Learning from Mistakes: Lessons for Obama from Israel

Asaf Romirowsky

Security, Middle East

Israel made sure to correct its errors after a costly war. America should do the same.

As we approach the end of the Obama administration, we may look back over the past eight years, which has been responsible for more foreign policy debacles and misguided presidential decision making, especially in the Middle East, than we have seen in previous administrations. In response to Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece in the Atlantic, Josef Joffe correctly summarized the Obama doctrine and the Commander and Chief himself as “an isolationist with drones and special-operations forces” and—above all—not a realist. A clear example of this is the decline in American deterrence and power in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The recent New York Times profile of Obama’s foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes provides a key example of the administration’s lack of policy realism and just how disconnected the White House has been from the reality of the Middle East. As Samuels puts it:

Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations—like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing—is still startling.