The very notion of “facts” has been demeaned by Republicans, and most of all by Team Donald Trump. As Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes put it, “There’s no such thing, unfortunately anymore, as facts.” In response, Democrats have doubled down on their tendency to wield facts as cudgels, demonstrating their righteousness in the process. It would be a loss, though, if this came to be seen as merely another partisan schism. As it turns out, Obama’s foreign-policy legacy can offer an important window into whether facts—and being “reality-based”—are quite as critical to real-world policy success as we might like to think.
Unlike Kennedy and Johnson, Obama was very much the technocrat-in-chief, setting the tone for the people he would surround himself with. His intelligence was generally in little doubt. During his eight years in the Oval Office, the president was an almost unbelievably voracious reader, devoting around an hour on most days to books of history, philosophy, biography, or even sci-fi novels. But being smart and well-read doesn’t necessarily lead to good judgment or bold vision; in some cases, even, the former can undermine the latter. [...]
Matters of judgment still loom large four decades later. I, or any critic of Obama’s foreign policy, could sit with an Obama administration official, and, even if we agreed on all the facts and specifics of a particular country or conflict, it wouldn’t matter much. Divergences in how people interpret Obama’s legacy have much more to do with fundamentally different starting assumptions about America’s role in the world and even human nature—in other words, the very reasons why we do what we do. In fact, looking back at my own meetings with officials during the Obama era, rarely do I ever recall hearing something and thinking to myself that I had just heard some gross error of fact. This is why I found such meetings so frustrating and circular: The only things we disagreed on were the most important. [...]
Due to the formative experience of the Iraq war, as well as domestic political considerations, Obama hoped to reduce America’s footprint in the Middle East. This meant a general bias toward disengagement, irrespective of whether greater U.S. involvement could produce better outcomes in particular crises (even the Iran nuclear deal was basically about removing the possibility of an American war with Iran). There was also a general discomfort around the direct use of U.S. military force, a discomfort which was as ideological as it was practical.
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