Your reading assignment this week is Michael Doran's latest contribution to the growing body of Kremlinology on the motives of the Obama administration. In February, Doran published a thought-provoking synthesis of evidence indicating that the president's pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran was not characterized by bumbling incompetence, but rather by a cold, steady eye on the prize of withdrawing the U.S. from the Middle East, and leaving behind a rehabilitated Iran as a regional bulwark for stability. (You should read that too, if you haven't.)
Now Doran turns his attention to Obama's relentless quest for Russia's assistance in the Middle East, despite Putin's increasingly aggressive policy there and elsewhere. As with his interpretation of Obama's approach to Iran, Doran proposes that the president's Russia strategy has been largely unwavering and directed to the end of pulling the U.S. back from a dominant role in the Middle East while enlisting Russia's support in ensuring stability there.
"The rehabilitation of Putin ... is not occurring during a fit of absentmindedness in the White House; it is a direct consequence of Obama’s vision of global order," Doran writes. He concludes:
In sum, Obama’s headlong support for the Iran nuclear deal and his pursuit more generally of a concert system with Moscow and Tehran have encouraged the rise of a Russian-Iranian military alliance dedicated to diminishing the United States and its allies. His rejection of traditional military deterrence as a legitimate tool of foreign policy has given that alliance a free hand in Syria. Even as Russian policies vastly complicate the fight against IS and offer Putin increased leverage over key American allies, Obama remains captivated by the theory that, in the end, Russia and Iran will come around and cooperate productively with the United States.
The president entered office in 2009 believing in this theory; for seven years he has based his Middle East strategy on it; and nothing that has occurred in the interim has disabused him of the notion. Whenever he has taken an overt step that suggested otherwise—that he was moving toward a harder line in Syria or preparing to counter Russia and Iran—he has engaged in action behind the scenes to undermine his own position. At the same time, he has repeatedly and consistently reassured both Putin and Ali Khamenei that they have nothing to fear from the United States in Syria.
It is very much worth reading the entire article. If Doran's assessment is correct—and he makes a persuasive case—among the realities we face is that Obama has habitually engaged in breathtaking levels of dishonesty with his own people. Few Americans would have voted for a candidate who not only spoke of a willingness to talk with the world's bad actors, as Obama indeed did, but who ran on a platform of aligning U.S. interests with those of Russia and Iran at the expense of our traditional allies and, indeed, our own influence.
Obama, in this reading, comes off as someone who cynically manages American public opinion in order to build a post-American world. He seems to be making progress, even if the details are messy. But one problem is no detail: the fact that, as Doran puts it, "When Putin encounters a conflict like the Syrian civil war, he asks not, 'How do we solve it?' but, rather, 'How do we exploit it?'" Regimes like those in Russia and Iran don't want to be part of a responsible club of nations working to make a better world. They have interests all their own, which have nothing to do with "progress."