WASHINGTON
— President Obama’s decision to engage in a lengthy battle to defeat
the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria reorders the global priorities of
his final years in office. The mystery is whether it will deprive him of
the legacy he had once hoped would define his second term, or enhance
it instead.
Israeli
officials, who by happenstance arrived in Washington this week for
their regular “strategic dialogue,” immediately argued that ISIS was a
distraction from that priority. Their fear is that the Iranians, finding
themselves on the same side of the fight against ISIS as the United
States, would use it as leverage to extract concessions from the
president.
“ISIL
is a five-year problem,” Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s strategic affairs
minister, said a few hours before Mr. Obama addressed the nation on
Wednesday night, using the acronym the Obama administration employs to
describe the Sunni extremist group. “A nuclear Iran is a 50-year
problem,” he said, “with far greater impact.
Mr. Steinitz may prove to be right. The
Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq 11 years ago distracted
it from many things — notably the war in Afghanistan — and Iran used
that time to vastly expand its capacity to produce nuclear fuel. But
there is a countertheory as well: that a president who for five years
made clear that he was looking for a way out of the bog of the Middle
East may have a chance to re-establish American credibility in the
region if the strategy he described on Wednesday night is well executed.
“If
this goes well, and the United States is seen as acting effectively, it
could generate political capital,” said Richard N. Haass, who served in
the administration of the first President George Bush — the
coalition-builder Mr. Obama says he most admires — as well as that of
George W. Bush. “There’s the chance it will be something of an
investment in the region. But that is going to require constant rudder
checks, to make sure the administration’s broader goals do not go off
course.”
It
is the fear of veering off course that most haunts Mr. Obama’s current
and former top national security aides. Even before the rise of ISIS,
they looked at the calendar and worried.
Mr.
Obama once saw the reorientation of American focus to the Pacific as
his greatest long-term contribution to “rebalancing” American
priorities. Tom Donilon, a former national security adviser to Mr.
Obama, often described it this way: “We inherited a world in which we
were overinvested in the Middle East and underinvested in Asia.”
In
setting out to conduct the rebalancing, Mr. Obama argued that America’s
long-term economic interests and prosperity lie in how it manages
China’s rise. By implication, the Middle East was an economic drag and a
military sinkhole.
Yet
over the past year, there has been a broad sense that the effort has
stalled, along with several others. And in his speech on Wednesday, Mr.
Obama said nothing about the opportunity cost of his strategy: How would
he ensure that 60 percent of America’s military might is in the Pacific
— the goal the Pentagon has laid out — while ramping up the fight in
Iraq and Syria? How would he square that with the commitment he made
just a week ago to bolster NATO in Eastern Europe, part of another
long-term effort, to contain Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia? Or his desire
to focus the world on longer-term threats like global warming and
cyberattacks?
So
far, Mr. Obama’s national security team has suggested that the efforts
are not mutually exclusive. They note that the Pentagon has maintained a
counterterrorism program in Yemen and Somalia, the two efforts Mr.
Obama compared to the operation against ISIS, while the C.I.A. has run a
larger operation, under covert-action authorities, against Al Qaeda and
the Pakistani Taliban inside Pakistan.
But
the goal of degrading and ultimately destroying ISIS requires an effort
of a different scale. It goes beyond the “light footprint” strategy
that the president used in his first term, which included hundreds of
drone attacks against targets in Pakistan and Yemen, a cyberattack on
Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the use of special forces against
pirates, terrorist cells and Osama bin Laden.
Mr.
Obama on Wednesday described a far more sustained effort, in which
building and sustaining a coalition, and training Arab forces at a new
base in Saudi Arabia, will take time and constant attention.
For the Chinese, this is most likely good news.
One recently retired Chinese general noted during the Iraq war that
America always seems to let the urgent blowups in the Middle East
distract it from the slow, grinding shifts of power in Asia. Unless Mr.
Obama backs away from his commitment to shrink the Pentagon budget, it
is hard to understand how the United States will be able to do all he
would like to do.
“We
don’t plan to be Iran’s air force in this battle, any more than we plan
to be Assad’s air force,” one senior official said on Wednesday,
referring to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
But
the Iranians are already testing whether America’s newest imperative
will give it maneuvering room in the negotiations over its nuclear
program. With a reported new energy and trade deal, Iran is trying
to split Russia away from the coalition of six powers that are
negotiating with Tehran.
“The
Iranians may well think we need them to help defeat ISIS and that this
will make us more accommodating in the nuclear negotiations,” said
Robert Einhorn of the Brookings Institution, who had responsibility for
enforcing sanctions. “If they do think that, it is an illusion.”
The
administration so far is trying to keep the issues compartmentalized.
It says it is “communicating” with Iran about ISIS, but not coordinating
action. There is a “commonality of interest” in defeating Sunni
extremists, one administration official said, that should give Tehran
and Washington a mutual cause.
