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The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power, by James Mann
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The definitive analysis of the events, ideas, personalities, and conflicts that have defined Obama’s foreign policy—with a new afterword for his second term
When Barack Obama first took office, he brought with him a new group of foreign policy advisers intent on carving out a new global role for America in the wake of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. Now the acclaimed author of Rise of the Vulcans offers a definitive, even-handed account of the messier realities they’ve faced in implementing their policies and the challenges they will face going into the second term.
In The Obamians, prizewinning author and journalist James Mann tells the compelling story of the administration’s struggle to enact a coherent and effective set of policies in a time of global turmoil. At the heart of this struggle are the generational conflicts between the Democratic establishment—including Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden—and Obama and his inner circle of largely unknown, remarkably youthful advisers, who came of age after the Cold War had ended.
Written by a proven master at elucidating political underpinnings even to the politicians themselves, The Obamians is a pivotal reckoning of this historic president and his inner circle, and of how their policies may or may not continue to shape America and the world. This edition includes a new afterword by the author on how the Obamians’ foreign policy affected the 2012 election and what that means for the future.
- Sales Rank: #390050 in Books
- Published on: 2013-01-09
- Released on: 2013-01-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.43" h x .94" w x 5.50" l, .77 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 416 pages
From Bookforum
Mann is an experienced and judicious observer of both presidential policy making and the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment, and, as in the case of his earlier book, many of his initial judgments are likely to pass the test of time. —Michael Lind
About the Author
James Mann, a former Washington reporter, columnist, and foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, is author in residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author of many books on global affairs and U.S. foreign policy, including the New York Times bestseller Rise of the Vulcans.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The ultimate Obamian, of course, was Obama himself. Aides such as McDonough and Rhodes reflected the president’s own views. Obama was as new to foreign policy as they were, and as little influenced by previous Democratic administrations.
Over the years, far too much has been made of how Obama’s race and upbringing supposedly affected his thinking about the world. Political opponents, diplomats and journalists have sometimes speculated about the impact on Obama of his father’s roots in Kenya or of his childhood years in Indonesia. Some have theorized that Obama had somehow been imbued with an “anticolonial” perspective and was hostile, or at least unsympathetic, to British and European traditions.
There is little if any evidence to support this theory, and it represents an extremely selective interpretation of Obama’s youth. His postprimary education included a private college-prep school in Hawaii, private colleges in Los Angeles (Occidental College) and New York City (Columbia), and law school at Harvard. Obama’s secondary and higher education, in other words, was not radically different from that of, say, John F. Kennedy (prep school and Harvard), Franklin Roosevelt (prep school, Harvard and Columbia Law School), Richard Nixon (Whittier College and Duke Law School), Gerald Ford (University of Michigan and Yale Law School), George H. W. Bush (prep school and Yale), Bill Clinton (Georgetown and Yale Law School) or George W. Bush (prep school, Yale and Harvard Business School). If Obama’s worldview was influenced by his upbringing—and even this is an open question—then surely those long years of elite American schooling must have counted for far more than the father he barely knew or his four years in elementary school overseas.
Instead, Obama’s views of the world and of America’s role in it were shaped to a far greater extent by his age and by the times in which he came to national prominence. Obama was the first president since Vietnam whose personal life and career were utterly unaffected by that war. Every president since Gerald Ford had tried, in one fashion or another, to declare an end to the Vietnam War or to put to rest its continuing impact. Ford had ended the American presence in Vietnam. Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush had both proclaimed the end of the “Vietnam syndrome,” their term for the fear of military intervention and casualties. Bill Clinton had normalized diplomatic relations with Vietnam.
The war had nevertheless retained its potency in American political life. When Clinton ran for the presidency in 1992, he had to explain why he hadn’t served in the military during Vietnam. When George W. Bush ran in 2000, his campaign was obliged to justify an assignment in the Texas Air National Guard that kept him out of Vietnam. In the 2004 presidential campaign, after the Democrats nominated a Vietnam veteran, the Republicans managed to raise questions about John Kerry’s service on a “swift boat” in that war.
In the election of 2008, however, Obama, who was only thirteen years old when the last American troops came home from Vietnam, defeated a Republican candidate who was a Vietnam War hero and former prisoner of war. Vietnam had finally vanished from American presidential politics.
Obama was also the first American president in the modern era who neither served in the military nor was subject to the draft. In this respect, he was a fair representative of most other Americans under the age of fifty-five. Knowing nothing else, Obama could take as a given the existence of the volunteer professional army; military service was a career, not an obligation. The military could be seen as simply a constituency in American society— another big, powerful group with which Obama could try to reach compromise, bridge differences or find a centrist position. “He’s not suspicious of the military, and he’s not scared of the military,” said Denis McDonough. “It’s a vitally important institution that’s part of this country and part of this government.”
Finally, Obama was the first president to come to the White House after George W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq. The mere fact that he followed Bush provided Obama with considerable opportunity for improving America’s relations with the rest of the world. In this respect, Obama had considerable success. He sought to avoid the rancorous relations Bush had with the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and other countries. During his second term, Bush had himself tried to smooth over the frictions caused by the Iraq War, but he was so unpopular that these belated efforts didn’t have much impact; no elected president or prime minister in Western Europe could be seen as too close to Bush. After Obama’s election, European leaders once again wanted to have their pictures taken alongside an American president.
The 2008 financial crisis affected Obama’s foreign policy and America’s international standing at least as much as the Iraq War. The impact of the financial crisis went far beyond the mere lack of money. The United States had far greater difficulty holding itself up to the world as an economic model. In the countries that were harmed by the financial crisis, some of the blame was assigned to the United States—legitimately so. In those few countries where the financial crisis did not hit so hard, such as China and Germany, there was a newly acquired sense of superiority to the American economic system.
Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
The Obamians
By Jared Branch
In The Obamians, a somewhat wonky term used to describe the chief Obamian (Obama) and his Obamians (aides), James Mann attempts to discern, through his foreign policy, an Obama doctrine. While his domestic policy has been hampered by Democrat (Guantanamo) and Republican (Obamacare, nee Romneycare) alike, day-to-day foreign policy execution does not require congressional approval. Foreign policy then, unlike domestic, is a "clear test of his underlying ideas and choices."
Obama chose his inner circle among a small and informal network of people with no foreign policy experience to purposely cultivate an image of Washington outsiders. His appointment of Hillary Clinton, a pragmatic decision to remove her from the Senate where she could possibly form a coalition against him, required a revamping of this image, and thus was born the "team of rivals" phrase to give a "grand historical gloss to the uneasy merger of the Obama and Clinton teams." In contrast, Bush's aides, his "Vulcans" as the author calls them, all shared a common history, namely Vietnam.
Mann has a lot to say about Vietnam. He argues that Obama is the first president not, in some way, shaped by the war. This is true, and interesting, but he takes this argument to extremes. Obama's team is young and they "tend to believe their ideas are new and original, a response to events or trends of the twenty-first century" and not, as Mann repeatedly argues, in response to Vietnam. While the Obamians came of age in a world influenced by Iraq and the 2008 financial crisis, Mann believes Vietnam plays a seemingly unconscious influence through which all of their decisions filter. While Mann is given to such sweeping statements, perhaps the only extent to which Vietnam plays a role is that Obama has to contend with the remnants of McGovern's left-wing antiwar base of the Democratic party.
Avoiding this and other extremes, Obama has attempted to "position (himself) in the middle ground, detached from the fray." While Obama is not simply a continuation of Bush (Mann cites healthcare and gay rights), any president has to contend with entrenched bureaucracies concerned solely with maintaining the status quo. Obama's positions have therefore been simultaneously more and less hawkish than his predecessor. By toeing the line of the middle ground, he has made constituents of both parties unhappy.
Resulting criticisms leveled against him have fundamentally misunderstood who he is. For a clearer picture, Mann turns to the Arab Spring and dissects the Obamian response to each country. In Libya, Obama showed the two most distinctive aspects of his foreign policy. First, that he was not squeamish about employing military power, as both parties believed. Second, that he was willing to recast the United State's role in the world to fit its limited resources, a role "far less wedded than his predecessors to the idea of an enduring American primacy or hegemony." His decisions were "by circumstance and strategy, country by country," based ultimately upon advancing American's interests in the region. Mann is concerned more with how Obama thinks than in a minutiae discussion of positions he takes.
An aspect missing from this discussion is Republicans. He assesses an event and a liberal response, leaving out the extent to which liberals are influenced by a conservative response. Republicans play virtually no role at all at any point throughout the book. Leaving out this crucial opposing view is surprising, as Mann is unbiased in his assessment of Obama. While he makes the argument that Vietnam shaped liberals who then influenced Obama, he implicitly argues that Obama is shaped more by these unconscious influences than in reaction to President Bush and his policies, which played a huge role in making his presidency possible.
Bush's policies "represented the outer limits of the expansion of American power." Obama's, on the other hand, have merely "added up to centrism." His presidency has marked "the beginning of a new era in America's relations with the rest of the world, an era when American primacy is no longer taken for granted," and an era in which America has less money and power to implement its will.
20 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Solid and Timely Account of Foreign Policy Under Obama
By Samuel J. Sharp
This is a solid and timely account of American foreign policy under President Obama. Mann focuses on foreign policy narrowly and fully discusses military strategy while mostly ignoring other aspects of international relations such as trade policy and issues like budgeting and defense spending which require negotiations with Congress. The book thus begins with a short history of Democratic foreign policy under the Carter and Clinton administrations. The next few chapters detail the Obama primary/presidential campaigns and the rise of the "Obamians," the group of youngish advisers that were attracted to Obama by his personality but had much less foreign policy experience than the more senior, establishment Democrats that aligned with Hillary Clinton during the primary contest.
From here the book devotes chapters to various episodes in international affairs since 2008 and how the Obama administration managed them. Some of these chapters are a bit tedious and read like a simple rehash of newspaper accounts of global events. That being said, the chapters on China (chapter 13) and the assassination of Bin Laden (chapter 21) were captivating reading because the author perfectly blended factual occurrences with strategic planning. The book shines when Mann relies on information gleaned from an impressive array of interviews with insiders to give a behind-the-scenes image of how events looked from the White House. The tone is largely neutral except for repeated praise for Obama's "elegant" speeches (which get their own chapter) and some criticism of Obama's unwillingness to keep a campaign promise to abide by the War Powers Resolution.
All in all, this is a very good book that paints a portrait of a foreign policy team that is cautious, deliberative, fittingly hawkish, and very attuned to politics. It is not as scholarly or ideological analytic as some readers may hope, but its accessibility means a large audience can appreciate its historical approach. This book is bound to be as highly regarded as Mann's previous book, "Rise of the Vulcans," and I expect readers interested in foreign affairs will be grateful for Mann's most recent effort.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Foreign policy under the Obama administration
By KinksRock
A thorough review of three years of foreign policy under the Obama administration, focusing on the conflict and interplay between the young and less experienced idealists that Obama brought in and the more experienced realists with whom they had to work in order to function.
This book is not pro-Obama or anti-Obama, but, rather, covers Obama's triumphs, most notably the killing of Osama bin Laden, and his failures, notably the decision not to support the Green movement in Iran and Obama's poor treatment of Richard Holbrooke.
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