Why Obama Can’t Catch Up with Putin’s Increasingly Bold Moves

As conscientious chroniclers do, Michael Doran, in his painstaking examination of the Obama administration’s disastrous foreign policy toward Russia, both instructs us and provokes thoughts and questions that may exceed the intended scope of his essay. Specifically, one is drawn to ask: what caused this policy to be so dismal, so strewn with mistakes, so strikingly unable to predict Moscow’s behavior or to catch up with Vladimir Putin’s increasingly bold moves?

Between historical explanations based in theories of conspiracy and those premised on assumptions of incompetence, it’s usually prudent to plump for incompetence; or so we’re told. But a number of those advising President Obama on Russia are personally known to me to be quite competent, so that explanation won’t wash. Doran offers a different explanation, one that focuses on the beliefs of the president. Barack Obama, he writes, is ideologically wedded to a strategic understanding that is at once false, impervious to correction by reality, and unswayable by the counsel of advisers. This may well be so, but the problem may also be deeper and require elaboration.

First, a narrow amendment. Doran suggests that the 2009 “reset” with Russia was motivated by the administration’s desire to bring in Moscow as a constructive partner in confronting and containing the dangers of Sunni radicalism in the Middle East. This may be so, although it’s worth noting that by 2008 al-Qaeda had been defeated in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But there was also another and in my view more compelling reason for launching the reset: namely, President Obama’s dream of a “world without nuclear weapons,” as spelled out in his April 2009 speech in Prague two-and-a-half months after his inauguration.