A Promised Land (Obama, Barack)

Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.

Photo by Kawai So on Unsplash

Obama, Barack. A Promised Land (English Edition). Crown, 2020.

These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!

Preface

convinced as I was that by appealing to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature I stood a greater chance of leading us in the direction of the America we’ve been promised.

Part One | The Bet

Chapter 1

And then there was the unsettling fact that, despite whatever my mother might claim, the bullies, cheats, and self-promoters seemed to be doing quite well, while those she considered good and decent people seemed to get screwed an awful lot.

Something approaching a worldview took shape in my mind. I was helped along by a handful of professors who tolerated my iffy study habits and my youthful pretensions.

but also the result of a deep self-consciousness. A sensitivity to rejection or looking stupid. Maybe even a fundamental laziness. I took it upon myself to purge such softness with a regimen of self-improvement that I’ve never entirely shed. (Michelle and the girls point out that to this day I can’t get into a pool or the ocean without feeling compelled to swim laps. “Why don’t you just wade?” they’ll say with a snicker. “It’s fun. Here… we’ll show you how.”) I made lists. I started working out, going for runs around the Central Park Reservoir or along the East River and eating cans of tuna fish and hard-boiled eggs for fuel. I stripped myself of excess belongings—who needs more than five shirts?

SUCH WAS MY state when I graduated in 1983: big ideas and nowhere to go.

For starters, it got me out of my own head. I had to listen to, and not just theorize about, what mattered to people.

we kept bumping up against somebody—a politician, a bureaucrat, some distant CEO—who had the power to make things better but didn’t.

A collective unwillingness to keep putting up with a steady accumulation of unfairness and slights—

Bobby Kennedy—it wasn’t so much what he did as how he made you feel. Like anything was possible. Like the world was yours to remake.

Maybe you could generate the same energy, the same sense of purpose, not just within the Black community but across racial lines.

principles of organizing could be marshaled not just to run a campaign but to govern

the people I found at Harvard Law School were generally impressive young men and women who, unlike me, had grown up with the justifiable conviction that they were destined to lead lives of consequence.

 Chapter 2

conflict that I was feeling: between working for change within the system and pushing against it; wanting to lead but wanting to empower people to make change for themselves; wanting to be in politics but not of it.

“Have you ever noticed that if there’s a hard way and an easy way, you choose the hard way every time? Why do you think that is?”

I also found it awkward to talk about myself. As an organizer, I’d been trained to always stay in the background.

special designation for junior members in the minority like me—“ mushrooms,” because “you’re fed shit and kept in the dark.”

That was politics in Springfield: a series of transactions mostly hidden from view, legislators weighing the competing pressures of various interests with the dispassion of bazaar merchants, all the while keeping a careful eye on the handful of ideological hot buttons—guns, abortion, taxes—that might generate heat from their base.

“The key to surviving this place is understanding that it’s a business. Like selling cars. Or the dry cleaner down the street. You start believing it’s more than that, it’ll drive you crazy.”

Inside Michelle’s anger lay a more difficult truth. I was trying to deliver a lot of things to a lot of different people. I was taking the hard way,

Chapter 3

If, on the other hand, a campaign could somehow challenge America’s reigning political assumptions about how divided we were, well then just maybe it would be possible to build a new covenant between its citizens.

“Your idealism is stirring, Barack… but unless you raise five million bucks to get it on TV so people can hear it, you don’t stand a chance.”

But my loss to Bobby Rush had given me a clear blueprint for upping my game: I needed to interact more effectively with the media, learning to get my ideas across in pithy sound bites. I needed to build a campaign that was less about policy papers and more about connecting one-on-one with voters.

“Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.”

“I don’t oppose all wars,” I said. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.”

The short speech I’d given at the antiwar rally suddenly looked prescient and began to circulate on the internet. My young staff had to explain to me what the hell “blogs” and “MySpace” had to do with the flood of new volunteers and grassroots donations we were suddenly getting.

My stump speech became less a series of positions and more a chronicle of these disparate voices, a chorus of Americans from every corner of the state.

They’re not trying to get filthy rich. They don’t expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves. “But they do expect that if they’re willing to work, they should be able to find a job that supports a family. They expect that they shouldn’t go bankrupt just because they get sick. They expect that their kids should be able to get a good education, one that prepares them for this new economy, and they should be able to afford college if they’ve put in the effort. They want to be safe, from criminals or terrorists. And they figure that after a lifetime of work, they should be able to retire with dignity and respect. “That’s about it. It’s not a lot. And although they don’t expect government to solve all their problems, they do know, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities government could help.”

had become a mere conduit through which people might recognize the value of their own stories, their own worth, and share them with one another.

the way we’d won, with votes from all demographics, including from southern and rural white counties.

But there comes a point in the speech where I find my cadence. The crowd quiets rather than roars. It’s the kind of moment I’d come to recognize in subsequent years, on certain magic nights. There’s a physical feeling, a current of emotion that passes back and forth between you and the crowd, as if your lives and theirs are suddenly spliced together, like a movie reel, projecting backward and forward in time, and your voice creeps right up to the edge of cracking, because for an instant, you feel them deeply; you can see them whole. You’ve tapped into some collective spirit,

I saw now how it could happen—how the incrementalism and decorum, the endless positioning for the next election, and the groupthink of cable news panels all conspired to chip away at your best instincts and wear down your independence, until whatever you once believed was utterly lost.

 Chapter 4

I was becoming convinced that I could excite voters in ways that they couldn’t—if I suspected that only a wider coalition than they could build, a different language than they used, could shake up Washington and give hope to those in need—I also understood that my favored status was partly an illusion, the result of friendly media coverage and an over-stoked appetite for anything new.

Ten more years in the Senate won’t make you a better president. You get people motivated, especially young people, minorities, even middle-of-the-road white people. That’s different, you see. People are looking for something different.

The country was desperate for a new voice.

I recalled a sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called “The Drum Major Instinct.” In it, he talks about how, deep down, we all want to be first, celebrated for our greatness; we all want “to lead the parade.” He goes on to point out that such selfish impulses can be reconciled by aligning that quest for greatness with more selfless aims.

“The process can be exhilarating, but it’s mostly misery. It’s like a stress test, an EKG on the soul. And for all your talent, I don’t know how you’ll respond. Neither do you. The whole thing is so crazy, so undignified and brutal, that you have to be a little pathological to do what it takes to win. And I just don’t know if you’ve got that hunger in you.

You may be a little too normal, too well-adjusted, to run for president.

Part Two | Yes We Can

Chapter 5

Looking back, I realize I was doing what most of us tend to do when we’re uncertain or floundering: We reach for what feels familiar, what we think we’re good at. I knew policy; I knew how to consume and process information. It took a while to figure out that my problem wasn’t a lack of a ten-point plan. Rather, it was my general inability to boil issues down to their essence, to tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

“Your problem,” he said, “is you keep trying to answer the question.” “Isn’t that the point?” I said. “No, Barack,” Axe said, “that is not the point. The point is to get your message across. What are your values? What are your priorities?

The most effective debate answers, it seemed, were designed not to illuminate but to evoke an emotion, or identify the enemy, or signal to a constituency that you, more than anyone else on that stage, were and would always be on their side.

hung signs on every wall in every office with a motto he’d authored: RESPECT, EMPOWER, INCLUDE.

During a debate in late July, I was shown images of Fidel Castro, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, and a couple of other despots and asked if I’d be prepared to meet with any of them during my first year in office. Without hesitation, I said yes—I’d meet with any world leader if I thought it could advance U.S. interests.

In my mind, these episodes indicated the degree to which the Washington foreign policy establishment got things backward—taking military action without first testing diplomatic options, observing diplomatic niceties in the interest of maintaining the status quo precisely when action was called for.

“Well, you know, to prepare for this debate, I rode in the bumper cars at the state fair,”

already prevalent impression that she was a garden-variety Washington politician—

leaders who led “not by polls, but by principle… not by calculation, but by conviction.”

I became convinced we would win Iowa—and by extension the nomination. Not necessarily because I was the most polished candidate, but because we had the right message for the time and had attracted young people with prodigious talent to throw themselves behind the cause.

my self-disclosed prior drug use would prove fatal in a matchup against the Republican nominee.

Chapter 6

for de-emphasizing any topic that might be labeled a racial grievance, or split the electorate along racial lines, or do anything that would box me in as “the Black candidate.”

too much focus on civil rights, police misconduct, or other issues considered specific to Black people risked triggering suspicion,

mixture of optimism and strategic patience.

The crowd laughed heartily. “But like cholesterol,” he continued, “there’s good crazy and bad crazy, see?

 Chapter 7

The number of threats directed my way exceeded anything the Secret Service had ever seen before.

in life, when avoidance, if not retreat, is the better part of valor, there are other times when the only option is to steel yourself and go for broke.

wealthy donors, most of them terrific and generous one-on-one but collectively fitting every stereotype of the latte-drinking, Prius-driving West Coast liberal.

Chapter 8

additional two or three years in Iraq at a cost of nearly $ 10 billion a month

Part Three | Renegade

Chapter 10

Of the more than three million people, civilian and military, employed by the federal government, only a few thousand are so-called political appointees, serving at the pleasure of the president. Of those, he or she has regular, meaningful contact with fewer than a hundred senior officials and personal aides.

A team of rivals after all, I thought. I’d find out soon enough whether this indicated a well-founded confidence in my ability to lead—or the naïve faith of a novice about to get rolled.

much-needed break from cynicism.

I realized this was now part of my job: maintaining an outward sense of normalcy, upholding for everyone the fiction that we live in a safe and orderly

 Chapter 11

“Mr. President-Elect,” she said, “this is your holy-shit moment.”

ambitious as it was at the time, New Deal spending actually proved too modest to fully counteract the Great Depression, especially after FDR succumbed to 1936 election-year pressures and pulled back too early on what was then seen by many elite opinion makers as government profligacy. It would take the ultimate stimulus of World War II, when the entire nation mobilized to build an Arsenal of Democracy, to finally break the Depression once and for all.

When, several weeks after the election, 387 mostly liberal economists had sent a letter to Congress, calling for a robust Keynesian stimulus, they’d put the price tag at $ 300 to $ 400 billion—about half of what we were about to propose, and a good indicator of where even the most alarmist experts had the economy pegged.

“When things are bad,” Axe said, walking next to me as we left the December meeting, “no one cares that ‘things could have been worse.’ ”

But steadily, year by year—through Vietnam, riots, feminism, and Nixon’s southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority, union busting, and Robert Bork; through assault weapons bans and the rise of Newt Gingrich, gay rights and the Clinton impeachment—America’s voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.

Gingrich disciples, Rush Limbaugh bomb throwers, Sarah Palin wannabes, and Ayn Rand acolytes—

For all their talk about wanting politicians to get along, American voters rarely reward the opposition for cooperating with the governing party.

I gave the governor what was my standard “bro hug”—a handshake, an arm around the back for a pat, an appreciative look in the eye, a thank-you in the ear.

mere fact that the four senators were working in “bipartisan” fashion signified Solomonic wisdom and reason.

Suck it up, I told myself. Tighten your laces. Cut your rations. Keep moving.

Chapter 12

I felt the seriousness of my job most acutely when reading letters from constituents. I received a nightly batch of ten—

Which is how the United States and other advanced democracies came to create the modern social contract.

As our society grew more complex, more and more of the government’s function took the form of social insurance,

Maintaining this social compact, though, required trust. It required that we see ourselves as bound together, if not as a family then at least as a community,

Promoting that story—a story that fed not trust but resentment—had come to define the modern Republican Party.

Indeed, it became axiomatic among political consultants of both parties that restoring trust in the government or in any of our major institutions was a lost cause, and that the battle between Democrats and Republicans each election cycle now came down to whether America’s squeezed middle class was more likely to identify the wealthy and powerful or the poor and minorities as the reason they weren’t doing better.

“It’s like we’ve got a hostage situation,” Gibbs said to me one morning. “We know the banks have explosives strapped to their chests, but to the public it just looks like we’re letting them get away with a robbery.”

“Plan beats no plan.”

My emphasis on process was born of necessity. What I was quickly discovering about the presidency was that no problem that landed on my desk, foreign or domestic, had a clean, 100 percent solution. If it had, someone else down the chain of command would have solved it already.

chasing after the perfect solution led to paralysis. On the other hand, going with your gut too often meant letting preconceived notions or the path of least political resistance guide a decision—with cherry-picked facts used to justify it.

 Chapter 13

Such moments taught me to see my country through the eyes of others.

I gravitated to my campaign precisely because I was willing to challenge the assumptions of what we often referred to as “the Washington playbook,”

AT THE START of each day of my presidency, I would find a leather binder waiting for me at the breakfast table. Michelle called it “The Death, Destruction, and Horrible Things Book,” though officially it was known as the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB.

told Gates that my first priority was to make sure our agencies, both civilian and military, were aligned around a clearly defined mission and a coordinated strategy.

“Listen to me, boss,” he said. “Maybe I’ve been around this town for too long, but one thing I know is when these generals are trying to box in a new president.” He brought his face a few inches from mine and stage-whispered, “Don’t let them jam you.”

contrary to the stereotypes, they understood all too well the limits of military action, because of and not despite the fact that they had commanded troops under fire. In fact, during my eight years as president, it was often the generals, rather than civilians, who counseled restraint when it came to the use of force.

Riedel and his team completed their report. Their assessment offered no surprises, but it did help articulate our principal goal: “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to prevent their return to either country in the future.”

I didn’t like the deal. But in what was becoming a pattern, the alternatives were worse.

“Dave’s a fine soldier,” Gates said, acknowledging that McKiernan had done nothing wrong and that changing a commanding general in the middle of a war was a highly unusual step. “But he’s a manager. In an environment this challenging, we need someone with different skills. I couldn’t sleep at night, Mr. President, if I didn’t make sure our troops had the best possible commander leading them. And I’m convinced Stan McChrystal’s that person.”

parallels between McChrystal and David Petraeus—battlefield innovators who could turn a war around.

fast-moving chain that allowed a Marine injured in a dusty Afghan village to be medevaced to the closest base, stabilized, then transported to Germany and onward to Bethesda or Walter Reed for state-of-the-art surgery, all in a matter of days. Because of that system—a melding of advanced technology, logistical precision, and highly trained and dedicated people, the kind of thing that the U.S. military does better than any other organization on earth—

Unique among world leaders, the American president travels fully equipped so as not to rely on another government’s services or security forces. This meant that an armada of Beasts, security vehicles, ambulances, tactical teams, and, when necessary, Marine One helicopters were flown in on air force C-17 transport planes in advance and pre-positioned on the tarmac for my arrival.

Our motivations for erecting this architecture had hardly been selfless. Beyond helping to assure our security, it pried open markets to sell our goods, kept sea-lanes available for our ships, and maintained the steady flow of oil for our factories and cars.

Part Four | The Good Fight

 Chapter 15

The second, scheduled to be given in Cairo, would address a global audience—in particular, the world’s Muslims. I had promised to deliver a speech like this during the campaign, and although with everything else going on some of my team suggested canceling it, I told Rahm that backing out wasn’t an option. “We may not change public attitudes in these countries overnight,” I said, “but if we don’t squarely address the sources of tension between the West and the Muslim world, and describe what peaceful coexistence might look like, we’ll be fighting wars in the region for the next thirty years.”

Muslims around the world believed the United States was hostile toward their religion,

Ben that the focus of our speech had to be less about outlining new policies and more geared toward helping the two sides understand each other.

I was left with an impression that would become all too familiar in my dealings with aging autocrats: Shut away in palaces, their every interaction mediated by the hard-faced, obsequious functionaries that surrounded them, they were unable to distinguish between their personal interests and those of their nations, their actions governed by no broader purpose beyond maintaining the tangled web of patronage and business interests that kept them in power.

Elie described to me and Merkel the daily strategies he and other prisoners had used to survive: how the stronger or luckier ones would sneak food to the weak and the dying; how resistance meetings took place in latrines so foul that no guards ever entered them; how adults organized secret classes to teach children math, poetry, history—not just for learning’s sake, but so those children might maintain a belief that they would one day be free to pursue a normal life.

Chapter 16

But one person’s waste and inefficiency was another person’s profit or convenience; spending on coverage would show up on the federal books much sooner than the savings from reform; and unlike the insurance companies or Big Pharma, whose shareholders expected them to be on guard against any change that might cost them a dime, most of the potential beneficiaries of reform—the waitress, the family farmer, the independent contractor, the cancer survivor—didn’t have gaggles of well-paid and experienced lobbyists roaming the halls of Congress on their behalf.

“Making sausage isn’t pretty, Mr. President,” he said. “And you’re asking for a really big piece of sausage.”

And yet for the next three and a half months, I felt the way I imagine sailors feel on the open seas after a brutal storm has passed. The work remained arduous and sometimes monotonous, made tougher by the need to patch leaks and bail water. Maintaining speed and course in the constantly shifting winds and currents required patience, skill, and attention. But for a span of time, we had in us the thankfulness of survivors, propelled in our daily tasks by a renewed belief that we might make it to port after all.

Part Five | The World as It Is

Chapter 18

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.

The conversation had been a useful reminder to me that elections alone don’t produce a functioning democracy; until Iraq found a way to strengthen its civic institutions and its leaders developed habits of compromise, the country would continue to struggle.

At the end of August, having spent weeks in Afghanistan with a team of military and civilian advisors, McChrystal turned in the top-to-bottom assessment that Gates had asked for. A few days later, the Pentagon sent it to the White House. Rather than provide clear answers, it set off a whole new round of troublesome questions.

The situation in Afghanistan was bad and getting worse, with the Taliban emboldened, the Afghan army weak and demoralized, and Karzai, who prevailed in an election tainted by violence and fraud, still in charge of a government that was viewed by the Afghan people as corrupt and inept. What got everyone’s attention, though, was the report’s conclusion. To turn the situation around, McChrystal proposed a full-blown counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign: a military strategy meant to contain and marginalize insurgents not just by fighting them but by simultaneously working to increase stability for the country’s wider population—

requesting at least forty thousand troops on top of those I’d already deployed—which would bring the total number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan close to one hundred thousand for the foreseeable future.

bait and switch—

if we coordinated closely with the Afghan security forces to protect local populations and better trained our soldiers to respect Afghan culture,

the latest attempt by an unrestrained military to drag the country deeper into a futile, wildly expensive nation-building exercise,

exercise, when we could and should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism (CT) efforts against al-Qaeda.

The costs were staggering—at least $ 1 billion for every thousand additional troops deployed.

Gates and the generals acknowledged that no amount of U.S. military power could stabilize Afghanistan “as long as pervasive corruption and preying upon the people continue to characterize governance” inside

status quo was untenable.

orchestrated, public campaign by the Pentagon to box in a president.

entire agency under my charge was working its own agenda.

policy decisions—about war and peace, but also about America’s budget priorities, diplomatic goals, and the possible trade-offs between security and other values—had been steadily farmed out to the Pentagon and the CIA.

what he dismissed as politics was democracy as it was supposed to work—that our mission had to be defined not only by the need to defeat an enemy but by the need to make sure the country wasn’t bled dry in the process; that questions about spending hundreds of billions on missiles and forward operating bases rather than schools or healthcare for kids weren’t tangential to national security but central

presided over a series of nine two-to-three-hour meetings in the Sit Room to evaluate McChrystal’s plan.

one of the chief arguments for adopting McChrystal’s plan was its similarities to the COIN strategy Petraeus had used during the U.S. surge in Iraq.

training local forces, improving local governance, and protecting local populations—rather than seizing territory and piling up insurgent body counts—made sense.

unlike al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Taliban was too deeply woven into the fabric of Afghan society

Despite their patience and good manners, they had trouble hiding their frustration at having their professional judgments challenged, especially by those who’d never put on a uniform.

help Biden flesh out a less troop-intensive, more CT-oriented alternative

It reminded me, I’d later tell Denis, of the nursery rhyme about an old lady who swallowed a spider to catch a fly. “She ends up swallowing a horse,” I said. “And she’s dead, of course,” Denis said.

threats we faced—deadly but stateless terrorist networks; otherwise feeble rogue nations out to get weapons of mass destruction—were real but not existential, and so resolve without foresight was worse than useless.

charismatic Yemeni American cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki,

Chapter 19

Iraq and Afghanistan offered stark lessons in how quickly a president’s options narrowed once a war had begun.

During my international trips, I made a point of hosting town hall meetings with young people.

needed a second kind of diplomacy, one of concrete rewards and punishments designed to alter the calculations of hard, ruthless leaders.

 Chapter 20

“Turns out avoiding a war is harder than getting into one.”

faithfully followed Deng Xiaoping’s counsel to “hide your strength and bide your time.”

Part Six | In the Barrel

 Chapter 22

FDR would never have made such mistakes, I thought. He had understood that digging America out of the Depression was less a matter of getting every New Deal policy exactly right than of projecting confidence in the overall endeavor, impressing upon the public that the government had a handle on the situation. Just as he’d known that in a crisis people needed a story that made sense of their hardships and spoke to their emotions—a morality tale with clear good guys and bad guys and a plot they could easily follow.

When asked once what sorts of out-of-town conferences were okay for administration officials to attend, his response was short and to the point: “If it sounds fun, you can’t go.”

 Chapter 23

(His obtuseness reminded me that BP—previously known as British Petroleum—had started off as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company: the same company whose unwillingness to split royalties with Iran’s government in the 1950s had led to the coup that ultimately resulted in that country’s Islamic Revolution.)

But in that Rolling Stone article, I’d heard in him and his aides the same air of impunity that seemed to have taken hold among some in the military’s top ranks during the Bush years: a sense that once war began, those who fought it shouldn’t be questioned, that politicians should just give them what they ask for and get out of the way. It was a seductive view, especially coming from a man of McChrystal’s caliber. It also threatened to erode a bedrock principle of our representative democracy, and I was determined to put an end to it.

It turned out that a solid majority of Americans really didn’t like the idea of trying terrorist suspects in civilian criminal courts on U.S. soil. In fact, most weren’t particularly concerned about giving them full or fair trials at all.

 Chapter 24

Except now I found myself asking whether those impulses—of violence, greed, corruption, nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance, the all-too-human desire to beat back our own uncertainty and mortality and sense of insignificance by subordinating others—were too strong for any democracy to permanently contain. For they seemed to lie in wait everywhere, ready to resurface whenever growth rates stalled or demographics changed or a charismatic leader chose to ride the wave of people’s fears and resentments. And as much as I might have wished otherwise, there was no Mahatma Gandhi around to tell me what I might do to hold such impulses back.

Part Seven | On the High Wire

 Chapter 25

Some of the earliest moral instruction I got from my mother revolved around the Holocaust, an unconscionable catastrophe that, like slavery, she explained, was rooted in the inability or unwillingness to recognize the humanity of others.

I believed there was an essential bond between the Black and the Jewish experiences—a common story of exile and suffering that might ultimately be redeemed by a shared thirst for justice, a deeper compassion for others, a heightened sense of community. It made me fiercely protective of the right of the Jewish people to have a state of their own, though, ironically, those same shared values also made it impossible for me to ignore the conditions under which Palestinians in the occupied territories were forced to live.

remained suspect, a man of divided loyalties: someone whose support for Israel, as one of Axe’s friends colorfully put it, wasn’t “felt in his kishkes”—“ guts,” in Yiddish.

“I thought he opposes settlements,” I said. “He does,” Ben said. “He also opposes us doing anything to actually stop settlements.”

speeches, the small talk, the easy familiarity—it all felt too comfortable, almost ritualized, a performance that each of the four leaders had probably participated in dozens of times before, designed to placate the latest U.S. president who thought things could change.

A world without illusions—that’s what they’d call it.

George Mitchell tried to put things in perspective, reminding me that during negotiations to end the Northern Ireland conflict, “We had seven hundred bad days—and one good one.”

It was possible that the stifling of dissent combined with plain inertia would be enough to keep them going for a while. But although our intelligence agencies mainly focused on tracking the actions of terrorist networks, and our diplomats were not always attuned to what was happening on “the Arab street,” we could see indications of a growing discontent among ordinary Arabs—which, given the lack of legitimate outlets to express such frustration, could spell trouble. Or, as I told Denis after returning from my first visit to the region as president, “Sometime, somewhere, things are going to blow.”

In pursuing each of these goals, we’d made autocrats our allies. They were predictable, after all, and committed to keeping a lid on things.

the possibility that some sort of populist uprising might bring down one of our allies had historically been met with resignation: Sure, it was likely to happen, the same way a bad hurricane will hit the Gulf Coast or the Big One will hit California; but since we couldn’t say exactly when or where, and since we didn’t have the means to stop it anyway, the best thing to do was prepare contingency plans and get ready to manage the aftershocks.

Not long afterward, Samantha and three NSC colleagues—Dennis Ross, Gayle Smith, and Jeremy Weinstein—presented me with the blueprint for a Presidential Study Directive stating that U.S. interests in stability across the Middle East and North Africa were adversely affected by the United States’ uncritical support of authoritarian regimes.

The NSC team set about conducting biweekly meetings with Middle East experts from across government to develop specific ideas for reorienting U.S. policy.

expected to deliver a consistent and coordinated message on the need for reform;

This was precisely the scenario my Presidential Study Directive had sought to avoid: the U.S. government suddenly caught between a repressive but reliable ally and a population insistent on change, voicing the democratic aspirations we claimed to stand for.

“corrupt, rotting authoritarian order,” as Ben liked to call it, that controlled life in the Middle East and North Africa.

“Let’s prepare a statement,” I said to my team. “We’re calling on Mubarak to step down now.”

that same establishment—particularly the Pentagon and the intelligence community—probably had more impact on the final outcome in Egypt than any high-minded statements coming from the White House. Once or twice a day, we had Gates, Mullen, Panetta, Brennan, and others quietly reach out to high-ranking officers in the Egyptian military and intelligence services, making clear that a military-sanctioned crackdown on the protesters would have severe consequences

It was only the beginning of a struggle for the soul of the Arab world—

Two of the countries that saw the worst violence were Syria and Bahrain,

I had no elegant way to explain the apparent inconsistency, other than to acknowledge that the world was messy; that in the conduct of foreign policy, I had to constantly balance competing interests, interests shaped by the choices of previous administrations and the contingencies of the moment; and that just because I couldn’t in every instance elevate our human rights agenda over other considerations didn’t mean that I shouldn’t try to do what I could, when I could, to advance

what I considered to be America’s highest values. But what if a government starts massacring not hundreds of its citizens but thousands and the United States has the power to stop it? Then what?—

Appalled by the escalating carnage, we quickly did everything we could short of using military force to stop Gaddafi. I called for him to relinquish power, arguing that he had lost the legitimacy to govern. We imposed economic sanctions, froze billions of dollars in assets that belonged to him and his family, and, at the U.N. Security Council, passed an arms embargo and referred the case of Libya to the International Criminal Court,

Analysts forecasted that once Gaddafi’s forces reached Benghazi, tens of thousands of lives could be lost.

considered this a sign of moral progress. For most of America’s history, the thought of using our combat forces to stop a government from killing its own people would have been a nonstarter—

obligation of the United States to prioritize the prevention of atrocities in its foreign policy was what Samantha’s book

declined Samantha’s suggestion that my Nobel Prize address include an explicit argument for a global “responsibility to protect”

latching on to the idea of imposing a no-fly zone to ground Gaddafi’s military planes and prevent bombing,

establishing a no-fly zone in Libyan airspace would require us to first fire missiles into Tripoli to destroy Libya’s air defenses—a clear act of war against a country that posed no threat to us. Not only that, but it wasn’t even clear that a no-fly zone would have any effect,

found the idea of waging a new war in a distant country with no strategic importance to the United States to be less than prudent.

support around the world for intervention gathered steam. To the surprise of many, the Arab League voted in support of an international intervention

Sarkozy, who’d been criticized mercilessly in France for supporting the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia till the bitter end, suddenly decided to make saving the Libyan people his personal cause. Together with David Cameron, he announced his intention to immediately introduce a resolution in the U.N. Security Council on behalf of France and the United Kingdom, authorizing an international coalition to initiate a no-fly zone over Libya—a resolution on which we’d have to take a position.

“In other words,” I said, “we are being asked to participate in a no-fly zone that will make everyone look like they’re doing something but that won’t actually save Benghazi.”

Susan Rice said the situation reminded her of the international community’s failure to intervene in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

here’s the one thing we’re not going to do—we’re not going to participate in some half-assed no-fly zone that won’t achieve our objective.”

options for what an effective intervention would look like,

Chapter 26

knowing we had to try to prevent a massacre in Libya while minimizing the risks and burdens on an already overstretched U.S. military.

broader mandate to halt attacks by Gaddafi’s forces in order to protect Libyan civilians. Meanwhile, the Pentagon would develop a military campaign that involved a clear division of labor among allies. In the campaign’s first phase, the United States would help stop Gaddafi’s advance on Benghazi and take out his air-defense systems—a task for which we were uniquely suited, given our superior capabilities. After that we’d hand off the bulk of the operation to the Europeans and the participating Arab states.

Within days, all elements of the operation were in place, with the Europeans agreeing that their forces would operate under a NATO command structure, and with enough Arab participation—from the Jordanians, Qataris, and Emiratis—

first few days of the Libya campaign went as well as possible. Gaddafi’s air defenses were quickly dismantled. European jets had moved into place as promised (with Sarkozy making certain it was a French plane that first crossed into Libyan airspace)

no-fly/ no-drive zone had been effectively established

March ended without a single U.S. casualty in Libya, and for an approximate cost of $ 550 million—not much more than what we spent per day on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—we had accomplished our objective of saving Benghazi and its neighboring cities and perhaps tens of thousands of lives. According to Samantha, it was the quickest international military intervention to prevent a mass atrocity in modern history.

Chapter 27

“I want to make the hunt for bin Laden a top priority,”

But I also viewed the elimination of bin Laden as critical to my goal of reorienting America’s counterterrorism strategy. By losing our focus on the small band of terrorists who had actually planned and carried out 9/ 11 and instead defining the threat as an open-ended, all-encompassing “War on Terror,” we’d fallen into what I believed was a strategic trap—one that had elevated al-Qaeda’s prestige, rationalized the Iraq invasion, alienated much of the Muslim world, and warped almost a decade of U.S. foreign policy.

“Mr. President, it’s very preliminary,” Leon said, “but we think we have a potential lead on bin Laden—the best one by far since Tora Bora.”

“I think there’s a good chance he’s our man,” he said. “But we can’t be certain.”

Based on what I’d heard, I decided we had enough information to begin developing options for an attack on the compound.

Whatever option we chose could not involve the Pakistanis.

Whatever we chose to do in Abbottabad, then, would involve violating the territory of a putative ally in the most egregious way possible, short of war—raising both the diplomatic stakes and the operational complexities.

Roughly speaking, I had two options. The first was to demolish it with an air strike. The benefits of that approach were obvious: No American lives would be risked on Pakistani soil. Publicly, at least, this option also offered a certain deniability—

The second option was to authorize a special ops mission,

McRaven reported feeling highly confident that the raid could be executed.

if the authorities confronted us on the ground, his inclination would be to have the SEALs hold in place while our diplomats tried to negotiate a safe exit.

“I know we’re trying to quantify these factors as best we can,” I said. “But ultimately, this is a fifty-fifty call. Let’s move on.”

He raised the precedent of the April 1980 attempt to rescue the fifty-three American hostages held in Iran, known as Desert One,

Joe also weighed in against the raid, arguing that given the enormous consequences of failure, I should defer any decision until the intelligence community was more certain that bin Laden was in the compound.

I wasn’t in favor of a missile strike, even one as precise as Cartwright had devised, feeling that the gamble wasn’t worth it without the ability to confirm that bin Laden had been killed. I was also skeptical of giving the intelligence community more time, since the extra months we’d spent monitoring the compound had yielded virtually no new information.

a no-nonsense, no-ego, no-excuses public servant

Operation Neptune’s Spear.

The team had planned for us to follow the operation indirectly, through Leon, since Tom was concerned about the optics of me communicating directly with McRaven, which might leave the impression that I was micromanaging the operation—a bad practice generally and a political problem if the mission failed.

Then, with a suddenness I didn’t expect, we heard McRaven’s and Leon’s voices, almost simultaneously, utter the words we’d been waiting to hear—the culmination of months of planning and years of intelligence gathering. “Geronimo ID’d… Geronimo EKIA.” Enemy killed in action.