© Provided by Washington Examiner From an Asia pivot that barely altered Pentagon policy to an Iraq withdrawal that led to the rise of the Islamic State, defense watchers are eyeing whether President Biden will learn from Obama-era defense shortcomings as he prepares to make key national security decisions.
The matter is exacerbated by his Defense Department and other national security hires: His team looks like a slightly reshuffled deck of Obama administration military, diplomatic, and intelligence community trading cards. Many of the same faces are in new places, but many of the same individuals will be advising a president, Biden, who during the Obama administration was the last person advising then-President Barack Obama on how to act (or not act) against the country's adversaries.
"One of the principal failures of the Obama administration on Middle East policy was the precipitous withdrawal from Iraq in 2011," Heritage Foundation Middle East fellow Jim Phillips told the Washington Examiner.
Prior to Obama taking office, President George W. Bush had already negotiated a full drawdown from Iraq in the absence of a new status-of-forces agreement.
Obama as a candidate promised a full withdrawal from Iraq. Once president, he tapped Biden to execute it, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates recalls in his book, Exercise of Power.
Once Obama took office, the commander of forces in Iraq and current Biden Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called for new negotiations to keep 20,000 troops in Iraq.
"I don't know how hard President Obama tried (I suspect not very hard at all), and the Iraqi leaders, for their part, made no effort to get an extension approved by their parliament," Gates wrote in his book.
Phillips recalled that the Iraqi Parliament refused to take up a new agreement, but the prime minister was willing to grant the required immunity.
"The Obama administration would not take yes for an answer," he said. "The U.S. military was warning that withdrawing so fast could leave Iraq vulnerable to a resurgence of al Qaeda, which later became ISIS."
"Hopefully, he'll listen to his secretary of defense," Phillips said of Biden.
The withdrawal moved forward, creating a vacuum after Obama and Biden pulled more than 135,000 U.S. troops out of Iraq. The exit, along with other regional forces, helped spawn what is now ISIS.
Today, only 2,500 troops remain in Iraq for training and intelligence gathering missions. A few hundred of the troops patrol the area east of the Euphrates in Syria, working to assure that ISIS does not take any new ground.
"I'm not sure what Biden's policy is on Iraq," Phillips said. "I think it really hasn't emerged yet."
Iran deal "flawed from the beginning"
Phillips also cites the 2016 Iran nuclear agreement, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as a failure of the Obama administration.
"The Obama administration trusted Iran too much," he said.
Biden has publicly stated his willingness to rejoin the deal that Trump pulled out of in 2018 when Iran is again in full compliance.
"The JCPOA was flawed from the beginning," said Philips, noting the very baseline for the agreement was derived from Iran's lies about its true nuclear facilities and progress.
"One of the big mistakes the Obama administration made is that it reached an interim deal, which gave Iran substantial sanctions relief, which took the pressure off Iran," he said.
The Middle East expert points to the rise of Iran's regional malfeasance during the period between 2014 and 2018 as evidence that it would only use sanctions relief to wreak havoc once more. Phillips contends Iran used $100 billion in sanctions relief to finance proxy conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
Phillips argues that a new deal should incorporate limits to Iran's ballistic missile program. Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made the case that the limits on Iran's ballistic missile program should be negotiated as a separate agreement after rejoining the JCPOA.
While the Iran nuclear deal temporarily limited Iran's nuclear weapons development, once the deal sunsets, Iran could "break out" to a weapon within weeks, Phillips said.
"The administration claimed that this was a barrier to an Iranian nuclear weapon, but really it was just a speed bump that would slow down the Iranian program," he said. "Hopefully, there'll be no rush to failure in negotiations with Iran."
Phillips agrees with assessments that the next Iranian government will likely be a hard-line one with little appetite for negotiating with the United States, but he contends that the nuclear program is already controlled by the hard-line Revolutionary Guard at the behest of the country's supreme leader.
He also believes Biden is in a good negotiating position if he leaves the sanctions, which experts have called debilitating, in place.
"The regime is walking on eggshells now with its own people," he said. "It would be a mistake for the Biden administration to do a 'full Obama' [by] returning to the JCPOA, which led to tremendous problems in the region."
Phillips said the administration should work on a new deal that incorporates Iran's ballistic missile program, a tougher inspection regime, greater restrictions on uranium enrichment, and a ban on industrial use.
"Iran needs sanctions relief much more than the U.S. needs a bad deal or even a good deal," he said.
A "never fulfilled" Asia pivot
The Obama administration was "more optimistic" about China's growing economic power making it a freer country and too distracted by other missions to contain China's rapid military growth, contends American Enterprise Institute China expert Zack Cooper.
"We promised 10 years ago to pivot to Asia, but we never really fulfilled that," Cooper told the Washington Examiner. "We never actually did what we had to do to stabilize the military balance in Asia."
In his book, Gates did not lay specific blame on Obama for not keeping pace with China's military investment, writing instead that the U.S. had "no strategy for a decades-long competition with China."
China's military budget rose from $20 billion in 1998 to $170 billion in 2018, with investments in advanced weaponry, naval expansion, shipbuilding, and anti-ship missiles, Gates writes.
"The big issue that the Biden team has to approach differently is China," Cooper emphasized. "A lot of the big muscle movements, they didn't happen, or they were, in my view, not big enough to fundamentally shift the worsening security dynamics in the region."
Cooper grants that Obama did put 2,500 Marines on rotation in Australia, but the Middle East, global counterterrorism missions, and deterring Russia took a front seat in his team's national security policy.
In the opening statement of his nomination hearing, Austin, who served in the Middle East and is a former chief of U.S. Central Command, indicated that he would orient the Pentagon toward the Indo-Pacific as Biden's defense secretary.
"Globally, I understand that Asia must be the focus of our effort, and I see China, in particular, as a pacing challenge for the department," Austin told a panel of senators before winning a 93-2 confirmation on the chamber floor.
Cooper said that the hard turn toward Asia under the Trump Pentagon, which included former Defense Secretary Mark Esper's multiple trips to put in face time with key Pacific allies and its other acts of relationship-building in the region, was helpful.
So was Congress's recent passage of the most recent National Defense Authorization Act, he said, which includes a $2.2 billion "Pacific deterrence initiative" aimed at improving America's ability to team up, if needed, with allies in that area. And that's mostly about one common threat: China.
"There has been a head start," Cooper said. "It's not enough for us to just do better than we were doing a few years ago. We have to do better than the Chinese are doing to make sure that we keep the edge."
He added, "Are we making progress? Absolutely. Is it fast enough? I'm not sure."
Tags: News, National Security, Department of Defense, Joe Biden, Lloyd Austin, China, Middle East, Iran, Iraq, Antony Blinken, Robert Gates
Original Author: Abraham Mahshie
Original Location: Can Biden avoid repeating these Obama-era national security missteps?