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Notes -
The Obama Factor
Ran across this lengthy piece in Tablet this week. I have a lot of thoughts about it, but the main one is that it is the first piece I've encountered that feels sufficiently removed from the Obama years to count as sufficiently distant to be a really good historical retrospective. Of course, that's not all it is! But it consists substantially of a conversation between two men who have impeccable liberal bona fides. David Garrow is a biographer of some repute, and his wide-ranging commentary here is priceless.
For my part, back in the day, I was bullish on Obama during the Democratic primaries, in part due to a rumor that he intended to tap Lawrence Lessig to do some intellectual property reform. Beneath the soaring oratory and the socialist populism, Obama seemed to me to get technology in a way that I thought it might be good for America's economic future. When he did things like appoint RIAA lawyers to top positions a lot of the old nerd guard felt betrayed, but looking back I think most were also profoundly incurious about that betrayal. Maybe because we're all just accustomed to politicians failing to live up to their promises? Only, I don't know that Obama made any clear promises along these lines, it was more that he spoke in promising ways, if that makes sense. It was a failure, not of promises, but of promise. Obama's failure to appoint the right tech people didn't make a lot of sense to me then, but modeling him as doing things he imagines winners do, rather than modeling him as someone with real ideological commitments, gets me there.
Likewise, the economic plight of black Americans actually worsened under Obama (e.g.), but I don't recall much discussion then about how Obama is not Black, i.e. is not a descendant of American slavery and did not even especially grow up with descendants of American slavery. This piece touches on that a fair bit.
There is also some fascinating stuff here re: MLK, and Clarence Thomas. It opens with a great exploration of Obama's fabulism, and touches on his dalliances with Marxism. It makes explicit the connection between Obama's courting of Iran, and his turning a blind eye to Syria. There are digs on Bibi and Putin, there's a brief discussion of Hitler. It all hangs together as a talk about the relationship between individual personalities and the sweep of political history.
I'd include some choice quotes but I don't want to focus the conversation any more than I already have. Every single word of this piece is worth reading, on my view, and I'd love to hear what others take from it.
We had a very good discussion on this piece in the Culture War Thread last week, here.
I think the most interesting assertion is that Obama has stayed in DC and is secretly the power behind Biden, holds meetings with all his juniors, is implied to decide policy. I'm pretty doubtful here. I don't think Obama is ideologically motivated enough to shape ongoing policy, the argument actually seems to counteract both Garrow's and Samuels' other claims.
The article has an answer: it started as a response to Trump and continues cause Obama wants to push his non-achievements like rapprochement with Iran.
It doesn't seem contradictory but it's yet another thing that is blamed on his narcissism.
Rapprochement with Iran would likely have proceeded much better if the administration that followed Obama hadn't been led by Iran hawks.
It also would have proceeded better had Obama not tried to approach foreign policy without the buy-in of the opposition party in general.
Later-term Obama basically ran foreign policy conflating executive fiat with presenting a fait accompli. This was done on the assumption that there wouldn't be an opposition party succession, let alone willing to pay the political costs of not going along with it, which was hubris.
Given that Obama took office at a time when Americans had turned against the idea that the Iraq War had been the right thing to do, I think he could maybe be forgiven if he thought that the opposition party would back him in de-escalating American hawkishness in the Middle East.
However, he may have underestimated the deep hatred of Iran that still seems to be widespread in US political circles. Even Trump, who openly criticized the decision to invade Iraq, seems to hate Iran.
That is partly because Iran consistently goes out of its ways to not only be bad by generally neutral standards, but especially the standards the Obama administration claimed to care about.
Rapproachment with Iran wasn't something that could be neatly simplified as 'de-escalating American hawkishness in the Middle East.' It involved things as over-the-top as flying literal planeloads of cash to a known state-sponsor of terrorism, who was involved in killing American soldiers in Iraq and made no promises to stop, for a deal even its adherents claimed would only result in Iran reaching breakout capability, i.e. what it would reach without it. You don't need to be 'hawkish' to think that that's not a particularly good play, and that was even as Iran was one of the most extreme global examples of the institutionalized homophobia (as in, literal stoning the gays) and gender discrimination. Not only was the later a flaw on the human rights front, Iran's sins were the sort of accusations that the Obama administration and the progressive-millenials were using as political cudgels in the domestic culture war at the same time.
Obama seeking rapproachment with Iran by fiat and trying to avoid Congressional scrutiny didn't come across as 'at last, reason will give peace a chance!'- it came across as a really short-sighted stupid bit of political hypocrisy, for which the primary beneficiary on the American side was Obama himself in terms of international laurels for giving the Europeans endorsement to trade with someone who at the time was helping blow up American soldiers and was in no way required to stop doing so.
I mean, take out the very subjective word "terrorism" and this is the same thing that the US is currently doing in Ukraine. It's not like the Iranians were blowing up Americans who were peacefully sitting on bases in the US. For true rapprochement to happen, generally both sides have to make compromises, not just one.
As for breakout capacity, I don't see why the US should try to stop Iran from building a nuke to begin with. Why should I care if they have a nuke?
Also, being belligerent towards Iran is pretty unlikely to get them to treat homosexuals better. Soft power could potentially do it. A full-on invasion could also do it, but that was not an option in 2008 and even if it was, it would have killed probably hundreds of thousands of people, so the tradeoff is questionable.
If Iran gets a nuke then all of their rivals in the region will also want nukes. That's a really bad trend to start because the more nuclear powers exist the more likely it is for someone to use them. A world with 100 nuclear powers is much more dangerous than a world with 10.
The United States specifically has an additional interest in stopping nuclear proliferation because it nullifies our overwhelming advantage in conventional forces.
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If you disagree that Iran supports groups that are broadly and internationally recognized as terrorist groups, feel free to disagree with the object level claim, but you haven't actually said you disagree.
And if a Russian politician tried to make a series of major concessions to the US without the US reciprocating with major policy changes, and without convincing their political base of the appropriateness or necessity or usefulness of doing so for even marginal effects, their efforts would probably not last very long.
If you want to make a deal with an adversary, you need to sell it to your political base. The saying 'only Nixon could go to China' reflects the belief that only Nixon had the political capital and credibility to sell a deal as a valid thing, as opposed to being seen as a sell out. Without the popular legitimacy that requires buy-in, the deal itself means nothing. This is why weak leaders can rarely make enduring changes, as the changes they can implement through their formal power rarely outlive their terms in office. By contrast, strong leaders can make changes to public perception that even their political opponents accept the reframings on some level.
Why would a reasonable American political establishment or voting base would only care about Americans blown up in the US?
Your claimed confusion why Americans would dislike the Iranians. Part of this is because, regardless of whether people supported the Iraq War or not, only a relative minority are indifferent about the Americans who were there being blown up, or indifferent about who helped blow them up. The US government- even the Democratic parts of it- has long memories of people they have spent in some cases literal decades in conflict with. It only required a short-term memory- contemporary even- to find personal and living grievances with Iran.
That was one of the arguments against the deal, yes- a lack of equivalent Iranian policy compromise.
The functional compromise the Iranians were agreeing to in the final versions of the deal were... breakout capability, for a limited period of time, without the sort of verification systems that would prevent the Iranians to cheating and completing it unnoticed if they wanted to. This is the same capability the iranians have without a deal.
Ultimately Obama wasn't actually interested in true rapproachment, and didn't even try to sell the deal as such.
Why should anyone care about the nuclear proliferation opinions of someone who doesn't value nuclear non-proliferation?
The answer is of course your opinion doesn't matter- the question was about why people didn't care for Obama's plan.
Whether you agree or not, most politically-engaged people are not, in fact, indifferent to nuclear proliferation. They tend to be opposed to it in fact. The deal did not stop nuclear proliferation. As a consequence, the deal's maintenance could not be credibly be argued to be needed to prevent nuclear proliferation, because by the design the deal wouldn't do that because it lacked verification and enforcement mechanisms at Iranian insistence.
You seem to have missed the message to the domestic audience. The point isn't that the Obama administration had any hope of making the Iranians change policy (nuclear or gay). The point is that the Obama administration was willing to make major policy compromises to a major abuser, while using far lesser alleged character condmenation to justify not making domestic political compromises.
For his own base, who broadly considered the line of attack valid on a domestic front, it served as an easily co-optable tool against the Iran deal, which they would have a hard line refuting. For the opposition he used the attack against, the contradiction spoke of hypocrisy and insincerity, which undermined any political argument that the opposition should try to maintain a deal whose maintenance could be used to validate a line of political attack against them.
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Because they can use it.
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I sort of feel this is overly complicated. There are two power in the ME the Saudis and the Iranians. Pick one. The other will hate you. Those two will compete. Any Iranian homophobia you can probably sling on Saudis. For a long time Saudi oil was more important which they had more of so we were friends with them.
Iran would say all sort of nice things about us if we quit supporting the Saudis and let Iran run Iraq etc and being the ME hegemon.
I don’t know if there’s a way where America could ever be best buds with both. Maybe we could be neutral with both.
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