Mark Landler - Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power

Barack Obama turned up unexpectedly in the press cabin of Air Force One as the plane was high above the South China Sea, about to begin its descent into Malaysia on a flight from South Korea. The president was not one for casual in-flight visits, saving these encounters for the trip home to Washington, when he would ruminate with reporters, off the record, about what he had accomplished overseas. So when he appeared on the afternoon of April 26, 2014, in the middle of a weeklong tour of Asia, something clearly was up. Wearing an open-necked blue shirt, gray slacks, and an unsmiling expression, Obama shook hands with the journalists on board that day: reporters from the four major news agencies; a network producer from CBS News; a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Before he reached the third row of seats, where I was standing with a hand outstretched, the president wheeled around, returned to the front of the cabin, and propped himself, arms crossed, against a gray bulkhead, next to a flickering television screen.

It was hard to know if Obama had ignored me intentionally: I was the last in a scrum of reporters, and the president likes to keep these pleasantries to a minimum anyway. But when he swatted away my opening question about China, a chill wind was clearly blowing.

Ill answer that in a minute, the president said, but first I want to say a few things.

Obama, it turned out, was angry about two articles that had run in The New York Times the previous day. One, by me and a colleague, Jodi Rudoren, declared that his trip had already been marred by a pair of setbacks: the failure to strike a trade deal with Japan and the collapse of his latest effort to negotiate a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians. The other said his administration had underestimated the bellicose nature of North Koreas new ruler, Kim Jong-un. Obama wanted me to know he never expected to sign a trade agreement on that trip, nor, for that matter, did he bear any illusions about North Koreas boy dictator. The impromptu visit was meant to set the press straight about our coverage of his foreign policy. Obama viewed it as shallow, mistaking prudence for fecklessness, pragmatism for lack of ambition.

Ben and I have been talking about giving a speech that lays out my foreign policy, he said, stealing a glance at his foreign policy amanuensis, Benjamin Rhodes, who had slipped quietly into a seat behind the reporters, next to the press secretary, Jay Carney, and seemed as unsure of what his boss was going to say as the reporters were.

I can sum up my foreign policy in one phrase, Obama said, pausing a beat for his punch line. Dont do stupid shit.

Americas problems, he said, stemmed not from doing too little but too much, from overreach rather than inaction. The countrys greatest disasters had come from blundering into reckless military adventures, whether in Vietnam or Iraq. The key to managing a sound foreign policy was to avoid entanglements in places where Americas national interests were not directly at stakeSyria, for example, which was caught up in a sectarian war that would defy outside efforts to end it; or Ukraine, victimized by a predatory Russia but a country with which the United States conducted a negligible amount of trade. Warming to his theme, Obama offered a brisk tour of places his White House had not started new conflicts: the Middle East, Asia, eastern Europe. Historic achievements in foreign policyNixons opening to Chinawere once-in-a-generation occurrences, he said. He might yet get one if the West negotiated an agreement with Iran to restrain its nuclear program. But in a world of unending strife and unreliable despotic leaders, hoping for more than that was simply not realistic. In such a world, Obama was content to hit singles and doubles, hewing to his foreign policy version of the Hippocratic oath.

As we touched down outside Malaysias capital, Kuala Lumpur, Obama kept talking, bracing himself against the bulkhead as the tires squealed and ordering those who were standing in the aisle to sit down. (Im the only one whos allowed to stand, he said. I dont want that liability.) Before returning to his cabin, where he would put on a jacket and tie and jog down the stairs to another red-carpet welcome in another distant land, Obama turned to the reporters and asked, Now whats my foreign policy philosophy?

Dont do stupid shit, we replied sheepishly, like schoolchildren taught a naughty rhyme by a subversive teacher.

Obama smiled and then was gone as abruptly as he had come. His credo hung in the air, though. At one level, it seemed crude, almost juvenile, particularly coming from a man who cared deeply about words and believed in the power of language to convey ideas. And yet it had the ring of authenticity. More so than his shimmering oratoryhis references to the arc of history or the spark of the divinethose four words seemed to capture what was for Obama the irreducible truth of being commander in chief of the worlds remaining superpower.

As a White House correspondent for The New York Times, I had traveled to a dozen countries with the president over four years, from a state visit to Buckingham Palace, arriving in a thirty-car motorcade, to a secret mission in Afghanistan, flying at night over the Hindu Kush in Black Hawk helicopters. I questioned him at news conferences in the East Room and the Great Hall of the People, listened to him elaborate his worldview in speeches in London, Jerusalem, and Brisbane. And yet it was during a salty Saturday afternoon encounter in the back of Air Force One that Obama uttered what would become perhaps the signature slogan of his presidencythe foreign policy equivalent of Its the economy, stupid.