When personality flaws have historic implications

A most insightful article by David Rothkopf at Foreign Policy on how the Most Equal Comrade's engagement of the world stage went from cruddy to abysmal.

He starts with an overview of the cruddiness stage:

Obama's presidency is largely a product of a moment in history that likely will be seen someday as an aberration -- the decade after 9/11, during which a stunned, angry, and disoriented America was sent spinning into a kind of national PTSD. Call it an age of fear, one in which the country and its leaders were forced to grapple with a sense of vulnerability to which they were unaccustomed. The response of George W. Bush's administration -- entering into the long, costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, remaking U.S. national security policy around the terrorism threat -- led to a backlash that ushered Obama into office with a perceived mandate to undo what his predecessor had done and avoid making similar mistakes.

The problem is that in seeking to sidestep the pitfalls that plagued Bush, Obama has inadvertently created his own. Yet unlike Bush, whose flaw-riddled first-term foreign policy was followed by important and not fully appreciated second-term course corrections, Obama seems steadfast in his resistance both to learning from his past errors and to managing his team so that future errors are prevented. It is hard to think of a recent president who has grown so little in office.

As a result, for all its native confidence and fundamental optimism, the United States remains shaken and unsteady more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks. Many of its problems have only grown dangerously worse: Its relative influence has declined; the terrorism threat has evolved and spread; and U.S. alliances are superannuated, ineffective shadows of their former selves.

But it was that stroll with the Chief of Staff and the subsequent meeting with some top advisors when things really went south.  The Assad regime had made it necessary for the MEC to follow through on his red-line statement:

by the afternoon of Aug. 30, 2013, the White House appeared set to follow through on the limited-attack option. Kerry was sent out to deliver an impassioned set of casus belli remarks to the public, laying out the rationale for action, and commanders expected to receive their orders the next day.

But later that afternoon, the president went on a walk around the South Lawn of the White House with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, a longtime loyalist whose relationship with the president dates back to just prior to the 2008 campaign. McDonough was not just a chief of staff -- he was a member of the president's tightly knit innermost circle and a former deputy national security advisor. McDonough had also long been one of the voices urging that America not get involved in Syria, often stiffening the commander in chief's resolve to keep out of the crisis when pressure came from others, such as first-term Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who thought Washington ought to do more to support moderate opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It was during their 45-minute stroll that Obama shared with McDonough his concerns about following through on his Syria plan.

He then told the group back inside  that he was going to ask for Congressional support after all.

Many in the group were stunned by the news, including Rice, who reportedly argued that it would send a message of vacillation and would set a bad precedent of deferring to Congress on such issues.

Notably, the group did not include several key national security principals. Obama called Hagel to let him know about the decision to punt. Absent as well was Kerry, whom Obama later privately informed about his change of mind. The secretary of state's team felt he had been treated badly, having been asked to play the role of frontman on this issue just hours before.

"This was the real turning point for the administration's foreign policy," a former senior Obama advisor told me. "This was when things really started to go bad."

One interesting tidbit in the article:  Did you know Susan Rice has a reputation as spotty mouth?

on the edges of the G-20 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, which took place Sept. 5 and 6, 2013, Washington continued to push for international support of military action as it had been doing ineffectively since late August. In one meeting, Rice pressed the German delegation relentlessly for leadership within the European Union. The Germans sought more time and consultation with other EU member states, frustrating Rice to the point that she lost her cool and reportedly launched into a profanity-filled lecture that featured a rare diplomatic appearance of the word "motherfucker." Germany's national security advisor, Christoph Heusgen, was so angered that he told an American confidante it was the worst meeting of his professional life.

(Rice's bluntness and hot temper have undercut her effectiveness throughout her career. In July 2014, the New Republic reported that she once confronted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas outside the Oval Office, saying, "You Palestinians can never see the fucking big picture." A U.N. ambassador of one of the world's major powers told me that he didn't "understand what she thinks she is achieving by talking to us like a longshoreman." The brusqueness hasn't helped with her interpersonal relationships within the administration or with her staff, either. It is a particularly frustrating Achilles' heel for someone who is well known among her friends as having the capacity to be very warm, humorous, and engaging.)

Rothkopf goes on to make some comparisons between the ways W and the MEC have gone about team-building and assuming the role of leader.  His upshot is that the MEC just doesn't get very high marks for working well with others.

But somebody's gotta decide.  Preferably not al-Baghdadi, al-Zawahiri, Khameini, or Vladimir Putin.  But those guys aren't going to wait forever.