hen President Barack Obama pledged to seek "a new beginning" between the United States and Muslims in Cairo two years ago, he received a standing ovation.
Two years later, the response to Mr. Obama's Middle East policy is more muted. Domestic political constraints, tectonic changes in the Arab world, and his deliberative presidential style have yielded mixed results in the region.
Even at the outset, the change Mr. Obama touted in Cairo proved hard to believe in. Early signs suggested that he believed that a relative decline in American power called for shifting military focus to other regions like Asia, refocusing U.S. power on engagement and diplomacy, repairing America's image in the Arab street, and rethinking U.S. policies toward Arab regimes facing public discontent. Such a dramatic reorientation would undoubtedly take more than one presidential term to accomplish. His approach to decision-making is also more risk-averse and deliberative than his predecessor, which means he requires more time to decide on policy and often makes more middle-of-the-road choices.
This has produced a checkered record for Mr. Obama in the Middle East. Perhaps his greatest success has been in the battle against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. His administration has waged a relentless campaign of drone strikes and covert operations that has decimated terrorist leaders from Pakistan to Yemen. He has also balanced this with an attempt to win Muslim hearts and minds: banning torture and making it clear that America is not at war with Islam. These seemingly symbolic moves have gone a long way in recovering the moral legitimacy America lost during the dark Abu Ghraib years.
Although the jury is still out on the Arab Spring, Mr. Obama has mostly balanced American ideals and interests judiciously. He always tended to think about political reform in the region in a country-specific way, an approach that has been largely vindicated over the past year. Mr. Obama overcame his initial unwillingness and intervened in Libya to avert a clear massacre. In places like Egypt, where more vital U.S. interests were at stake, he wavered but eventually found the right balance, trying to support reform (despite protests from other autocratic allies like Saudi Arabia) while ensuring an orderly post-Mubarak transition. He watched as Saudi Arabia led a counter-revolution among the Gulf countries, but powerful U.S. interests in those cases proved difficult to overcome.
However, Mr. Obama's middle road approach fares poorly with respect to those issues that need firm decisions and substantial commitments. The Arab-Israeli peace process is a case in point. The Obama administration's early symbolic initiatives did not translate into the sustained action required to succeed in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Instead, in the face of Arab and Israeli resistance and domestic political pressure, the Obama administration backed off from attempting to put forward a systematic peace agreement plan.
A similar trend can be seen with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan. In both cases, Mr. Obama's middle-road approach risks not equipping U.S. forces with the appropriate resources to complete the objectives he has himself outlined. In Iraq, while most agree that at least 10,000 U.S. troops will have to remain to help Iraqi forces prevent a very likely slide back to civil war, the administration announced it will only limit troops to 3,000, a size too small to protect itself, let alone the region. In Afghanistan, the president has repeatedly shied away from providing the troops his commanders need.
Taking stock of Mr. Obama's Middle East policy as the campaign season begins, Americans will find that his deliberative approach has fared well in waging the war against Al-Qaeda and dealing with the Arab Spring. But on other matters like the Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires and the Arab-Israeli deadlock, they may soon be yearning for the decisiveness they chastised just a few years ago.
