A Promised Land

Part 5, “The World as It Is,” focuses on foreign policy. Obama’s account is again focused providing the reader with in-depth access to the circumstances surrounding notable events. In Chapter 18, for instance, he discusses serious conflicts between the White House and the Pentagon. Tensions deepened when his generals ran a media campaign promoting their strategy for winning the war in Afghanistan before Obama approved it. Biden warned Obama that the generals were trying to force his hand. Obama blamed the situation on the lack of oversight during the Bush years. The episode illustrates just how accustomed the US military was to getting whatever it wanted under Bush. It also demonstrates the extent to which the Bush White House handed off basic policy decisions about war, peace, budget priorities, diplomacy, and the trade-offs between security and other values to the Pentagon and the CIA. Obama explains the factors driving Bush’s attitude, notably, his desire to punish those responsible for 9/11, his reluctance to ask questions that might get in the way of catching terrorists, and his scramble to address the fallout from the invasion of Iraq. Other factors include Congress’ reluctance to tackle hard policy problems and the press corps, which was overly deferential to the military.

Obama further contextualizes current events in Chapter 19, which addresses Iran’s nuclear program. Obama was unsurprised when Khamenei rebuffed his attempts to open a dialogue between their two countries. Khamenei had every right to be suspicious of Obama. Indeed, the US has a long history of meddling in sovereign nations’ affairs, including Iran. In 1953, when Eisenhower was president, the CIA and MI6 engineered a coup d’état that deposed Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The US aimed to strengthen the power of the Iranian monarchy (the Shah), who bought US weaponry and extended contracts to American oil companies. In other words, the US helped overthrow a democratically elected leader to make money and safeguard its oil interests. The Shah lived extravagantly off American largess until the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution when various Islamist and leftist organizations, including student groups, overpowered royal troops. The exiled messianic Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, rose to power, denouncing the Shah as a Western puppet. Khomeini installed himself as Supreme Leader, sidelined former secular and reformist allies, and formed the paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to crush opponents of the new regime. American meddling, then, had a profound impact on Iran. This explains why many Iranians, including the country’s rulers, remain suspicious of the US today. In short, historical context sheds light on the complex relationship between the US and Iran, and helps to explain why diplomacy between the two countries remains an uphill battle.

One of Obama’s priorities as president was to build on the work of his predecessors to combat climate change. He opens Chapter 21 with an anecdote explaining why he wants to save the planet. At dinner one night, Malia asked Obama what he planned to do to save the tigers, which were losing their habitat due to deforestation. Obama’s concern for his children and future generations informs his stance on the environment. Indeed, there is broad consensus among scientists that climate change poses an existential threat to the planet and that bold, coordinated international action is needed to reduce emissions. Without such efforts, global temperatures will continue to rise, leading to an acceleration of melting ice caps, rising oceans, extreme weather, massive population displacement, global conflicts, and increases in insect-borne diseases. Young progressives are more receptive to calls for action than older right-leaning voters, some of whom deny the existence of climate change. The expiration of the Kyoto Accord presented Obama with an opportunity to make the US a leader in the fight against climate change. President George H. W. Bush laid the foundation for US climate action during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Bush joined representatives from 153 countries in signing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the first global agreement to address greenhouse gas concentrations. Clinton took up the baton by collaborating with other countries to create a binding treaty based on the goals announced in Rio. These efforts resulted in the Kyoto Protocol, which provided detailed plans for coordinated international action against climate change. The accord included greenhouse gas reduction targets, a global carbon-trading system, and financing procedures to help poor nations adopt clean energy and preserve carbon-neutralizing forests, notably, the Amazon. Congressional Republicans opposed the Kyoto Protocol. Preferring a delay to defeat, Clinton refrained from sending the agreement to the Senate for a vote. In 2009, a year after the protocol went into full effect, the US was one of only five nations not party to the agreement. The others were Andorra and Vatican City, both of which are so small they were named observers rather than being asked to join; Taiwan, whose contested status as an independent nation prevented it from signing; and Afghanistan, which cited its 30-year occupation as an excuse not to join. Obama was not inclined to sign a treaty modeled on the Kyoto Protocol, which allowed developing countries, such as China, India, and Brazil, to skirt emission rules. Instead, he proposed an interim agreement that addressed the main problems of the existing accord. He then convinced other nations, including the BRICS, to sign it during a UN global summit on climate change in Copenhagen. Reggie aptly described Obama’s bold actions at the summit: “‘I gotta say, boss […] that was some real gangster shit back there” (515).

Part 5 describes Obama’s growing confidence in his role as Commander in Chief. With thousands of lives at stake, however, he was never wholly comfortable in the role: “The stakes were too high, the problems too knotty, for any of this to ever feel entirely routine” (429). Indeed, he compares the role as Commander in Chief to other high-stakes work: “I came to experience my responsibilities the way I imagine a bomb-disposal expert feels about clipping a wire or a tightrope walker feels as she steps off the platform, having learned to shed excess fear for the sake of focus—while trying not to get so relaxed that I made sloppy mistakes” (429). To stay grounded, Obama kept dead service members and their families in his thoughts: “Every week or so, my assistant Katie Johnson set on my desk a folder containing condolence letters to the families of fallen service members for me to sign” (429). Obama’s reverent treatment of these letters reveals how seriously he took his job, and how torn he was about risking American lives:

I’d close the door to my office, open the folder, and pause over each letter, reading the name aloud like an incantation, trying to summon an image of the young man (female casualties were rare) and what his life had been like—where he’d grown up and gone to school, the birthday parties and summer swims that had made up his childhood, the sports teams he’d played on, the sweethearts he’d pined for. I’d think about his parents, and his wife and kids if he had them. I signed each letter slowly, careful not to smudge the heavy beige paper with my left-handed, sideways grip of the pen. If the signature didn’t look the way I wanted, I’d have the letter reprinted, knowing full well that nothing I did would ever be enough (429-30).

Keeping Americans safe was of paramount importance to Obama. This sense of duty explains his somber letter-signing ritual, as well as his measured approach to foreign policy. Daily fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and global actors intent on sowing dissent, made the task of protecting the country, and the world, all the more difficult. Obama reflected upon this impossible task before he received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo: “The idea that I, or any one person, could bring order to such chaos seemed laughable” (446). As he gazed at the thousands who had gathered for the ceremony, however, he was filled with hopeful resolve: “I saw an expression of the spirit of millions of people around the world […] Whatever you do won’t be enough, I heard their voices say. Try anyway” (446).