Book Review

Published on Sunday 8 February 2009 19:15

The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power By David E Sanger Bantam, 528pp, £12.99

THE notion that a change of US president can, by itself, sweep up the foreign policy detritus of the Bush years is ludicrous. Barack Obama may believe he can undo its worst excesses, but he's got to play the cards he has been dealt, and as David Sanger points out, his room for manoeuvre will be a lot tighter than he might expect.

What, for example, would all those Obama supporters waving their placards calling for change really expect him to do vis--vis Iran? Only the politically nave, says Sanger, "think the Iranians will give up their nuclear programme without the lingering concern that bombers may appear over the skies". Far more likely, he says, is a future in which crises are too plentiful and expectations too high for Obama to steer a truly new course, no matter what his more excitable lieutenants think.

American presidents tend to enter office with an exaggerated sense of their own destiny which often ensnarls them in troubling moral and strategic complications. Abraham Lincoln was a rare exception. "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me," he wrote to a friend in 1864. Obama would do well to heed such caution.

A similar disconnect between claims and reality, Sanger argues, characterises almost every diplomatic or military venture the Bush administration has undertaken. In Afghanistan, we meet General Dan McNeill. A chart in his office illustrates "what America's allies were unwilling to do – go out on patrol far from camp, or travel beyond their assigned sector, even if fellow Nato troops were in trouble in a firefight".

In Pakistan, too, the US has become caught in a bind of its own devising. In the murky aftermath of 11 September, 2001, the Bush administration pinned its hopes on President Pervez Musharraf. Reviled at home and increasingly suspect in Washington, Musharraf found his writ was eventually supplanted by American air strikes. "The problem of Pakistan comes down to this," a Bush aide tells Sanger. "How do you invade an ally?"

Sanger has a knack for getting Washington insiders to leak like sieves – especially over dealings with North Korea. Even as US spy satellites were orbiting in search of Iraq's stockpiles, Koreans were erecting a nuclear reactor in Syria. "We had a few other things on our mind," a US official concedes.

Sanger has the eye of a journalist – but he does not have the depth of a historian. In one slip, he writes that by 2005 the Iraq war "was about to become America's longest military commitment, save for the American Revolution". Which is true enough, if one exempts Vietnam, the Second World War, the Philippines and a few others.

Sound on grand strategy, Sanger is weak on war. Iraq, he argues, has crippled US foreign policy, but he never addresses the war against Saddam as being anything other than a distraction. An enterprise that kills and mangles tens of thousands of people is many things. A distraction is not one of them.

But Iraq is just one of Obama's many inheritances, and it would be misguided to think that he will deal with them all in a radically different way to his predecessor.

There will be more continuity than not between Obama and Bush, just as there was between Bush and Bill Clinton, and between every president going back to America's arrival on the international scene. There will be no arguments about first principles. The changes, if they come, will happen around the edges.