Read Online The Long Game by Derek Chollet - Free Book Online Page B

not impossible to sustain the rebalance to Asia.
    Maintaining American staying power has been a constant theme, especially in an era of tighter budgets and governing gridlock in Washington. In the administration’s two most important strategic statements about the rebalance—Obama’s November 2011 speech to the Australian Parliament and Clinton’s October 2011 essay in Foreign Policy —both went to great lengths to reassure regional partners who wondered about America’s ability to deliver on its future commitments. Obama pledged that while the US defense budget would have to be cut, he would prioritize the American mission and presence in Asia, while Clinton wrote that the US would resist the temptation to “come home” and not be “distracted again by events elsewhere.” 6
    This created a third challenge. The parts of the world where “events elsewhere” took place wondered how this strategic shift would affect them. Those concerns help explain the somewhat esoteric debate about the strategy’s terminology, and whether the approach to Asia was a “pivot” or “rebalance.” The terms were used interchangeably, but the use of the former fed suspicions in other regions that, because one has to pivot away from something, they were going down the priority list. This was true among Europeans, who fretted that more American time and attention in Asia meant less for them (my former Pentagon colleagues who worked on Europe joked that they were the “ass end of the rebalance”). And it was also true for US allies in the Middle East, who had been the subjects of America’s post-9/11 “distractions.” To them, all the talk of the “pivot” caused unnecessary stress.
    Yet these key relationships—with Europe, with Russia, and with the Muslim world—were the focus of another component of Obama’s effort to build a strategy for the long term—a reset to repair America’s image and reestablish its leadership position.
    RESET
    In Europe, the reset began before Obama even got elected. There is no better symbol of this than his July 2008 address in Berlin, which he visited as a presidential candidate. It will likely be remembered for a long time—if not necessarily for its message, then for the imageryof over 200,000 wildly enthusiastic, mostly young Germans packed into Berlin’s Tiergarten, creating an atmosphere more like a rock festival than a policy conference. As Obama’s top campaign adviser, David Plouffe, later reflected, the Berlin event was an opportunity to “visually demonstrate an important premise: the world was still hungry for American leadership, but of a different, more cooperative kind that only Barack Obama could deliver.” 7
    During the Bush years, the US-European relationship had been especially choppy. The policy debate had been dominated by influential analysts such as Robert Kagan, who argued that the United States and Europe lived on entirely different planets and were therefore drifting apart. The Europeans, Kagan observed, lived in a world of Kantian “perpetual peace,” whereas Americans lived in a Hobbesian world of grave threats. Among leaders, insults flew across the Atlantic, with the Bush team belittling “old Europe” (traditional partners like France and Germany) and European officials openly deriding Bush’s “cowboy” approach.
    Such bitterness was especially evident in Europe’s most pivotal country, Germany, which is a key example of the damage the post-9/11 years had done to America’s image in the world (this impact is still being felt today, when Germans complain about an issue like torture long after Obama ended it). The year before Obama’s visit to Berlin, opinion polls showed 86 percent of Germans disapproved of President Bush’s handling of foreign policy, and 59 percent did not want the United States to play a leading