, decried a process overtaken by, in his words, “pure mil-think.”
THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION also doubled down on the kind of White House power grabs that had frustrated Powell during the Bush administration. From Obama’s first days in office, Jones, the national security advisor, pledged to expand the National Security Council’s reach. What was disparagingly referred to as “back-channel” communication between the president and cabinet members like the secretary of state would be constrained. Jones’s successors, Tom Donilon and Susan Rice, each ratcheted up the level of control, according to senior officials.
Samantha Power, who served as director for multilateral affairs and, later, in Obama’s cabinet as US ambassador to the United Nations, conceded that there were “some fair critiques” of the administration’s tendency to micromanage. “It was often the case,” she recalled, that policies made at anything but the highest tiers of the White House’s hierarchy, “didn’t have the force of law, or a force of direction. People weren’t confident it wouldn’t get changed once it went up the White House chain.” We were holed up in a shadowy, exposed-brick corner of Grendel’s Den, a bar near Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she was a professor. Power, the one-time bleeding-heart war reporter and professor of human rights law, had won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on America’s failure to confront genocide around the world. She had long been a favorite subject of awed, inadvertently sexist journalistic paeans, which often began in the same way. Power “strode across the packed room and took a seat, her long sweep of red hair settling around her like a protective shawl,” the New York Times offered. She was “ivory-toned, abundantly freckled and wears her thick red hair long,” added the Washington Post. “Her long red hair,” Vogue agreed, was “striking against the UN’s hopeful sky-blue backdrop.” Samantha Power’s hair, through little fault of her own, shimmered its way across a decade of profiles until, finally, the feminist blog Jezebel pleaded, “Enough With Samantha Power’s Flowing Red Hair.” Power had a winning earnestness and a tendency toward authentic rambling that had, on occasion, made her a PR liability. She memorably called Hillary Clinton a “monster” during the 2008 presidential campaign. She said “fuck” a lot.
“The bottleneck is too great,” she continued, “if even very small aspects of US foreign policy have to get decided at the deputies’ and principals’ level in order for it to count as policy.” Denis McDonough, Donilon’s deputy and, later, White House chief of staff, would chastise senior officials who attempted to, as he put it, “color outside the lines,” according to two who received such rebukes. Susan Rice, according to one senior official, exerted even tighter control over policy related to virtually every part of the globe except Latin America. Rice pointed out that every administration struggles with questions of White House micromanagement. “That is ever the charge from the agencies,” she said, “and I have served more time in the State Department than I have in the White House in my career. I’m very familiar with both ends of the street. Find me an agency that feels like the White House isn’t up in their knickers and I’ll be amazed and impressed.”
But some career State Department officials said the Obama administration had gotten the balancing act wrong more often than previous administrations. Examples abounded. Policymaking on South Sudan, which was elevated to a “principals” level under Obama, often stalled when Secretary of State John Kerry or Secretary of Defense Ash Carter were unavailable to join meetings due to their numerous competing obligations. Lower-level officials were disempowered to fill the void. Meetings would be canceled and rescheduled, and weeks would be lost, with lives hanging in the balance. That, Power conceded, “should have been at best a deputies process, because, given inevitable bandwidth constraints, it was very unlikely to be sustained as a principals’ process.”
The centralization of power had a withering effect on capacity outside of the White House. “The agencies got habituated to always be coming back and asking for direction or clearance,” she reflected, as a waitress slid a plate of curry in front of her. She doused it with a shocking amount of sriracha sauce, which makes sense if you’re ordering curry at a bar. “The problem,” she continued, “is that central control, over time, generates something like learned helplessness.” The defiant, world-striding scholar-stateswoman sounded, for a moment, almost wistful. “I think people in other agencies felt that they couldn’t move.”
THE KINDS OF WHITE HOUSE CONTROL exerted by Presidents Trump and Obama were, in some ways, worlds apart. Where one administration closely micromanaged agencies, the other simply cut them loose.
