Derek Chollet - The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s Role in the World

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

The Long Game

The Long Game is Derek Chollets penetrating and wise examination of the foreign policy of a deeply unorthodox president. Rational, cool, and analytical (much like the man he is writing about), Chollet takes us deep inside the formerly opaque decision-making process of an administration that has upended longstanding assumptions about the way America should behave in the world. Chollets conclusions are controversial, and will be debated fiercely in Washington and beyond, but no one could deny that he has brought intellectual rigor to his important task. Nor could anyone deny that he has had a front-row seat to some of the great international dramas of our time.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG, National Correspondent, The Atlantic

Derek Chollet defines and explains the Obama foreign policy as grand strategy. The Long Game goes against the conventional wisdom of our moment. Though an insiders account, it views the present as history and puts down a marker that will shape how historians interpret the Obama years.

GEORGE PACKER, author of The Assassins Gate and The Unwinding

Foreign policy in the twenty-first century requires realism mixed with an element of idealism in order to navigate the intensifying anarchy of the world system. Derek Chollet shows this philosophy in action in this terrifically brisk, insider account of the Obama administrations travails in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Agree with it or not, I know of no more compelling defense of Obamas record.

ROBERT D. KAPLAN, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and author ofIn Europes Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond

Drawing on his front-row seats in the White House, State Department, and Pentagon, Derek Chollet provides a very insightful picture of President Obamas foreign policy. Memoirs are first drafts of history, and future historians will need to pay close attention to this one.

JOSEPH S. NYE JR., Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, former dean of Harvards Kennedy School of Government, and author of Is the American Century Over?

Obamas foreign policy has been misunderstood as much as it has been criticized, and a virtue of Derek Chollets lucid account is that it explains even more than it defends. As both a participant and a keen observer of American foreign policy, Chollet is well-positioned to provide powerful insights into what guided the president through these confusing times.

ROBERT JERVIS, Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics, Columbia University, and author of American Foreign Policy in a New Era

In The Long Game, Derek Chollet has given us a comprehensive, detailed inside account of the ideas and strategy underlying Barack Obamas foreign policies. Chollet, who worked in several positions in the Obama administration, describes what went into Obamas policies toward Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iran, Russia, and Ukraine. Even when he disagrees with a few of Obamas decisions, Chollet lucidly lays out the thinking behind them and responds to the most frequent criticisms. At least until Obama writes his own memoir, Chollets insightful book will probably stand as the best single guide to his reasoning and his policies.

JAMES MANN, author of The Obamians and Rise of the Vulcans

ALSO BY DEREK CHOLLET

The Road to the Dayton Accords: A Study of American Statecraft

America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11

(with James Goldgeier)

The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World

(coeditor with Samantha Power)

Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide

(coeditor with Tod Lindberg and David Shorr)

Copyright 2016 by Derek Chollet

Published in the United States by PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chollet, Derek H., author.

Title: The long game: how Obama defied Washington and redefined Americas role in the world / Derek Chollet.

Description: First edition. | New York: PublicAffairs, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016010114 (print) | LCCN 2016010384 (ebook) | ISBN 9781610396615 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: United States--Foreign relations--2009- | Obama, Barack.

Classification: LCC E907 .C459 2016 (print) | LCC E907 (ebook) | DDC 327.73--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016010114

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For my own long game:

Lucas and Aerin, and most of all, Heather

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Good policy depends on the patient accumulation of nuances; care has to be taken that individual moves are orchestrated into a coherent strategy. Only rarely do policy issues appear in terms of black or white. More usually they depend on shades of interpretation; significant policy deviations begin as minor departures whose effect only becomes apparent as they are projected into the future.

HENRY KISSINGER

Politics is not about objective reality, but virtual reality. What happens in the political world is divorced from the real world. It exists for only the fleeting historical moment, in a magical movie of sorts, a never-ending and infinitely revisable docudrama. Strangely, the faithful understand that the movie is not trueyet also maintain that it is the only truth that really matters.

MICHAEL KELLY

Games are won by players who focus on the playing fieldnot by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.

WARREN BUFFETT

I am more concerned with what we havent done than what we have, President Obama said in a July 2011 meeting in the White House Situation Room, where he met with a handful of his top advisers to plan his upcoming agenda. As his senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council staff at the time, I had helped prepare the meeting. For several weeks, the president had been consumed by the domestic debt crisis and grinding talks with congressional leadership to avoid a budget default, but as he turned his attention to the world, he seemed energized, and was in an expansive mood. While we had dutifully come ready to discuss his upcoming schedule of meetings, speeches, and trips, he wanted to think bigger.

Since 9/11, it has been a decade of war, the president said. We have an opportunity to make the next decade one of peace. He went on to add, Weve established that were tough enough. Just two months earlier, he had ordered the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, and American planes were then bombing Libya. But, he said, Whats been lost is the hope side of the equation.