Soft power reaps only a hard fall

On McCain's side was the traditional Republican focus on Asia and the Pacific, especially in security. McCain was a Vietnam veteran. He loved Australians. He stressed US alliances. In national security terms he looked like solid gold for Australia.

But there was a very strong argument for Obama as well. George W. Bush was an intensely unpopular American president internationally. There would surely still be anti-Americanism in the world under an Obama presidency, but it would operate off a much lower base. The US, so often personified in the incumbent of the White House, would generate much greater soft power under Obama and this would complement its hard power. The US would again enjoy the good opinion of mankind, as the US founding fathers put it.

The savage anti-US demonstrations across the Middle East this past week, and among Muslim communities in Europe and Sydney, and especially the death of Christopher Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya, show what a hollow hope that was.

The US's standing in the Middle East, and the Muslim world more widely, is just as bad as it ever was under Bush.

Here is a hard truth. Islamist extremists didn't hate America because of Bush. They hated Bush because of America. And now they hate Obama, because of America.

On the upside, Obama has given us almost everything we might have hoped for in a McCain presidency in terms of the Asia Pacific and a renewed emphasis on alliances. Indeed, although Asian political elites tend to be more comfortable with Republicans, most of them broadly, if relatively lukewarmly, want Obama to win re-election.

Asians are worried about the departure of Hillary Clinton and the Assistant Secretary of State, Kurt Campbell, who have been extremely good for Asia.

Obama's successes in national security have come almost entirely from the use of hard power, drone strikes on specific terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the Navy Seal mission that killed Osama bin Laden.

The failure, however, of his soft power in the Middle East is extraordinary. It is not necessarily a fatal setback, but it holds some important lessons.

If ever a US president was going to garner goodwill in the Muslim world it was surely going to be Barack Hussein Obama, with his Kenyan father, his post-colonial consciousness, his years of childhood in Muslim Indonesia, his eloquence on racial issues, the global pop star vibe he generated.

It wasn't only his identity and global media adulation that Obama had going for him. He made every conceivable effort in making overtures to the Muslim world. He tiptoed around Iranian sensibilities, extended an open hand to the ayatollahs, refrained even from voicing any early criticism when they stole an election. In Cairo Obama made an eloquent plea for reconciliation between the Muslim world and America. He beat up on Israel, even at one point refusing to be seen in public with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and he made an elaborate bow to a Saudi royal.

But none of it has won anything from the Middle East. It may be that Bush overestimated what hard power could achieve. But in his first year in office, Obama certainly overestimated what soft power, and his own personality and eloquence, could achieve.

After a pretty dismal first year, Obama got much tougher and much more effective. On the Middle East, his policy has been pretty ineffective but I am at a loss to imagine what a more effective policy might have looked like.

In the Middle East we are simply living through a period where no outside power, including America, can decisively direct the course of events. This is only partly because of a decline in US power. And remember, too, that the Middle East has always been recalcitrant, and US successes of any kind there have been few and far between. It is said that many years ago Paul Wolfowitz remarked that he was delighted to move from working on the Middle East to Asia, because in Asia problems got solved eventually, whereas in the Middle East they just went on forever.

It may be Mitt Romney was expressing no more than the plain truth when he told a fund-raiser that the best a president could do on the Israel-Palestine front at the moment is kick the can down the road a bit. Indeed, this remark to a private function, caught on a secret video and later made public against Romney's will, is in many ways pretty reassuring. This is no time for millennial visions. Sober leadership is at a premium.

Much of the dispute today rests in how we should interpret the Arab spring. It is still far too early to know how it will ultimately unfold. A more democratic Middle East was bound to be more Islamic and more anti-Israel in the short term. The hope is that the chaos and nationalism of the short term will not destroy the consolidation of a less extreme and more representative political culture in the Middle East, which is the only long-term guarantee of stability and moderation.

The big anti-American demonstrations, in response to a tacky, offensive, amateur anti-Muslim film which the Obama administration condemned, are very disturbing. But to some extent we need to keep our heads. Demonstrations are not everything. The murder of the American ambassador in Libya is truly shocking and an indictment of the Libyan security forces for not keeping him safe. Yet the political trend in Libya is still pretty good. Moderates won a sound electoral victory in Libya. The Libyan government utterly condemned the anti-American violence. Libya is a case where the West's friends, broadly defined, are in government and under violent attack from al-Qa'ida like extremists. So it is not in our interests for the US to scale down its efforts in Libya, or in the Middle East. Rather, we need to continue to support the Libyan government.

But the manner of Western support for moderates within the Muslim world is extremely complex. We have to be very careful we don't do more harm than good. No country in the Muslim world is more dangerous than Pakistan, with its large nuclear arsenal, failing state institutions and seething jihadist extremism. A couple of years ago Washington settled on a seemingly attractive political strategy. It backed Benazir Bhutto as the moderate, civilian politician most likely to win popular support and tried to help her negotiate a reconciliation with the military. The formula was indeed enticing. It offered the prospect of having civil society, an electoral mandate and the military in Pakistan all working together for economic development and to combat extremism. The problem is that Bhutto's identification with the US, as much as anything, got her killed. And with her death the political strategy fell to pieces. Something similar happened with Bashir Gemayel in Lebanon some three decades ago. In many of these Muslim countries it can be dangerous to be an enemy of America but absolutely fatal to be America's friend.

This suggests that, however distasteful and sub-optimal it is, a strategy of indirect support of friends is probably best. Thus in this light although the Obama administration looked clumsy during the Egyptian uprising, it is hard to see what else good it could have done. Close identification with any faction would have damned it. And given how prone the Middle East is to conspiracy theories, it is important that the people of the Middle East come to take responsibility for their own political end economic futures.

This is not a counsel of abdication and abandonment. The US is still rich enough to provide aid that makes a difference. Carefully applied, this is a powerful tool. Similarly, the US can still play a big role in conferring, or denying, international legitimacy on a government. It can selectively provide military help. And as an absolute last resort, it can still threaten military intervention.

What a lot of people see as fecklessness in Obama's Middle East policy, I see as a not unreasonable caution, while maintaining essential commitments, in a situation where there is no clear path to success. This might be as good as it gets for the moment.