Perhaps in years to come those who teach leadership skills will call this the Tomasky Principle: Do nothing and hope you're lucky.
Let me quote to you from Tomasky's essay:
Barack Obama hasn’t been much of a domestic-policy president from nearly anyone’s point of view. And it’s a little hard to picture how he might ever be seen as such—that is to say, even if he’s reelected, he’ll probably have a Republican House or Senate (or both) that will thwart him at every turn, so the best he’ll be able to say is that he presided over a slow and very difficult economic recovery, which presumably will finally happen by January 2017. But foreign policy could be a completely different story. Here one can see how he might become not just a good but a great foreign-policy president.Mr. Tomasky makes a virtue out of necessity. There's not much an American president can do in these situations so it's the mark of greatness to not do it. Historic presidents are those who stand aside and let events play out. If things go well then whoever is in the White House at the time will be seen as a foreign policy president of the highest accomplishment.
Obama has been more in the mold of George H.W. Bush and his secretary of state, Jim Baker, when the Eastern bloc was throwing off Moscow’s shackles. Offer encouragement and stability, give a few speeches about freedom, but otherwise let them do their own work.
Obama took a lot of stick for not being more forceful on Egypt in February, but he was right to be cautious—there were lots of stakeholders involved, and sorry, but the president of the United States just can’t say every sweet thing romantics would like him to say. He then, as noted, took heat for moving too slowly on Libya, but here again he was correct. The nature of the Libyan regime is not a direct national-security issue, so there absolutely had to be a specific trigger to justify acting. That trigger was Gaddafi’s threatened assault on Benghazi.
That was completely the right thing to do. It was as textbook a fulfillment of “R2P,” or “responsibility to protect,” as one could imagine.One of the best things an American administration can do when big changes are afoot somewhere in the world is stay out of the way and not act as if we can will an outcome just because we’re America.
Next comes Syria. Conservatives are pushing Obama to take stronger steps. Maybe he should. I argued back in the spring, before Obama imposed sanctions on Assad, that he needed to be more forceful. But now he has imposed those sanctions and said Assad should step down. Doing much more seems dubious. Bashar al-Assad will go. It’s a matter of when. Better to let it play out. If a true R2P situation arises, then Obama will have to make some decisions. But it’s far better to let the Syrians do this themselves, if they can. We cannot prevent every casualty.
That’s starting to sound like a doctrine to me. Call it the doctrine of no doctrine: using our power and influence but doing so prudently and multilaterally, with the crucial recognition that Egypt is different from Libya is different from Syria is different from someplace else.
This does not yet greatness make. These dramatic changes have to work out for the better, and here the United States has a huge role to play. With respect to Libya, for example, we have control of about $37 billion in assets we can dole out to the transitional council. And yes, we probably are interested in its oil. But that doesn’t have to mean stealing it. All the Western countries that backed the rebels have to play a constructive and non- (forgive me for such a dated word) imperialist role in helping the country build its future.
Thus, the time Mr. Obama spends on the golf course or on his numerous tax-payer subsidized vacations should be seen as his way of implementing the Tomasky Principle. He's not doing anything to shape events and is thereby proving his extraordinary talent and foreign policy skill.
Who would have thought that greatness could be achieved so easily?
