Derek Chollet, The Middle Way: How Three Presidents Shaped America’s Role in the World (New York City, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021). xiv+238pp., $29.95.

IT WOULD be quite understandable if a reader perusing various book titles were to assume that a volume entitled The Middle Way: How Three Presidents Shaped America’s Role in the World illustrates commonalities among moderate post-World War II American presidents, including Bill Clinton. After all, Clinton embodied the “Third Way” that constituted the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. 

On the one hand, it was Clinton who tried to end “welfare as we know it” and who secured passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 that has since been the subject of bitter criticism—publicly regretted by President Joe Biden, at the time one of its strongest supporters; and was supplanted by, of all people, Donald Trump. Yet at the same time, as early as his first election campaign, Clinton sought to redefine the nature and purpose of American national security policy as it had been pursued during the Cold War. As Norman Ornstein, one of America’s shrewdest political analysts observed in the summer 1992 edition of Foreign Affairs,

Clinton, far more than his Democratic rivals, focused his campaign on a comprehensive worldview and articulated an assertive internationalist approach. In a major speech at Georgetown University in December and another in New York in April he stressed linking domestic needs with foreign policy. He detailed policies to meet three objectives: restructuring our military forces to counter our post-Cold War threats; promoting democracy around the world through working for demilitarization in the former Soviet Union, through private investment coordinated with conditional aid to the republics and to eastern Europe, and through the formation of a Democracy Corps that would send American volunteers abroad; and finally, restoring America’s economic leadership by expanding trade, increasing American exports and capitalizing on emerging technologies.

Once in office, Clinton made good on many of his campaign pronouncements. It was during his presidency that the budget was balanced after running up annual deficits for many years. He successfully limited increases in defense spending: When he entered office, the Department of Defense budget represented over one-fifth of all government expenditures and 3.7 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Clinton left office having reduced defense spending to under 16.4 percent of all federal expenditures, and nearly a percentage point less of GDP. Moreover, Clinton kept America out of major wars, while the economy continued to grow throughout his two terms. Finally, it was under Clinton’s leadership that the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.

But Clinton was buffeted from both the Right and the Left. Neocons and liberal internationalists bitterly criticized his inaction in the face of the Rwandan genocide, his initially tepid response to the massacres in Bosnia, and his reluctance to do more than bomb Saddam Hussein when many were braying for his removal. Clinton fared no better with the Left, which opposed his efforts to reform welfare and to impose mandatory sentences for criminal offenses. 

That Clinton in his post-presidency worked closely with, indeed befriended George H.W. Bush, another moderate president who suffered attacks from both the Right and the Left, would further underscore the assumption that a book about moderate presidents would include him. Indeed, George H.W. Bush is one of two moderates—the other is Dwight Eisenhower—who are the subjects of this short volume. Except that it is not Clinton who is the third of this presidential troika. It is Barack Obama.

DEREK CHOLLET, recently appointed counselor at the State Department in the new Biden administration, has become something of an Obama historian. This slim volume is his third that addresses the Obama years. The first was a biography of Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Chollet co-authored the book with Samantha Power. The book appeared in November 2012, shortly before the newly re-elected Obama named her ambassador to the United Nations and after Chollet had assumed the post of assistant secretary of defense for International Security Affairs. The second volume, published in June 2016 when Obama still had seven months remaining in his second term, and when Donald Trump had assumed the crown of presumptive Republican nominee for the upcoming presidential election, was The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s Role in the World.

Chollet’s latest effort represents yet another attempt to present the forty-fourth president in the best possible light. The short volume offers a gauzy, at times sentimental, reconstruction of Obama’s tenure—primarily of his national security policies but also of his presidency more generally. The objective is to present Barack Obama as the linear successor of two presidents whom history has judged increasingly favorably with the passage of time. 

Obama was fond of quoting both Eisenhower and Bush. He admired them both, and clearly saw himself following in their footsteps. As Chollet puts it, he “harnessed his lineage to both Eisenhower and Bush.” Obama saw himself under attack from both the Right and the Left, especially the Right. And in February 2011 he awarded Bush the Presidential Medal of Freedom, emphasizing that “his humility and his decency reflects the very best of the American spirit,” and celebrating his “profound commitment to serving others.” Chollet’s volume is both an echo and a vindication of how Obama saw himself, namely, as a twenty-first-century incarnation of two presidents who were vastly underrated both during their terms of office and for some years afterward.

Chollet’s portraits of Eisenhower and Bush are accurate enough. Both presidents were cautious pragmatists, who eschewed ideological fervor. Both were victims of attack from both isolationists and interventionists. Eisenhower had to cope with McCarthyism and its eponymous standard bearer, the junior senator from Wisconsin, and with the conspiracy-addled John Birch Society. At the same time, he was criticized for his reluctance both to act more forcefully in support of the beleaguered French forces at Dien Bien Phu and for refusing to intervene as Soviet tanks crushed the 1956 Hungarian uprising, or for that matter, the Polish revolt in June of that same year (which Chollet neglects to mention).

For his part, Bush likewise found himself the victim of sniping from both isolationists and interventionists. Pat Buchanan and his know-nothing isolationist followers derided his commitment to alliances and opposed his decision to restore Kuwaiti independence in the face of Iraq’s invasion and seizure of that small oil-rich state. Neoconservatives had been angered by his willingness to pursue business-as-usual with China after the Tiananmen Square massacre and faulted his seeming passivity as Lithuania and Ukraine sought independence from the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, they strongly supported his decision to commit a half-million troops to the Arabian Gulf and then launch a successful operation against Iraq that defeated Saddam, and restored the al Sabah family to their rulership of Kuwait. Yet they were then outraged and bitterly disappointed when Bush, having assumed that Saddam was on his last legs, encouraged the Kurds to rebel in northern Iraq and the Shi’a Arabs to do so in the country’s south, then stood by while Saddam’s forces brutally put down both rebellions. That Bush was not even prepared to order the military to shoot down Saddam’s helicopters even as they gassed the Kurdish rebels further outraged both the neocons and the liberal interventionists with whom they had made common cause.

Eisenhower was able to retain his immense popularity despite criticism of his failure to support the uprisings against the Soviet Union that year and overwhelmingly defeated Adlai Stevenson for a second term in 1956—he had also crushed Stevenson in the previous presidential election. On the other hand, Bush saw his immense postwar popularity rapidly plummet and, faced with Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy as well as the strong challenge from Bill Clinton, lost the 1992 election with the lowest percentage of the popular vote in decades. 

Chollet attributes Bush’s loss to his foreign policy missteps and the resentment of the neocons. As it happens, while some neocons did support Clinton—Chollet mentions but one, William Safire—not all of them did. Some of the most prominent, such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, stuck with Bush. Indeed, Wolfowitz, despite his misgivings about Bush’s reluctance to help the Kurds or the Iraqi Shi’a, remained in his post as under secretary of defense for policy until January 19, 1993, the day before Clinton was sworn into office.

Domestic issues—not national security matters—brought Bush down. Having promised voters to “read my lips, no new taxes,” he found himself forced to raise them due to the country’s increasingly weak economic performance. National security was not the issue in 1992. Instead, as James Carville put it, “it’s the economy stupid.”

Lurking in the background throughout the book is the specter of Donald J. Trump. Indeed, the entire thrust of Chollet’s effort is not only to link Obama to Eisenhower and Bush, but also to contrast them with Trump and the chaos that he unleashed virtually the day he took office in 2017. Chollet wastes no time underscoring both points. As he writes in his preface,

Many people question the future of America in the world … especially ... in the wake of the cataclysm generated by the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 … and when American democracy itself seems imperiled. … In such troubling times, the lessons of Eisenhower, Bush and Obama can be a guide … they exemplify an underappreciated tradition of political leadership and distinct vision for America’s global role.

Chollet’s effort to bracket Obama with Eisenhower and Bush, however, is often forced. For example, he asserts that “from the moment of their election Eisenhower, Bush and Obama thought deeply about their approaches to national security.” So for that matter did every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt onwards. Similarly, he argues that Eisenhower, Bush, and Obama “all faced a type of antagonist that shared a common ancestry—from Taft and McCarthy, to Buchanan and Perot, to Trump.” In fact, it was George W. Bush who, like his father, had to face a challenge from the isolationist Buchanan in the Republican primaries. By contrast, the only challenge Obama faced was from Hillary Clinton, a true internationalist. Trump may have fostered anti-Obama conspiracy theories, but he hardly posed a serious threat to either of Obama’s presidential campaigns, or, for that matter, to his actions while in office.

CHOLLET QUOTES with approval a 2008 campaign speech in which “Obama said he admired how the forty-first president recognized ‘that it is always in our interests to engage, to listen, [and] to build alliances.’” Bush did exactly that; Obama, not so much. Indeed, the only new alliance Obama appears to have instigated was the growth in de facto cooperation between Israel and the Gulf Arab states. He did so inadvertently, however. Both the Arabs and Israelis resented the Americans’ unwillingness to do anything other than tell them Washington’s intentions regarding a nuclear deal with Iran. There was no real consultation; unlike Bush, Obama did not “listen.” Ultimately, suspicion of American motives led to the Abraham Accords; an agreement such as that one was never on Obama’s radar, however.

Chollet argues that Obama, like Eisenhower and Bush, “embraced bold ambitions and saw their country as exceptional but remained focused on not overextending it.” That certainly is an apt summary of Eisenhower and Bush’s worldview. It contrasts starkly with the several apologies that Obama uttered on his early overseas trips in the spring of 2009. The trips may not have been an “apology tour” as Mitt Romney later characterized it, but Obama’s statements certainly came as a surprise to many Americans. During his first overseas trip as president, Obama remarked at a Town Hall in Strasbourg, France, on April 3, 2009, that “there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” He then added in an obvious slight to his predecessor, “We just emerged from an era marked by irresponsibility.” Speaking before the Turkish parliament a few days later, he asserted that “the United States is still working through some of our own darker periods in our history ... Our country still struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation, the past treatment of Native Americans.” 

Chollet points out that it was Obama’s “profound … conviction that the United States needed to confront its flaws directly. Doing so, Obama believed, was not an admission of weakness, it was the key to renewal.” Nevertheless, no president had previously made such pronouncements before an overseas audience. Indeed, Obama made it very clear that he thought the United States definitely was not exceptional when he mused to Edward Luce of the Financial Times, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Yet if all countries are exceptional, then none are. And while Obama subsequently went to great lengths to clarify, restate, and essentially repudiate what he had enunciated early in his presidency, given that his statement came at roughly the same time as his speeches in Strasburg and Ankara, the damage was done. Neither Eisenhower nor Bush ever came close to making similar statements even though they clearly had both the motive and opportunity to do so. Eisenhower had to send troops to Little Rock in 1957 to uphold the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education by forcing the all-White Central High School to admit Black students. Bush had to confront the Watts riots in late April and early May 1992, in the middle of his presidential campaign. Yet neither saw any reason to wash America’s dirty linen before the international public.

Chollet describes Obama as a “small-c-conservative, or what is sometimes described as a ‘dispositional conservative’: ambitious in outlook while cautious in action.” That is how Obama saw himself. As he told Jeffrey Goldberg, in an interview during his final year in office, “I suppose you could call me a realist in believing that we can’t at any given moment, relieve all the world’s misery.” Reflecting Obama’s sentiments, Chollet points to “numerous analysts” who noted the similarities between Obama’s foreign policy and those of Ike and Bush, especially “their common instinct for strategic restraint and their intuitive ‘realist’ approach.” Yet on closer examination, virtually all those “numerous analysts” were long-time supporters of Democratic administrations and Obama admirers. As Colin Dueck notes in Age of Iron, his study of conservative nationalism, “Obama’s foreign policy record was viewed favorably by Democrats, much less so by Republicans or independents.”

As Chollet notes several times in his volume, the president’s desire to employ all tools of American power, and not just those of the military, would appear to mesh well with the realists’ reluctance to have America engage in endless foreign adventures to promote its values. But Obama’s record on the use of force was hardly consistent. Obama justified his several increases in American force levels in Afghanistan from about 38,000 when he first took office to just under 100,000 two years later in order to bring the war to an end. As he put it in his February 2013 State of the Union Address, “By the end of next year our war in Afghanistan will be over.” That was eight years ago; when he left office there were still more than 8,500 troops in that country, with thousands more contractors supporting them. Chollet glosses over the magnitude of those force increases, and indeed, barely refers to Afghanistan throughout the entire volume.

Just as Chollet omits Obama’s decisions regarding force levels in Afghanistan, he likewise avoids mentioning Obama’s failed North Korea policy. Obama preached what he termed “strategic patience” vis-à-vis Pyongyang, somehow hoping that the hermit state would divest itself of its nuclear program. That of course did not happen. Pyongyang continued to develop nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them and continues to threaten both America’s ally Japan and American territory as well. 

Chollet mentions China only in the context of George H.W. Bush’s presidency. Perhaps that is so because Obama’s record on China is at best mixed. He certainly encountered little success in dealing with China’s autocratic Xi Jinping. His 2015 agreement with Xi that neither country would “conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property … with the intent of providing competitive advantages to companies or commercial sectors” was virtually a dead letter from the moment it was signed. As Jack Goldsmith and Robert D. Williams wrote three years later, “viewed narrowly, on the basis of the public record in light of its publicly stated aims, the indictment strategy appears to be a magnificent failure.” Since then, matters have hardly changed at all.

CHOLLET LIKEWISE avoids discussing Obama’s controversial decision to remove all troops from Iraq by the end of 2010. In acting on his promise, Obama enabled Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki to empower himself and his Shi’a allies at the expense of the country’s minority Sunnis. He thereby not only upset the delicate political balance that had held the country together but stoked bitter Sunni resentment that led to the rise of ISIS. Obama initially called ISIS the “junior varsity,” revealing how he had completely misjudged the attraction that the terrorist group had for Sunnis. Obama then found himself forced to send troops back to Iraq as ISIS conquered large swaths of both that country and Syria. By 2016 there were nearly 7,000 troops in Iraq. American forces continue to operate in Iraq as of the time of writing five years later, albeit at considerably smaller numbers.

Chollet only very briefly mentions the Arab Spring that began with the self-immolation of a fruit vendor in a small Tunisian town but does so only in passing. Regarding the series of rebellions that led to the ouster of the leaders of Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt, Chollet merely notes that “the unexpected events of the Middle East whipsawed his administration … Obama found it hard to handle the velocity of events, especially when weighed against other crushing demands at home and abroad.” 

Few presidents have avoided coping with “crushing demands at home and abroad;” dealing with multiple crises is part of the presidential job description. As Vali Nasr (who served in the Obama administration during the Arab Spring) has observed, Obama had a real opportunity to exert a salubrious influence on the uprisings. Nasr writes:

We did not know … that the Arab Spring would have been such a disappointment had we engaged the region quickly and forcefully … We could have had an impact on the outcome had we had a strategy other than washing our hands of the region, and had we shown willingness to exercise our leadership.

When Obama finally chose to intervene in one of the rebellions, he did so by voicing his support for the ouster of America’s long-standing Egyptian ally Hosni Mubarak. The result: Mubarak was deposed, and Egypt descended into the chaos that led to the brief rule of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi and then a military countercoup that ultimately resulted in the emergence of another military strongman, Abdel Fatah el-Sisi. Moreover, in dumping a long-standing regional ally, and implicitly supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama began to sow the seeds of doubt in the minds of other regional allies about American credibility and reliability.

Chollet frequently repeats Obama’s mantra: “don’t do stupid shit.” It is arguable, however, that Obama’s intervention in Egypt was just that. So too was the 2011 military intervention in Libya. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, or North Korea, Chollet does address at some length Obama’s controversial decision to provide American military support for the European effort to prevent Muammar el-Qaddafi from carrying out his threat to eradicate the Libyan opponents of his regime. He acknowledges that the Libya operation led to nothing less than a “tragedy.” Then again, so belatedly did Obama himself. “By the end of his presidency,” writes Chollet, “Obama summed up his Libya policy bluntly. ‘It didn’t work,’ he said, ‘Libya is a mess.’”

Even then, however, Chollet cannot bring himself to criticize Obama. “It is hard to remember,” he asserts, “that the campaign appeared to be a success when it ended and Qadhafi met his brutal demise in the fall of 2011 … After all, the immediate humanitarian crisis was averted, and for awhile [sic] Libya looked relatively stable.” “Relatively,” is, of course, a loaded word, as indeed is “for a while.” 

To begin with, it was unclear why the United States should have intervened at all. Obama stressed that he did not want to engage in any additional foreign military entanglements while American troops remained engaged in combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan. As he later told Jeffrey Goldberg, “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening.” Moreover, Obama launched what was called Operation Odyssey Dawn without fully consulting Congress, in contrast to George H.W. Bush, who sought, and received, authorization for the use of military force against Iraq.

Obama assumed that Qaddafi meant to eradicate his opposition and considered the American and European response a humanitarian operation, what liberal interventionists called “responsibility to protect.” Yet it was equally possible that Qaddafi simply was engaging in hyperbole, a not uncommon practice in the Middle East. The language he used as his forces approached Benghazi, where the rebels had their stronghold—“We are coming tonight, and there will be no mercy”—may simply have been meant to cow the city into submission. Chollet acknowledges that “there’s no question the United States lacked expertise on Libya at the time, and to a certain extent, American officials were flying blind.” Yet for the better part of a decade, ever since Qaddafi had agreed to dismantle his nuclear program and had resumed relations with the United States, American businessmen had returned to Libya and Washington maintained an embassy in Tripoli and a consulate in Benghazi. In other words, Washington knew no less about Libya than it did about most other states in the region. 

Moreover, by turning on Qaddafi, Obama once again demonstrated the futility of reaching a nuclear agreement with the United States. Chollet does not mention that agreement, nor does he acknowledge that Tehran and Pyongyang both took notice of America’s about-face. The result no doubt was a far tougher negotiating stance on the part of the ayatollahs, and North Korea’s refusal to decelerate its nuclear program. And, while acknowledging that Libya is a “mess,” Chollet prefers to avoid discussing the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens while visiting Benghazi, or the brutal, internationalized civil war that still rages in that country.

Chollet does not mention “leading from behind,” the phrase that characterized the Libya operation. Nor does he note that Obama wanted the Europeans to lead because as he told Jeffrey Goldberg, “It was part of the anti-free rider campaign.” The words “free riders” do not appear in Chollet’s book. They were central to Obama’s worldview, however. As he put it to Goldberg, “Free riders aggravate me.” Indeed, in this respect, he differed sharply from Eisenhower, and for that matter the archrealist Richard Nixon. As presidential historian Stephen Sestanovich told Goldberg, unlike his two predecessors “Obama appears to have had a personal, ideological commitment to the idea that foreign policy had consumed too much of the nation’s attention and resources.” His contempt for “free riders” not only cast doubt in the minds of America’s allies as to whether they could rely on Washington’s support, but laid the groundwork for the far less eloquent Donald Trump who wielded the concept with a vengeance.

Despite the various international security crises that Obama had to address during his eight years in office, Chollet discusses only one other apart from Libya, namely, the Syrian Civil War. He justifies Obama’s controversial decision not to support the Syrian uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad as he puts it: “Obama viewed Syria as an urgent priority but not a particularly important one.” Leave aside the fact that Syria, with its huge chemical weapons arsenal, was significantly more important to American security and that of its allies than the Libyan Civil War. There was also the fact that Obama’s reluctance to intervene flew in the face of his own secretary of state’s eagerness to do so. Hillary Clinton argued for early support for the rebels and subsequently pointed out—much to Obama’s annoyance—that “‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

The criticism that was lodged against Obama’s decision to withhold support for the Syrian rebels paled before the outcry that resulted from his failure to act on his implied threat to use military force if Assad crossed a “red line” by employing chemical weapons against the rebels. When Assad did cross that line, Obama did nothing in response. Goldberg reports that when Obama made a last-minute decision to cancel a strike against Syrian targets, “aides in the room were shocked. Susan Rice, now Obama’s national security advisor, argued that the damage to America’s credibility would be serious and lasting.” Clinton said, “If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice.” And Leon Panetta, who served as both Obama’s cia director and his secretary of defense, and for his last year at the Pentagon was Chollet’s boss, told Goldberg “Once the commander in chief draws that red line … then I think the credibility of the commander in chief and this nation is at stake if he doesn't enforce it.”

Yet in this case as well, Chollet finds a way to explain away Obama’s initial indecision and subsequent volte-face despite his red line. In justifying why Obama sat on his hands for two years, he argues that the president “worried most about two risks related to chemical weapons: escalation and loss of control.” “Nevertheless,” he continues, “after Syria used chemical weapons in August 2013, killing nearly 1,500 civilians, Obama was prepared to strike.” Except of course, that he didn’t, and Chollet blames Congress—without naming names—for casting “dire warnings about American involvement in a morass, expressing many of the same concerns Obama shared.” That Obama did not have similar reservations when he launched the Libya operation without fully consulting Congress is a paradox that Chollet fails to address.

It was Russia that pulled Obama’s chestnuts out of the Syrian fire. Russian president Vladimir Putin, clearly the power broker in Syria, reached an arrangement with Assad that not only resulted in the Syrian’s acknowledging for the first time that he possessed chemical weapons, but in his willingness to dispense with them. Chollet argues, somewhat implausibly, that Putin and Assad reached their agreement because “Moscow and Damascus took Obama seriously.” In fact, Putin and Assad finalized their deal fully a month after Obama’s decision not to go ahead with a strike in Syrian facilities. By that time, it was clear that Obama’s threats were little more than hot air.

Less than a year after Putin had brokered the chemical weapons arrangement in Syria, Moscow masterminded a referendum that ultimately enabled it to annex what was Ukrainian territory. Obama, blind to the reality that Russia once again represented a resurgent and malign force with which America would have to contend, derisively labeled Moscow a “regional power.” He refused to permit the sale of lethal weapons to Ukraine even as Russian “little green men” came to the support of Luhansk and Donetsk, the two breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine. Obama came in for criticism not only from Congressional Republicans, but from leading Democrats as well. In the words of Rep. Adam Schiff, who later would be a leading figure in the two impeachments of Donald Trump, “There has been a strong bipartisan well of support for quite some time for providing lethal support.” Chollet barely mentions Ukraine, however, and says nothing at all about Crimea or about Obama’s negating arms sales to Ukraine. Ironically, it was Donald Trump who, despite behaving as Putin’s lackey, permitted those sales to go through. 

Chollet’s vindication of Obama’s policies is coupled with his critique of Trump. He is most explicit in doing so in his final two chapters, entitled “Politics” and “Legacy.” Here he is on much stronger footing, simply because the Trump years were nothing less than an ongoing disaster, both abroad and at home. In at least two respects, however, Obama provided a model for Trump. Faced with a hostile Congress, Obama chose to sidestep the legislative branch entirely, unlike George H.W. Bush, or for that matter, Ronald Reagan, who strove to reach some understanding with at least one side of Capitol Hill controlled by the Democratic Party. Instead, for the most part, Obama circumvented Congress and governed by executive order. Trump did the same, only to a far greater and more devastating extent. 

Likewise, Trump’s neo-isolationist policy owed more to Obama than Chollet is prepared to admit. In addition to its nasty connotations that evoked the pro-fascist elements of 1930s America, Trump’s “America First” was simply a more radical formulation of Obama’s “nation building begins at home.” Trump’s attitude to allies was certainly perverse, but his threats to withdraw support for allies who did not increase their defense spending certainly seemed to echo Obama’s critique of “free riders.” Trump was certainly a crude, vulgar bully but Obama was simply more suave in seeking the very same objective. 

Obama left one “legacy” that, not surprisingly, Chollet chose to ignore: the so-called “sequester.” In the summer of 2011, the Obama administration confronted the imminent prospect of American default on its debt obligations as well as what it viewed as an intransigent Republican Congressional majority that was unwilling to contemplate tax increases to help solve the debt crisis. Obama’s advisors concocted a complex plan that would both increase the debt ceiling, and at the same time force the Republicans either to accept tax increases or accept roughly equal cuts in both domestic and military spending, called budget caps. Any Congressional increases above the cap in any year of the nine years during which the sequester would remain in force would result in mindless across-the-board budget cuts. Obama’s team bet that the Republicans would never agree to limits on defense spending over the course of a decade, and thus would be forced to accept Obama’s plan for tax increases. They were wrong. The Republicans, heavily influenced by an influx of legislators supported by Tea Party activists, called the Obama bluff, and the Budget Control Act of 2011 became law.

Successive Obama’s secretaries of defense railed against the sequester, but it remained in force, although the Congress did modify the budget caps every two years. The net result was that the president’s plans for tax increases to support his objective to increase domestic spending failed to materialize, while the Department of Defense was forced to cut training and other elements of its Operations and Maintenance budget, thereby taking a heavy toll on military readiness. Little wonder that Chollet preferred not to mention the dreaded “s” word; it hardly enhanced Obama’s legacy.

THE MIDDLE Way represents a valiant attempt to polish the national security image of the forty-fourth president. Much more polishing will be needed, however. Obama simply did not provide Chollet with sufficient material to present a convincing case on his behalf. 

Indeed, Obama’s record is one of multiple failures especially, but as the sequester fiasco demonstrates, not solely, in the Middle East. As the veteran Middle East analyst Shmuel Rosner recently observed in the pages of The New York Times in what can only be seen as a critique of the Obama presidency:

The United States was unsuccessful in its half-hearted quest to contain Iranian expansion; it was missing in action in the Syrian civil war; it bet on wrong horses during the so-called Arab Spring; it has alienated the Saudis, let Russia take over Libya and did nothing of value to resolve the Palestinian issue.

Nevertheless, for those seeking to glorify Barack Obama, The Middle Way will not disappoint. It is both engaging, well written and forcefully argued. Anyone searching for a more balanced account of his national security record will have to look elsewhere.

Dov S. Zakheim served as the undersecretary of defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the U.S. Department of Defense from 2001–2004 and as the deputy undersecretary of defense (planning and resources) from 1985–1987. He also served as the DoD's civilian coordinator for Afghan reconstruction from 2002–2004. He is vice chairman of the Center for the National Interest.

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