US Politics: How Can Obama Deal with a World after Iraq? (Cohen)

Roger Cohen writes for The New York Times:

Europe adjusted long ago, but not without pain, to its diminished place in world affairs. After Suez for the British, after Algeria for the French, even the most stubborn post-World War II illusions evaporated. The baton had passed to America. European nations set their minds to a war-banishing Union.

I don’t think the Iraq and Afghan wars constitute for the United States what Suez and the Algerian conflict were for Britain and France: points of irrevocable inflection. But, inconclusive and ill-managed, they have set new limits to U.S. power. President Obama is focused on reducing American expectations for “an age without surrender ceremonies.”

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That’s how he defined our epoch in an address winding up the seven-year U.S. war in Iraq. It was a quintessential Obama speech — intelligent but not stirring, firm and sober and rather solemn, altogether in the image of his refurbished Oval Office with its risk-averse muted neutral tones.

As with the office so with the speech: You can admire the clean lines but your heartbeat sure won’t quicken.

The main subject, it must be said, hardly lent itself to hurrahs. In Iraq, brief triumph subsided through criminal incompetence into fractured mayhem, leaving more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead and concluding in the fluid uncertainty of sporadic violence and democratic deadlock. No intellectual contortion — even with important stirrings of political give-and-take in Iraq — can ever inscribe Operation Iraqi Freedom in the annals of U.S. victories.

An age without surrender ceremonies is just that: an age without clear winners, an opaque time.

Obama put the situation this way: “One of the lessons of our effort in Iraq is that American influence around the world is not a function of military force alone. We must use all elements of our power — including our diplomacy, our economic strength, and the power of America’s example — to secure our interests and stand by our allies.”

Power, in this Obama doctrine, is not for winning the day, vanquishing the enemy. Its purpose is more modest: the pursuit of America’s interests or those of its friends.

Obama is a realist in the image of Britain’s 19th-century statesman Lord Palmerston, who once declared: “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

What inhabits Obama is the conviction that the United States “is still the biggest power but not the decisive power,” said Jonathan Eyal, a British foreign policy analyst. “And Americans will only accept that with time and with bumping against buffers.”

This is not the stuff of heroic American narrative, of shining citadels or beacons to mankind. Obama, subtly but persistently, is talking down American exceptionalism in the name of mutual interests and mutual respect, two favorite phrases. He is downsizing American ambition — the eventual Afghan exit is now pre-scripted along neither-defeat-nor-victory Iraqi lines — in the name of American rebuilding.

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