Off Message vs. Off the Rails

Today's article in the Times about the Obama Administration's internal deliberations on Egypt is worth a read. It relies almost entirely on anonymous sources, which is annoying, and means the narrative that the article lays out should be taken with more than a few pinches of salt. Now that Mubarak is gone, I could easily see Obama directing some strategic leaking to make it look as if his waffling was actually a result of staff disagreements rather than his own indecision. That said, assuming one takes the story at face value, there are a few points to make.

First, back during the '08 campaign, my principal reason for supporting Obama was that he seemed willing to break through the hardened carapace of American foreign policy thinking, which in so many ways remains mired in the Cold War and the strategic logic of that period. That's why I was a bit put off when Obama named Clinton Secretary of State (why not just make her Vice President?), and why I've been generally disappointed at the status quo bias of the Obama Administration's foreign policy. That said, if this article reflects reality, it looks as though Obama himself still retains some of his campaign-era instincts. I hope he nurtures them.

Second, it's one thing to be "off message." It's another thing to have different people from the same organization saying really substantively different things. If Obama had decided that the United States was no longer supporting Mubarak, and was sufficiently willing to own that decision to call for a regime transition "now," then he should have been much clearer with his subordinates about the thrust of American policy. Clinton and Biden shouldn't have been saying nice, conciliatory things about Mubarak after it had been decided that his regime no longer enjoyed American support. That's not a question of tone, but of substance. The President and the Secretary of State really shouldn't be publicly articulating two different versions of U.S. foreign policy.

Finally, this whole incident just goes to show how dated the traditional government-to-government model of international relations is. Obama and some of his less establishment-oriented staff seem to understand that playing the long game in modern geopolitics is far more about relating to foreign societies than it is to foreign governments. It would be nice if the rest of the U.S. foreign policy establishment got that message.