Week in Review: Cables Depict Range of Obama Diplomacy
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: December 4, 2010
BEIJING — Barack Obama came to office vowing to restore “engagement” — talking and listening to America’s most troubling adversaries and reluctant partners — as a central feature of American foreign policy. But engagement can take many forms, from friendly to wary, naïve to cunning, and it was never quite clear how the term would translate from a campaign sound-bite to a practical approach to the world.
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Now we know, from the granular picture of engagement-in-action that emerges from that trove of 250,000 WikiLeaks cables, many from the first 13 months of the Obama presidency. Mr. Obama’s style seems to be: Engage, yes, but wield a club as well — and try to counter the global doubts that he is willing to use it.
The cables suggest that Mr. Obama’s form of engagement is a complicated mixture of openness to negotiation, constantly escalating pressure and a series of deadlines, some explicit, some vague. In the cables, the administration uses all of these tools to try to prevent the mullahs in Iran from dragging out an endless series of feints and talks until they have a bomb. The July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan is a whip to get President Hamid Karzai to train his troops — so that the United States can start to leave. This policy is tailored to the needs of a new president trying to demonstrate that he is neither too inexperienced nor too soft to face the menaces of the world. In a handful of cases, the approach shows some early signs of success. But in dealing with some of the world’s most intractable governments — from the Middle Kingdom to the Middle East — Mr. Obama inevitably hits some real-world limitations.
In Russia, the policy of engagement yielded results. The cables tell a fascinating tale of intelligence-sharing on missile threats, with reasoned debates about what the Iranians and the North Koreans are capable of building. The cable traffic hints at horse trading: The Obama administration killed a missile defense site in Poland, seemingly to win Moscow’s support for sanctions on Iran.
In the case of Yemen, the cables suggest engagement of a different form, with both countries agreeing to a mutually convenient cover story. Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, tells Gen. David Petraeus that he is free to bomb Al Qaeda — as long as Mr. Saleh can say that it was his own forces, not the Americans, striking the militant strongholds. General Petraeus takes that deal; now, critics of the leaks argue that the disclosure may unravel it.
Engagement, however, has its limits. Here in Beijing, a once-promising effort to engage the world’s greatest rising power has gone badly off track. Chinese officials welcomed Mr. Obama’s outreach in 2009. But increasingly, they are determined to show they will not be pushed around by a country they view as a fading superpower. They have declared much of the South China Sea as a zone of “vital interest,” and ignored American arguments for letting China’s currency float to resolve a huge trade imbalance. And cables show repeated, often successful hacking attacks on the United States government.
The cables, of course, don’t get inside the president’s head. The most sensitive are classified “Secret,” far short of “Codeword” and “Nodis,” for “No Distribution,” the kind of true secrets that might reveal whether the United States is thinking about cutting a deal with the Taliban or living with an ambiguous Iranian nuclear weapons capability.
Yet the cables confirm that the administration has largely fulfilled its promise to give engagement some time to work, even while preparing for it to fail. “We need to be optimistic enough to make a bona fide effort to engage,” one of Mr. Obama’s most senior national security advisers said in a June 2009 interview. “And realistic enough to know that the main benefit of engagement may turn out to be that it showed the world we gave it an honest try and they need to join now for much tougher steps.”
While WikiLeaks made the trove available with the intention of exposing United States duplicity, what struck many readers was that American diplomacy looked rather impressive. The day-by-day record showed diplomats trying their hardest behind closed doors to defuse some of the world’s thorniest conflicts, but also assembling a Plan B.
“When dysfunctional does not begin to describe our political system and institutions,” Prof. Stephen Kotkin of Princeton concluded after sampling the cables last week, “something in the government is really working — the State Department — far better than anyone thought.”
Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served under two presidents named Bush, said Mr. Obama’s team seemed to understand from the start that “engagement isn’t an on-off switch, it’s a rheostat, and they knew how to turn it up quickly.” But he noted that “what the cables don’t tell you is how far he’s willing to keep turning it up, especially in the hard cases like Iran.”
In fact, Iran is perhaps the best example of the benefits, limits and unknowns of Mr. Obama’s engagement style.
Mr. Obama reached out to Iran early, with little response. Even as that dance was playing out, the cables show that Mr. Obama’s aides were drawing Arab states into an informal regional alliance that gradually closed off Tehran’s access to banks and ports. Missile defense sites sprang up around the Persian Gulf, continuing a process that started under President Bush. Dennis Ross, the Middle East envoy, asked the Saudis to supply China with oil — in hopes that China will be willing to enforce sanctions on Iran if it can get oil elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the administration deflected secret calls for far stronger action from some Arab leaders, like King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, whose advice was to “cut off the head of the snake.”
Unmentioned in the cables is the accelerating covert program against Iran’s nuclear facilities. (To end a conversation with an administration official quickly, just ask about the Stuxnet computer worm of mysterious origin; Iran admitted last week that malicious software had struck its uranium-enrichment centrifuges.)
But what next? The administration is vague, because few officials expect the Iranians to give up their nuclear ambitions or know what risks Mr. Obama is willing to take to stop the program. “If you haven’t accomplished your goal you are left with the unpalatable choice of extending the timeline, diminishing your objective, or being forced to take the kind of military action you were attempting to avoid,” said David Rothkopf, who wrote a history of the National Security Council.
Another question is how long Mr. Obama will engage with weak leaders who are unlikely to help him reach his objectives, like President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan. Mr. Zardari is quoted in several cables lamenting his lack of clout; he also is reported to wonder whether the military leaders “will take me out.”
The reality is that while Mr. Obama tries anew to persuade Pakistan to attack the toughest Al Qaeda havens, Plan B is well underway: There have been more than 100 Predator strikes in Pakistan this year, nearly double last year’s number, and far more than President Bush ever launched. But what if the Predators cannot do the job? The cables don’t say.
With North Korea, it’s unclear whether Mr. Obama will ever move beyond the most minimal engagement. Mr. Obama says he is determined to break the cycle in which the North launches attacks or builds nuclear plants, then shows up at “six party talks” and is rewarded with food or other aid. A few months pass, and it happens all over again.
“Despite all the talk of unconditional engagement, they’ve actually been tougher on the North Koreans than we were the last few years,” said Michael Green, senior director for Asia in President Bush’s National Security Council.
But the North Koreans will not be ignored. The two attacks they have launched this year raise the specter of a military miscalculation that can rekindle a war in hiatus for six decades.
Meanwhile, no country is testing the limits of engagement strategy more skillfully than China. Its surprising challenges to Mr. Obama this year have sent America’s most critical relationship into a presumably temporary freeze. With both countries trying to set the global rules, it’s not clear how their early talk of mutual cooperation will be possible.
One Chinese scholar, close to the government, said last week that he was taking the WikiLeaks cables home to try to decipher how China should handle the Americans.
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