Has Obama Blown His Credibility -- And Syria?
Jonathan Mercer
May 13, 2013
Article Summary and Author Biography
The debate about what to do in Syria has been sidetracked by discussions of credibility and reputation. But both logic and evidence prove that reputations are mostly imaginary. Obama should not let fears that others might think him irresolute drive him to disaster. Instead, he should refocus on what U.S. interests really are in Syria, and how he can best obtain them.
JONATHAN MERCER is associate professor of political science at the University of Washington in Seattle and a Fellow at the Center for International Studies at the London School of Economics. He is author of Reputation And International Politics.
U.S. President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, 2013. (Larry Downing / Courtesy Reuters)
People can believe extraordinary things. In an interview with NPR’s Melissa Block earlier this month, Susan Ahmad, the English spokesperson for the Syrian revolutionary council, claimed that last week’s Israeli strikes in Syria might have been the result of collusion between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Israelis. And it is well documented that Saddam Hussein believed that, in Hebrew, the name of the Japanese cartoon franchise Pokémon meant “I am Jewish.”
It is not beyond the bounds of imagination, then, that Assad believes that U.S. President Barack Obama is feckless and irresolute. At least that has been the worry among many American circles since Obama backed down from earlier warnings that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a “red line.” It is likely that the Assad regime or Syrian rebels crossed that line in late April and … nothing happened. Cue the strategists: American credibility is on the line! Not just with Syria, as Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham put it at the end of April, “but with Iran, North Korea, and all of our enemies and friends.”
Since then, the debate about what to do in Syria has been sidetracked by discussions of how central reputation is to deterrence, and whether protecting it is worth going to war.
There are two ways to answer those questions: through evidence and through logic. The first approach is easy. Do leaders assume that other leaders who have been irresolute in the past will be irresolute in the future and that, therefore, their threats are not credible? No; broad and deep evidence dispels that notion. In studies of the various political crises leading up to World War I and of those before and during the Korean War, I found that leaders did indeed worry about their reputations. But their worries were often mistaken...
Read more: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139376/jonathan-mercer/bad-reputation
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