Foresight Versus Insight: Learnings from Brexit and the problem of forecasting.

Brexit and Causal Strands

Brexit, the British exit from the European Union is at the tail end of an extraordinary succession of events—the Syrian civil war, the forced migration of thousands of refugees, the flight of desperate families to the West, the German impulse to act morally by accepting refugees, the European Union’s less than willing subordination to German policies, Islamic fundamentalist violence in the heart of Europe,  Eastern Europe’s anxiety about being overwhelmed with foreigners they could not support and did not trust, and Russia’s impulse to destabilize the European Union, one reason among several of why it has supported Syria’s Assad.

These casual strands merged in Brexit as the people of “little England” recoiled from the prospect of being overwhelmed by refugees, while also being drawn to the prospect of  revitalizing their cultural identity separate even from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In this regard, they participated in a pan-European movement that calls into question the salience of nations as loci of identity, as is evident in Scotland, Catalonia, Flanders and Northern Italy. One serious question is whether this new localism will strengthen or undermine democratic traditions. Both Russia and China have staked out a future in which democratic practices are subordinate to the rule of elite cliques who seek legitimacy by mounting programs of imperial expansion. A weakened democratic Europe strengthens their political and moral legitimacy.

In responding to the initial phase of the Syrian conflict in 2011, as Jeffrey Goldberg reports in his comprehensive  article in the Atlantic, Obama felt that engaging directly in the Syrian civil war would distract him from a larger and more longer-term agenda of confronting China in the East. As he notes, Obama, “Gets frustrated that terrorism keeps swamping his larger agenda, particularly as it relates to rebalancing America’s global priorities. For years, the ‘pivot to Asia’ has been a paramount priority of his. America’s economic future lies in Asia, he believes, and the challenge posed by China’s rise requires constant attention. From his earliest days in office, Obama has been focused on rebuilding the sometimes-threadbare ties between the U.S. and its Asian treaty partners, and he is perpetually on the hunt for opportunities to draw other Asian nations into the U.S. orbit. His dramatic opening to Burma was one such opportunity; Vietnam and the entire constellation of Southeast Asian countries fearful of Chinese domination presented others.” This is also why he mobilized twelve countries in the Pacific Rim to create a free trade zone, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as a counter to China’s own expansion in the region.

Yet, as  the sequence of events outlined above indicates, the Syrian crisis, in its wider meaning, influences China’s ability to project its power. What we face here is the complexity of causal strands. In one tradition of thinking, associated with the work of Fred Emery and Eric Trist, this complexity gives riser to our experience of turbulence. Obama can plan for the rise of China by looking to East Asia, but fail to anticipate the rise of China as one end result of the crisis in the Middle East.

One question is, should we and can we hold our leaders accountable for anticipating the evocation of these causal strands? I want to distinguish here between foresight and insight. Obama demonstrates foresight in creating what he and his advisors have called the “pivot to Asia” as the primary focus of his foreign policy. It takes account of the obvious fact that China is a rising power, whose mercantilism --it's press to secure trade channels for its imports and exports --underlines its globalist stance.
The problem with this forecast is that it is in fact both too obvious and too simple. For example, it does not take account of the forces for stability and instability in China itself. The Communist Party’s claim to its monopoly on decision making rests in part on its ability to secure economic growth while limiting corruption. But is this twin goal achievable?

State-owned and locally-owned government enterprises play a significant role in the Chinese economy. This gives the Party leverage over the scale and scope of economic activity. But it also means that party-members, their families and their political allies can control enterprises without being accountable to customers, investors or the public. As Daniel Bell of Tsinghua University writes, “The overall level of corruption has exploded over the past three decades, and it has become a visible political problem the past few years due to the glare of social media and more conspicuous consumption by political elites.” It is reasonable to ask if the Party can enforce a corruption free culture while also limiting the rule of law. After all, the best vehicle for limiting corruption is a free press and independent courts. But should the latter institutions develop, they would threaten the Party’s monopoly over political life.

Moreover, corruption is also self-reinforcing. People who hold an image of the state in their mind as “corrupt” treat the state’s institutions badly. Why protect these institutions when they are the source of ugliness and the venue for other people’s corrupting activities. Instead, they should be exploited. This is why corruption stimulates what political scientists and economists call “rent seeking activity” as party-members work to secure resources through state-owned and state-influenced enterprises without regard for the wider and longer-term impacts of their decisions on the fabric of urban and rural life.

It is also why wealthy Chinese look for safe havens for their money abroad. For example, Bloomberg News reported in November of 2015 that China’s wealthy citizens were sending money overseas, “at unprecedented levels to seek safer investments — often in violation of currency controls meant to keep money inside China. This flood of cash is being felt around the world, driving up real-estate prices in Sydney, New York, Hong Kong and Vancouver…While this year’s numbers aren’t yet in, during the three weeks in August after China devalued its currency, Goldman Sachs calculated that another $200 billion may have left.”

This is also why Chinese enterprises take decisions without regard for the longer-term impacts of their activities on pollution, food safety, and the quality of construction. If an executive’s self interest is focused on his or her extended family, and he or she sees settings outside China as vehicles for accumulating family wealth, why worry about the longer term impacts of their investment decisions within China. But as these severe indirect effects of economic activity take hold of, and reshape, urban and rural life, political instability increases. This can lead the Communist Party to try to exert even greater control, through undemocratic means, triggering yet again the cycle of corruption and its untoward consequences. In Albert Hirschman’s inimitable terms,-- “exit, voice and loyalty” -- the wealthy cannot exercise their “voice” in an undemocratic setting, nor are they “loyal” to the ideals of the Party that has long ago forsaken them. So they must prepare for the possibility of exit.

Of course, I am writing out a forecast or a “scenario,” which we could name, “China’s Communist Party undermines its own legitimacy.” No one can tell now whether it or not is accurate. Nor is it clear how, should such a scenario come to past, the “pivot” to Asia would increase, decrease or render irrelevant current, U.S policies in East Asia. But it does highlight how the interplay of causal strands makes a long-term vision and its associated forecast a problematic foundation for strategy formation. Indeed, management theorists such as Elliot Jacques, Russell Ackoff, and Eli Goldratt, who have examined the challenge of forecasting in some depth, have concluded that forecasting is a fool’s errand. Instead, executives should focus on constructing a desired future rather than trying to anticipate one.

But in some degree this perspective kicks the can down the road. One cannot construct a future, particularly one based on a long-term time horizon, without at the same immersing oneself in the immediate causal strands that create the conditions for the elaboration of any desired future. In this sense there is no escaping the present moment, what psychoanalysts refer to as the “here and now,” and Kurt Lewin, one of the founders of social psychology, called, “the force field.” This stance, I suggest, is the foundation stone for insight and is best vehicle for assessing if and how the Syrian crisis provides a new venue for the projection of Chinese power. In other words, insight is a precondition for foresight. But is it possible to effectuate such a stance and should we hold our leaders to account for this kind of understanding?

Philip Tetlock and the Super-forecasters

I am drawn here to Philip Tetlock’s work of assessing how effectively people can in fact forecast political events, for example the likelihood of a war, a coup, a riot, a strike, or a secession. He found surprisingly, that generalists were better forecasters than experts with specialized knowledge of particular countries, regions or disciplines. To use Tetlock’s  term, experts often predicted no better than “dart throwing chimps.”

Why should this be? Surprisingly, temperament plays a role. The best forecasters had an ironic stance toward the judgments they made, were less emotionally connected to particular forecasted outcomes, were more “actively open-minded” in their consideration of information, blended different perspectives, tended to see events in the round, that is, as instances of a larger class of events rather than as unique stories, were skeptical of deductive reasoning, were more likely to question analogies, and could decompose likely events into the separate components that underpinned them. Following the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor, Tetlock characterized these good forecasters as” foxes” who know many things if sometimes superficially, rather than as “hedgehogs” who know only one big thing in depth, as experts do. 

One basic reason foxes outperformed hedgehogs is that the former reason from a “base case” and use statistical reasoning, while hedgehogs rely on the emotional salience of a particular story or case. For example, I might ask you to estimate the likelihood that a young suburban couple without children and with a good income, has a pet. Perhaps you, like most people, would turn the question into a story about how such a prototypical couple would conduct their lives, investing the story with emotional meaning. For example, you might imagine that the couple has discretionary income and no children, and so are likely to have a pet to keep them company, perhaps as a trial for their later child bearing and rearing. By contrast, the good forecaster starts with the base rate and asks, “What percent of households own pets?” (the answer is 62%), and then revises this estimate based on the additional facts provided. (Some readers will recognize this as a form of Bayesian reasoning.)

Consider as well the following example. As Tetlock reports, “In 2013 the Obama administration nominated Chuck Hagel to be defense secretary, but controversial reports surfaced, and a hearing went badly, and some speculated that Hagel might not be confirmed by the Senate. ‘Will Hagel withdraw?’ wrote Tom Ricks, a defense analyst. ‘I’d say 50-50 but declining by the day. Bottom line: Every business day that the Senate Armed Services Committee doesn’t vote to send the nomination to the full Senate, I think the likelihood of Hagel becoming defense secretary declines by about 2%.’”

Tetlock compared this forecast to a super-forecaster who reasoned statistically, noting that, ‘Since the establishment of the secretary of defense position soon after World War II, it looks like only one of 24 official nominees has been rejected by the Senate, and none has withdrawn. So the base rate is 96%.’ Using statistical reasoning analogous to the way in which we evaluate whether or not someone has cancer, just because he or she tested positive for cancer, the super-forecaster predicted that Hagel had an 83% chance of being nominated, which in fact he was. One reasonable hypothesis is that Ricks, the defense analyst in Tetlock’s example, was drawn to the emotional drama of Hagel’s confirmation hearings -- to the story of the possible rejection of a nominee and implicitly his president --and that this story biased his judgment about the facts shaping Hagel’s prospects.

Cognitive psychology, helps explain this phenomena. Daniel Kahneman, the major theorist of cognitive biases, argues that people are prone to an “availability bias,” the tendency to use available examples and stories, often with emotional salience, as the basis for making meaning of a situation. We reason from the inside out, ”How are pets substitute children?”  rather from the outside in, “What are the many reasons that people own pets?”

The Case of Libya

Compelling emotions probably distorted Hillary Clinton’s judgment when she  supported using U.S. air power to interdict Gaddafi’s troops in Libya. In retrospect, the intervention to topple Gaddafi turned out very badly. As one author wrote in the Journal, Foreign Affairs, “Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state. Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have increased several-fold. Rather than helping the United States combat terrorism, as Gaddafi did during his last decade in power, Libya now serves as a safe haven for militias affiliated with both al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The Libya intervention has harmed other U.S. interests as well: undermining nuclear nonproliferation, chilling Russian cooperation at the UN, and fueling Syria's civil war.”

At the time of the Libyan intervention, March 2011, the  Arab Spring was bringing democracy to Tunisia,  Mubarak had recently been deposed in Egypt, and ISIS was still an embryonic terrorist group. There were grounds for optimism. But let me suggest that this optimism was distorted by a kind of romanticism. Most telling, Christopher Stevens, later appointed as the American ambassador to Libya after Gaddafi’s overthrow, released a video to the Libyan people, shortly before he travelled to aid in the rebellion, comparing their revolution to the U.S. Civil war. This analogy suggests that Stevens and others thought it reasonable to hope that any post-Gaddafi Libyan leaders would have the caliber of an Abraham Lincoln, that is leaders who could oversee catastrophic destruction while planning for a post-war setting where, “malice toward none and charity toward  all” would reconcile grievous enemies. But in fact, the U.S., in supplying 20,000 tons of weaponry to anti-Gaddafi militias, wound up buttressing hard core Islamic Jihadis. As one reporter notes, “That they were the heart of the opposition was inevitable: Salafist Sunni jihadis had been Gaddafi's principal opposition for more than three decades.”

In advocating for intervention, Clinton bet on Mr. Jibril, who as head of the Transitional  National Council, became Libya’s interim prime minister after Gaddafi’s overthrow. Yet he was a political scientist with a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, who had weak ties to Libyan tribes and sects. Reflecting later on his failure to build an institutional framework that supported liberalism and democracy, he noted that, “We  had a dream, and to be honest with you, we had a golden opportunity to bring this country back to life. Unfortunately, that dream was shattered.” The notion of a “dream” particularly in a deeply factionalized society, evokes the image of romantic rather than pragmatic aspirations. Indeed, one possibility is that Christopher Stevens’ later murder in Benghazi also highlights the romanticism of the moment. He did not attend to his own security, because he underestimated the venom associated with tribal and religious warfare.

Detached Immersion

Many of the findings associated with the literature on cognitive bias and decision making are linked to the broader idea that people do not naturally think in terms of probability and statistics. Stories pull them toward what is specific and unique rather than what is general and rule-governed. But the “probability way of thinking” entails a level of abstraction from everyday life, and in that regards constitutes a burden on cognition. One measure of civilization’s progress is the degree to which the senses are subordinated to thoughts, whether in science, in the use of money -- now only digits on a computer disk -- or in the concept of regularities that govern social life. This is also why modern societies are vulnerable to attacks on science as a mode of thought, the quintessential expression of abstraction, even though science has provided so many benefits. 

I want to suggest that Tetlock’s findings point to a mode of apperception consistent with the demands of abstraction, which I propose to  call, detached immersion. This term is paradoxical for good reason. On the one side, there is no substitute for engaging with the “here and now” in all its complexity, with Kurt Lewin’s force field. But this engagement should be accomplished through a stance of emotional detachment. Immersion draws our attention to the obvious fact that any future will and must emerge from the present. Detachment ensures that we are not seduced by the emotionally compelling stories we tell ourselves about the present. In describing the analyst’s stance toward a patient, the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion counseled attending to the present moment in the analytic process, “without memory or desire.” This too is a good model of detachment as a vehicle for gaining insight and guiding intervention.

One hypothesis is that Obama, in confronting the Middle East, uncharacteristically lacked detachment. He pivoted to Asia to escape from the ugliness and hopelessness of the Middle East. Yet early in his presidency he invested in the image of himself as a leader who could help reconcile the Arab world to modernity, by offering its people and their leaders understanding and respect. This was one meaning of his speech entitled, “A New Beginning,” that he delivered in Cairo in 2009. Yet he ultimately failed as an agent of “hope and change” in the region. This undermined an idealized image he had of himself as a global leader, and according to this hypothesis, he turned away from the Middle East in part to protect his self-esteem.  

Purposes versus objectives

I raised the question at the beginning of this post about what should we hold our leaders accountable for when they make strategic decisions? One answer is that we expect them to take pragmatic decisions based on detached immersion. But there is fly in the ointment here, one that Tetlock identifies as a limitation of this own research. His super-forecasters were great at answering questions, “Will Russia stay the course in Syria until Assad wins, will Saudi Arabia reduce its support for Wahhabi Imams in other countries, will Hungary withdraw from the EU? But who determines what the best questions are? Who are the “super-questioners?

In the normal course of executive decision-making our best questions come from our objectives. If, for example, as the owner of a small business in the U.S., my objective is to start selling my products abroad, my questions are all about how to accomplish this. My scenarios are about what obstacles I may face in pursuing this objective, and my plans are about how to overcome these obstacles. But in the turbulent environment we are describing, objectives are forever unstable, always undermined by the unexpected confluence of causal strands.

Brexit is the quintessential case in point. The main elements of the Conservative party’s platform in 2015, as reported by the BBC, were to reduce the deficit, extend the right of housing association tenants to buy the homes they lived in, to increase spending on the National Health Service, and to sponsor a referendum on Great Britain’s membership in the EU. David Cameron sought the referendum for tactical reasons; to unite the Conservatives, contain the challenge on his right from the UKIP, and “give himself the space to implement his legacy agenda of One Nation reforms to improve people’s life chances.”

But Brexit upended all these objectives and raised serious questions about the capacity of either Labour or the Tories to govern, and about the integrity of Great Britain as a federation of identities. One hypothesis suggested by Russell Ackoff’s thinking is that under these conditions leaders are guided by ideals or purposes rather than goals and objectives. It then becomes a matter of statecraft to determine what objectives under present conditions best instantiate these purposes. To use an analogy, purpose is to an objective as climate is to weather. Moreover, purposes are not so much achieved as they are expressed. For example, if my purpose is to conduct my business honorably, I don't achieve honor by a certain targeted date. Rather I instantiate it everyday in the pursuit of my objectives.

To be sure, the moral quality of a purpose is contingent and is in the “eyes of the beholder.” To give an example, one hypothesis is that Putin’s political strength comes from his singular purpose of reanimating Russia as an empire, an identity it lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Or China’s purpose is expressed in its mercantilism, that is, to secure for its 1.36 billion people (!), an unimaginably large population, the resources it needs to advance its citizens’ living standards. Similarly, in the 19^th century, people in the United States imagined that they had a “manifest destiny” to expand westward and appropriate the whole continent, even when this meant riding roughshod on Native Americans. The power of purpose is that it confers flexibility in the face of turbulence. As causal strands intersect and upend inherited objectives, purpose readily directs the search for, and discovery of, new ones.

The rise of China, Russia’s adventurism, the image of the EU as an undemocratic polity, and the belief that democratic capitalism is inequitable, all raise questions about democracy’s viability. It is reasonable to ask if the United States could take up the purpose of representing the moral meaning of democratic traditions and practices throughout the world. This is what Christopher Stevens, the ambassador murdered in Benghazi, represented. But there is a sense in which the U.S. has soured on this purpose, no doubt partly in response to what Trump derides, quite reasonably, as its failed attempt at nation building in Iraq. Libya in this sense was simply a repetition. Perhaps Trump’s dark speech in accepting the Republican Party’s nomination for president resonates, because in a time of terror preserving safety is the overriding purpose.

The ISIS surprise and its meaning

ISIS' rapid advance through Syria and Iraq and its indifferent brutality have been frightening. Starting as an Iraqi terrorist group with links to Al Qaeda, it has grown amidst the chaos of the Syrian uprising by capturing weapons and Humvees, robbing banks, and taking over oil fields. Obama’s opponents see its progress as one sign that his policy for containing threats to the United States and its interests is failing. Obama himself has projected a degree of uncertainty when he said that, “The intelligence agencies had underestimated the peril posed by the Islamic State," and that the U.S., “Did not yet have a strategy” to confront ISIS. 

[Added text in response to readers' good questions: The purpose of this post is to explore the nature of this uncertainty as Obama experienced it. I am not actually examining the real politics of ISIS and its impact on international affairs. I am speculating about how Obama might have seen this real politics. I am arguing that Obama has been hobbled by a stance of ambivalence toward the U.S engagement with the Middle East. He believes, I speculate, that the Iraq invasion and its aftermath represented a kind of defeat for the US, but that the stakes for the US in the Middle East do not allow for disengagement. I suggest that this ambivalence underlies why he might have been surprised by ISIS,  and why he was defensive in responding to the claims that he was surprised.This process is one example of the impact of ambivalence on executive action]

One question journalists and others have sensibly asked is why was the president and his administration surprised, and why doesn’t Obama have a strategy? After all, as one broadcast journalist reports, in describing ISIS’ origins and expansion, “That process actually began as early as mid-to-late 2009. It was at that point that the Islamic State was in some ways forced to devolve into a typical terrorist organization. At that point it relocated much of its central leadership to Mosul (Iraq), which was a relative safe zone, and it was at that point that it essentially began its period of recovery.” 

It seems unlikely that with this extended history, the ISIS insurgency was a complete surprise. Indeed, when Obama faulted the intelligence agencies for failing to grasp the threat it represented, several intelligence heads replied in public that in fact they had warned the Obama administration. Indeed, one intelligence official testified to Congress this past February saying, “ISIS will probably attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria in 2014, as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah.” Similarly, CIA director John Brennan, “Defended his agency’s performance on intelligence in Iraq, saying that the CIA had been watching for ‘many months’ how ISIS was 'growing in capability in Fallujah areas and how they were expanding their reach.'”

Nonetheless, the director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Admral Michael Rogers, acknowledged that the intelligence community had underestimated the Islamic State’s transformation, “From an insurgency to an organization that was now also focused on holding ground territory. ‘It’s an area we talked about,’ he said, ‘but in hindsight, I wish we had been a little — I’ll only speak for me and for NSA — I wish we’d been a little stronger about.’” In other words, everyone was watching ISIS, but intelligence analysts, at least at the NSA, failed to anticipate the change in its intentions, from being an insurgency wreaking havoc with suicide bombers, to becoming a group that wanted to hold territory. This failure, if Rogers’ statement is accurate, evokes two classical challenges to intelligence. First, it is very hard to gauge an enemy’s intentions, particularly if you do not have spies on the ground.  Second, an untested assumption-- ISIS is an insurgency rather than an army occupying territory -- shapes what information you pay attention to and what you ignore. It can become your blind spot.

Indeed, the Obama administration misread the Iraqi army’s capability as well. Commenting on ISIS, a panel of intelligence agency officials, including the CIA’s Brennan, concluded that, “One of the biggest blind spots was the lack of good insight not only into the Islamic State, but into the readiness and state of the Iraqi security forces that the United States had been training and equipping for years.” Brennan went on to note that, “One of the most difficult things is trying to determine the will to fight. It speaks almost to intent.” In other words, good intelligence helps you assess an enemy’s or ally’s state of mind, and not just its position or material resources. As the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu argued, one does not defeat the enemy per se, but the enemy’s strategy, which is an outcome of his intentions and his self-assessed capabilities. But this is as much a matter of psychology as it is of data gathering. 

This failure highlights yet another source of intelligence failure, and that is the failure to deconstruct the assumptions behind’s one’s own strategy. It appears that for some time the Obama administration, viewing ISIS as an insurgency, worried most about its threat in the West—terrorists killing individuals- rather than to the West—hostile armies taking territory. Hundreds of young men with European passports were going to Syria and joining up with ISIS. Would some return to their countries of origin, determined to wreak havoc in Europe the U.S. and other western countries, by bombing facilities and killing individuals? Examining the Syrian insurgency one reporter noted, that administration officials were asking,  “Is this a local fight? Are they going there to really just battle the Syrian forces and topple [Syrian President Bashar] Assad? Or is there even a small percentage of these folks who are going to return home and turn their sights on western victims and their fellow citizens?” As Obama noted, “In terms of immediate threats to the United States, IISL (ISIS), those folks could kill Americans.” Indeed, on September 18, “Counter-terrorism raids in Sydney, Australia were sparked by security intelligence that ISIS was planning a violent random attack as a demonstration of its reach.” In this sense, it was necessary to focus on threats to citizens in the West but it was not sufficient. ISIS is operating on two fronts, fighting as an army and acting as terrorists, with success on one front triggering success on the other.

One question is whether or not these intelligence failures; the failure to gauge an enemy’s intention, an ally’s capabilities and to test one’s own assumptions, were in some sense motivated. By “motivated,” I mean that there are emotional and thus un-verbalized reasons for neglecting intelligence that is available. Motivated failures can lead to what Zvi Lanir calls, “fundamental surprises.” For example, the Israelis’ were surprised by the success of Egyptian and Syrian attacks in the first days of the Yom Kippur war (1973), not for want of intelligence,-- the prime minister’s cabinet debated a preemptive air strike six hours before the war began-- but because their victory in the earlier "six-day war" (1967) created a self concept of themselves as a regional power that could enforce the status quo. Moreover, military doctrine presumed that the Arabs would attack only to destroy Israel, a near impossibility, rather to gain tactical advantage, as Egypt eventually did, despite its defeat militarily. As Lanir goes on to note, “In this context, information about the enemy, accurate as it was, had very little relevance in creating a more complex understanding of the national “self,” nor did it support an understanding of the “other” in relation to them.”

The question is what concepts of the national “self” and of the “other” have underlined Obama’s response to the ISIS threat. One hypothesis is that Obama represents the idea of the United States as a militarily defeated nation. In light of the enormous expense of the Iraq invasion and its chaotic aftermath, the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and the failure to secure a legitimate government in Baghdad, this self-concept of the U.S. as a defeated nation may in fact appear reasonable. But with this self-concept there is a temptation to see the enemy, the “other” in Lanir’s terms, as a group of outlaws or brigands who can be contained or eliminated through police actions rather than military activity. This may be one reason why Obama came to rely on the use of drones to kill individual terrorists as the best exemplar of U.S. power. 

This self-concept may also be why Obama had hoped early in his administration, to pivot his attention from the Middle East to Asia. The presenting issue Obama faces in Asia is how to coopt China as a partner while acknowledging its increasing standing and global reach. While he can project power in Asia by “increasing U.S. naval and air force assets in the Pacific,” he will exercise power if he can create economic arrangements that tie China, its Asian neighbors and the U.S. together. The challenge is using economic diplomacy not military forces.

But John Kerry, the current Secretary of State, described one additional rationale for the pivot to Asia. “Obama wanted to signal that the Bush-era obsessions with the Middle East, democratization, and terrorism were over.” The term, “obsessions” suggests, if Kerry is an accurate reporter, that Obama believed that the focus on the middle-east had been inappropriate and misdirected, that Bush had inappropriately personalized the issue. But in light of our hypothesis it also suggests that the Pivot to Asia was a psychological defense against confronting the intractability, messiness and failures associated with the middle-east. This may be one reason why Obama and the intelligence agencies misread the Iraqi army’s capabilities. If the Iraqi army was competent, the U.S. troop withdrawal would not jeopardize the region’s stability, and Obama could undertake the pivot without risking the reputation and standing of the U.S. 
 
My reader might still object that the idea of the U.S. as a defeated nation is after all realistic. But I want to suggest that Obama has internalized this idea psychologically under feelings of duress, rather than as the foundation for a strategy. He is resisting the idea just as he is has embraced it.  This point of view can account for three examples of Obama’s defensiveness in articulating his thinking about ISIS,

First, as we have seen, he initially blamed the intelligence agencies rather than himself for failing to anticipate ISIS’ rise. Second, when a New Yorker reporter interviewed Obama, he characterized ISIS and other terrorist groups as “junior varsity”* basketball players when compared to “pros” such as Al Qaeda. The reporter described Obama’s remark as “uncharacteristically flip.” A person’s flip response, particularly when it is uncharacteristic, signals their defensiveness, their unwillingness to consider a difficult and psychologically threatening question seriously. Third and finally, this may also be why he willingly conceded, that despite ISIS’ long-term buildup, he had no strategy for confronting it. This self-defeating comment is sensible only if his failure to secure a strategy meant that the obstacles ISIS presented were almost too great to be overcome. If so he should not be held accountable for lacking one. These defensive comments suggests that he lacks conviction in his own decisions. If my argument is reasonable, he lacks conviction because he believes but cannot yet suppose that the United States is a defeated power. This situation creates emotional duress and impairs judgment.

This duress may have deeper roots. Obama faces the dilemma of choosing between two different frames of reference for countering the threats in the Middle East. On the one side he can look at the region as the setting for the struggle against fundamentalism, or on the other, as the struggle for democracy. Despite our wishes, the two struggles are decidedly not equivalent and their difference has bedeviled Obama since the beginning. For example, Egypt as an autocracy is a good defense against fundamentalism, but a poor example of a democracy. Hamas was elected democratically, but maintains a fundamentalist cast. Iraq is a limited democracy burdened by fundamentalist currents. Bashar al Assad, the president of Syria represented secular Arabism but dictatorial tendencies. Indeed, as late as 2011, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state said that, "The elements that led to intervention in Libya -- international condemnation, an Arab League call for action, a United Nations Security Council resolution -- are “not going to happen” with Syria in part because members of the U.S. Congress from both parties say they believe Assad is 'a reformer.'"

There is of course a strand of American idealism in the field of international relations that considers the choice between combating fundamentalism and supporting democracy to be a false one.  This was the basis for Bush’s confidence in invading Iraq in the first place. He would advance democracy in Iraq and in the process defeat fundamentalism in the region. He would export “democracy” much as the Soviet Union once exported revolution. This idealism allowed him to be decisive even if ultimately mistaken. This was also Christopher Stevens’ worldview, the American ambassador to Libya, who was killed in the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi. Shortly before leaving for Libya he shot a video for the Libyan people, describing his pride in pluralism and democracy and his belief that Libya, like the United States could achieve these ideals, and if necessary, through conflict. Of course, the collapse of Libya as a nation state and its devolution into an arena for tribal warfare is yet another witness against the case for this idealism.

It is reported that during the Cuban missile crisis, Richard Neustadt, the famous Harvard political scientist wanted to warn John F. Kennedy against precipitous action. The then Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, is purported to have said, “I know your advice, Professor. You think the president needs to be warned. But you’re wrong. The president needs to be given confidence.” Idealism to be sure is one source of confidence, but realism can be another. Acting realistically often means considering two choices that rub up against each other and choosing one as the focal point and the other as the backdrop. It is a matter of setting priorities. One takes action in relationship to the focal choice, for example fighting fundamentalism, while creating contingency plans and enacting defensive tactics, should the background choice, for example, supporting democracy, prove more decisive in the longer run.

When a leader fails to make such a choice, their actions take on the quality of ambivalence and detachment. Indeed, it is the ambivalence that stimulates the detachment as a psychological defense. The detachment reduces the felt burden of failing to choose.  It is now a common trope that Obama projects a kind of detachment as a leader. In a recent interview, Leon Panetta the former CIA director under Obama and author of a new book, Worthy Fights, said of Obama, "Too often in my view the President relies on the logic of the law professor rather than the passion of a leader." The reference to the professor evokes the idea of the “armchair” theorist who thinks coherently but can’t translate thoughts into actions.

I think that Obama’s professorial stance has much strength. As Philip Tetlock shows in his masterful study, Expert political judgment: How good is it, how can we know, detached observes who take an ironical stance toward the world are often better prognosticators. They are not impassioned by a worldview that oversimplifies their conception of a complex political situation. This may very well have been Bush’s fatal flaw. Moreover, the detached observer can avoid impulsiveness, a tempting stance when reality seems too complicated to decode. But at the same time this detachment in the hands of an executive who must take actions, can stimulate withdrawal, defensiveness, and ultimately mistakes. I want to suggest that Obama is caught in a situation of ambivalence, accepting but resisting the idea of the U.S. as a defeated nation, while stuck in the choice between promoting democracy or defeating fundamentalism

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*For my colleagues outside of the U.S. the “junior varsity” is a group of inexperienced basketball players, often on a high school team, who take a back seat to the varsity players when the team plays opponents from other schools.

The early failure of HealthCare.gov and the psychology of a crusade

The early failure of HealthCare.gov, the federal government’s marketplace exchange for buying health insurance, raises questions about how and why the Obama administration bungled such an important undertaking. Some writers suggest that the administration’s leaders did not appreciate the challenges of designing and implementing a large-scale computer system that integrated data from different government agencies. Focused primarily on politics, and skilled in creating legislation, these leaders lacked the requisite technical imagination and know-how to integrate the efforts of several contractors and government agencies in an orderly process of software development and testing. As David Cutler, Harvard professor and health adviser to Obama’s 2008 campaign noted, “They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business. It’s very hard to think of a situation where the people best at getting legislation passed are best at implementing it. They are a different set of skills.”

Instead, as the argument goes, the White House’s model for achieving what were technical objectives was based inappropriately on the dynamics of a political campaign, where for example, you face enemies, you focus on appearances and optics, and you value, when necessary, stealth and secrecy. As two Washington Post journalists wrote, the White House subsumed “technical needs” to “political fear.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/challenges-have-dogged-obamas-health-plan-since-2010/2013/11/02/453fba42-426b-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html) And as another writes, the administration managed “a software project as if it were a top-secret campaign strategy rather than a mission-critical component of the most ambitious federal entitlement expansion in almost 50 years.”

This frame of reference -- envisioning the work as political rather than technical -- explains why the 200 member team, enjoined to build the website, worked in relative secrecy within the Department of Health and Human Services “insulated from the efforts of House Republicans, who were looking for ways to undermine the law.” It also explains why the administration took up the role of “general contractor” rather than rely on a company with expertise in building large-scale computer systems. Congressional Republicans could readily subpoena contractors to testify about the difficulties the administration team faced.  It also explains why the White House did not permit the early release of a high level design for the exchanges that would have helped government contractors do their work. The White House worried that Republicans would mock the design’s seeming complexity, just as they had ridiculed the diagram Hillary Clinton’s team had used when describing its plan for overhauling health care some twenty years ago. It also explains why the team did not tell contractors how many states they expected would create their own complementary websites- a critical specification for the federal website design. The administration leaders worried, that were the number too low, it would signal that the federal government was taking over health care, just as the Republicans had predicted. 

Ironically, White House officials and administrative leaders took these decisions even though, as another journalist writes, “hours after the bill had been enacted, the president had stood on the Truman Balcony for a champagne toast with his weary staff and put them on notice: They needed to get started on carrying out the law the very next morning.” At subsequent meetings for monitoring the progress of enacting the law, “no matter which aspects of the sprawling law had been that day’s focus,” an administration official said, “Obama invariably ended the meeting by saying, ‘All of that is well and good, but if the website doesn’t work, nothing else matters.’” Yet as another insider, Donald Berwick noted, “The exchange ‘was in the future,’ explaining that the Web site was, during his tenure, a matter of ‘conceptualization,’ along with ‘the many other regulations we were batting out.’” The question is why did the administration make this fate-making choice of treating their effort as a political campaign. 

One reasonable answer is that the administration framed its efforts as a political campaign because it faced an ongoing political war with the Republicans over the law’s implementation. In this way of thinking, the Republicans who hated Obamacare were sabotaging the administration’s efforts. For example, all the Republican governors refused to build state-level web sites, which once put into place, would have reduced the technical complexity of building a federal web site. In addition, many Republican governors refused to expand Medicaid, as allowed under the law, which would have reduced the number of people using the federal exchange to purchase insurance. Similarly, “Although the statute provided plenty of money to help states build their own insurance exchanges, it included no money for the development of a federal exchange — and Republicans would block any funding attempts.”

Similarly, as one journalist notes, “In August, the Obama administration announced that it had awarded contracts to 105 ‘navigators’ to help guide people through their new predicaments and options. There were local health-care providers, community groups, Planned Parenthood outposts, and even business groups. In at least 17 states where Republicans are in charge, a variety of roadblocks have been thrown in front of these folks. In Indiana, they were required to pay fees of $175. In Florida, the health department ruled that local public-health offices can’t have navigators on their premises… Tennessee issued ‘emergency rules’ requiring their employees to be fingerprinted and undergo background checks. America, 2013: No background checks to buy assault weapons. But you damn well better not try to enroll someone in health care.” In short, the White House was at war and as another journalist writes, “sabotage works.” 

But this explanation is insufficient because many people involved in the administration’s effort, or who were close to the White House, worried that the administration’s own efforts, resources and skills were insufficient to the task at hand. As the two Washington Post journalists write, “In May 2010, two months after the Affordable Care Act squeaked through Congress, President Obama’s top economic aides were getting worried. Larry Summers, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, and Peter Orszag, head of the Office of Management and Budget, had just received a pointed four-page memo from David Cutler, the trusted outside health adviser from Harvard. It warned that no one in the administration was ‘up to the task’ of overseeing the construction of an insurance exchange and other intricacies of translating the 2,000-page statute into reality. After the (2012) election, Cutler, renewed his warnings that the White House had not put the right people in charge. “I said, ‘You have another chance to get a team in place,’ ” he recalled.

Similarly, in March, “Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer at the lead Obamacare agency, said at an insurance-industry meeting that he was "pretty nervous" about the exchanges being ready by Oct. 1, adding, "let's just make sure it's not a third-world experience." In addition, as another journalist writes, “by early this year, people inside and outside the bureaucracy were raising red flags. ‘We foresee a train wreck,’ an insurance executive working on information technology said in a February interview. ‘We don’t have the I.T. specifications. The level of angst in health plans is growing by leaps and bounds. The political people in the administration do not understand how far behind they are.’” 

One question is why the White House and top administration officials did not pay sufficient attention to these warnings and anxieities. Let me suggest the following hypothesis. The notion that the administration was waging a political campaign is not quite right, or rather not sufficient. Rather, it was waging a crusade. The psychology of a crusade can stimulate unrealistic and wishful thinking.

Consider the following. In remarks on the Sunday after the legislation passed, with every House Republican voting no, Obama said that the vote "proved that we are still capable of doing big things. We proved that this government -- a government of the people and by the people -- still works for the people." The phrase, “of the people, and by the people,” evokes of course Abraham Lincoln’s magisterial speech at Gettysburg during the Civil War. Moreover, it is a phrase embedded deeply in the consciousness of Americans, evoking as it does the great moral struggle against slavery. Indeed, one pro-Obama journalist invoked the Civil War in characterizing Republican opposition to the Affordable Health Care act. He writes, “To find obstinacy like this, you have to go back, yes, to the pre-Civil War era. The tariff of 1828, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which led to the Civil War in ‘Bloody Kansas’ and ultimately to the Civil War itself.” In this sense passing the Affordable Health Care Act was like winning the war against slavery.

This sense of a crusade was buttressed I suggest by Senator Ted Kennedy’s death, eight months after Obama first took office. He was the last of the great “liberal lions” whose consciousness was shaped by the idea of the welfare state that first took shape under the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt and his “New Deal.” He had been a passionate advocate for public health care insurance throughout his political career. But he was too sick with cancer to participate in the early congressional debates over health care legislation. Ironically, his death led to the election of a Republican senator, Scott Brown from Massachusetts, who campaigned against Obamas’ health care act. 

Perhaps many of my readers can recall, that upon the passage of the law, Democratic Party supporters expressed a sense of poignancy as well as vindication. It was as if Obama had given the dead Ted Kennedy a parting gift, while the law proved that Kennedy had not died in vein. In this sense, Obama, in evoking Lincoln, was also positioning himself in the line of presidents -- Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson-- who had successfully advanced the welfare state in the face of Republicans who identified the welfare state with socialism. After all, Ronald Reagan had warned conservatives in 1961 that if Medicare, the law that now helps pay for medical services for old people, were passed into law, “One of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

If this line of thinking is useful it suggests that we examine the psychology of a crusade. I suggest that it has the following three features. First, the crusade is propelled by a moral imagination. What matters most is not whether a particular assessment or assumption is true or false, but rather whether it is good or bad. Under these conditions, considerations of technique and the assessment of cause and effect take a back seat. Moreover, in such a setting, expressions of doubt or misgiving can themselves be labeled as immoral or disloyal. Second, it is a common and even right that a crusade should unfold in the face of trenchant opposition. Indeed the opposition underlines the moral superiority of the crusaders. Third, the crusade minimizes the emotional meaning of setbacks. Failures reinforce the idea that the crusade is necessary, since the strength of opposition and the impact of obstacles are signs of the crusade’s moral standing.

This frame of reference helps explain how and why the administration undermined its own efforts. It saw the Republicans as morally flawed, in this way discounting its dependence on the Republicans to implement the legislation. In fact, the Affordable Health Care Act was the only major piece of legislation to pass in the face of total opposition from the Republicans in the past 80 years. Medicare, the Voting Rights act, Social Security, and the Civil Rights act all passed with some Republican support. Any law as complex as these laws were, and the Affordable Care Act was certainly complex, depends on some bipartisan support for its implementation. 

For example, had some number of Republicans voted for the law, the Democrats could have secured the passage of supporting legislation to actually fund the implementation of the federal website. Instead, Republicans made it clear that they would such block funding. As the Washington Post journalists point out, this had very serious consequences. Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services Secretary, “could not scrounge together enough money to keep a group of people developing the exchanges working directly under her.” Instead, the technical people were seconded to one agency, the policy people to another.  They go on write, “Bureaucratic as this move may sound, it was fateful, according to current and former administration officials. It meant that the work of designing the federal health exchange — and of helping states that wanted to build their own — became fragmented. Technical staffs, for instance, were separated from those assigned to write the necessary policies and regulations… There wasn’t a person who said, ‘My job is the seamless implementation of the Affordable Care Act.’” In other words, because the administration was leading a crusade it failed to account for the impact that opposition would have on its practical ability to implement the legislation. 

This frame of reference also helps explain why the White House ignored David Cutler’s prescient warnings, the first written while the Democrats still controlled both houses. To respond to his memo the administration had to confront the difficult technical issues they faced. But a technical imagination stands at right angles to a moral one. It privileges the means over the ends, usefulness over meaning and being effective over being right. It sees the objective links between cause and effect as dispositive and failure as natural. This is why software-system implementers rely so heavily on stress testing their designs. This distinction helps explain Obama’s serious misjudgment in appointing Nancy-Ann De-Parle the director of the White House Office of Health Reform and a policy specialist, to be in charge of the law’s arduous implementation. Since the day the bill became law, the president believed that, “if you were to design a person in the lab to implement health care, it would be Nancy-Ann.” Ironically De-Parle recognized her own limitations and tried but failed to recruit to the White House “one of the nation’s top experts, Jon Kingsdale, who had overseen the building of a similar insurance exchange in Massachusetts.”

In addition, this concept of a crusade, where loyalty is favored over critical thinking, can help explain why people involved in the administration’s efforts were reluctant to express their anxieties and doubts. As the Washington Post journalists write, “On Sept. 5, White House officials visited CMS for a final demonstration of HealthCare.gov. Some staff members worried that it would fail right in front of the president’s aides. A few secretly rooted for it to fail so that perhaps the White House would wait to open the exchange until it was ready.” In other words, they withheld their doubts, secretly rooting for failure as they only way in which their doubts could then be justified. 

Finally, if you lead a crusade, you may paradoxically underestimate your opposition because you believe that your effort’s moral meaning should help you ultimately overcome all obstacles. This conception helps explain why in the face of implacable Republican hatred for the law, the White House still imagined or hoped that after the 2012 election Republication governors would decide to collaborate with the administration by implementing state-level exchanges. This was one reason why the administration risked releasing the exchange’s specifications to the contractors who were to build it, without specifying how many states would or would not create their own exchanges. As the Washington Post journalists write, “After the contract was awarded to CGI Federal, the administration kept giving states more and more time to decide whether to build their own exchanges. White House officials hoped that more would become willing after the 2012 election. So the technical work was held up. ‘The dynamic was you’d have [CMS’s leaders] going to the White House saying, ‘We’ve got to get this process going,’  one former official recalled. ‘There would be pushback from the White House.’”

It seems strange that, experiencing Republican hatred for the law, and feeling that they were working in a war zone, the White House would risk assuming that their Republican opposition would weaken significantly. One hypothesis is that the White House most feared the voting public rather than the Republicans.  In this sense, they could interpret Obama’s election potential victory as a signal that voters would now support the health care law and put pressure on their Republican representatives. In this context, it is striking that from 2010 to 2012 public approval for the Affordable Health Care Act never rose above 45%. 

This hypothesis  helps explain Obama’s personal failing of promising Americans that they could keep their current health policies after the law was passed. In fact millions had their plans cancelled because their policies did not meet the standards set by the new law. Speaking after many plans were cancelled, the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, told reporters, “What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services that every insurance plan has to provide. So it's true that there are existing healthcare plans on the individual market that don't meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.” 

This response appears evasive and suggests that Obama’s original promise was itself an act of evasion, the hope being that people would welcome the opportunity to buy better policies once they qualified for subsidies. In this way of thinking, his promise, “You can keep your policy,” was an evasive version of the statement, “You will get a better policy, when you lose your old one.” We give evasive answers when we are afraid that the truth will offend someone on whom we depend. This fear also explains why the administration decided that consumers shopping for a policy had to first enroll to determine if they were entitled to a subsidy and if so how much. As many commentators noted this meant that the website “engine” had to successfully integrate databases from different agencies and organizations, for example, the Internal Revenue Service, the state Medicaid agency and an insurance company. As one blogger writes, “The real problems are with the back-end of the software. When you try to get a quote for health insurance, the system has to connect to computers at the IRS, the VA, Medicaid/CHIP, various state agencies, Treasury, and HHS. They also have to connect to all the health plan carriers to get pre-subsidy pricing. All of these queries receive data that is then fed into the online calculator to give you a price. If any of these queries fails, the whole transaction fails.”

As a result, when users tried to enroll, they burdened the computer system’s ability to query and integrate all of these back-end databases. That is one reason why the website crashed frequently. Yet the website could have provided useful information, and an initial level of service, if consumers could have shopped for plans without first enrolling. But the administration feared that upon seeing the prices for these plans, without first knowing what subsidy they would be entitled to, users would be angry and quit the website. 

If I am right, that the administration saw its efforts as part of an historical crusade to expand the welfare state, there is a certain irony in their achievement. The best exemplar of the welfare state would have been a law that enabled consumers to get insurance directly from the Federal government, much as senior citizens do today when they enroll in Medicare. But the Obama administration ruled out what was called “the public option” as simply being too radical and therefore unacceptable to Republicans and their supporters. Instead, taking a brief from earlier work by conservative policy analysts, they embraced a marketplace exchange, on the unrealized hope that Republicans would support a social policy that relied on market mechanisms. This is one more sign that they failed to anticipate or understand Republican hatred of the law. The result is a jerry-rigged marketplace mechanism for providing insurance, which as we have seen, has proven difficult to set up and implement. Had the administration recognized the meaning of their compromise, they might have realized that their crusade had been compromised as well, and that they were best served by looking upon their efforts pragmatically. 

Such a pragmatic perspective might have reinforced a reality orientation, helping the White House and administration leaders focus their attention on the technical challenges of building the front-end website and its back-end engine.  In this sense, I part company with the Washington Post journalists, who wrote that the website’s failure signals that the administration had subsumed "technical requirements to political fear." The larger failing was to see the passage of the law through the lens of grandiosity. It was this grandiosity that led them to imagine that the opposition would melt away, that they could subvert the public’s anxieties and animosities through evasion and that technical problems could be solved without focused expertise.  

One remaining question, stimulated by the comments of my colleague Jim Krantz, is what is the root of the grandiosity?  The "psychodynamics of organizations" as a school of thought suggests that  organizations erect "social defenses" to stave off or suppress the anxiety stimulated by the work organization members are called upon to do. Perhaps administration officials felt anxious because they in fact feared that the citizen/voter would hate Obamacare, much as they had hated the earlier appearance of "managed care" in the 1990s.  In this context the grandiosity could be seen as a protective myth, a way of believing in the law's inevitability and its essential  goodness, even if many citizens hated it. But just as an individual's psychological defense masks a truth, and may lead to self-inflicted wounds, for example through "acting out," the White House acted out, thereby undermining its own efforts. 

Obama's decision making process and Syria's use of chemical weapons.

President Obama has had difficulty in developing and sustaining a consistent course of action in response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. As the New York Times reported last month, “Over the last three weeks, the nation has witnessed a highly unusual series of pivots as a president changed course virtually in real time and on live television. Mr. Obama’s handling of his confrontation with Syria over a chemical weapons attack on civilians has been the rare instance of a commander in chief seemingly thinking out loud and changing his mind on the fly. Instead of displaying decisive leadership, Mr. Obama, to these critics, has appeared reactive, defensive and profoundly challenged in standing up to a dangerous world.” 

Three moments support this perspective. Alarmed by intelligence reports in August  of 2012, suggesting that the “besieged Syrian government might be preparing to use chemical weapons,” Obama announced at a news conference that month that should Syria move or use large quantities of chemical weapons, they would be crossing a “red line” that would “change my calculus.” Yet as journalists reported, cabinet and staff members who participated in the discussion of these new and alarming reports, could not recall any discussion whatsoever about announcing a red line. It seemed that on so important a matter, Obama was speaking extemporaneously, and as a result boxed himself into a course of action he had not fully vetted or even clarified.  Moreover, as a writer for the London Review of Books notes, “a clearer invitation could scarcely be imagined by anyone who had an interest in drawing the US into the war.”

Second, when in late August of 2013, the Syrian government in fact killed over a thousand people by launching chemically tipped rockets into the Damascus suburbs, the Obama administration appeared divided. His Secretary of State, John Kerry, said that, “The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity. By any standard, it is inexcusable.” This seeming call to arms was reinforced when Chuck Hegel, the Secretary of Defense, said a few days later, “We are ready to go,” as the Navy “beefed up its presence in the Persian Gulf region, increasing the number of aircraft carriers from one to two.” Indeed, after lengthy deliberations Obama had in fact decided to launch a missile strike. Yet, despite his penchant for following a deliberate decision-making process, Obama, walking for an hour on the grounds of the White House with his chief of staff, changed his mind about striking Syria with missiles. He decided instead to submit the decision to launch missiles to Congress, without consulting with Hegel or Kerry. As one journalist writes, “When President Obama strode into the Rose Garden after a week of increasing tension over Syria’s use of chemical weapons, many assumed it was to announce that the attack that had been broadly hinted at by his own aides had begun. Instead, he turned the decision over to Congress.”

Third, with congressional opposition to a missile strike growing, Obama used a September 10 speech, planned as a venue for making the case for a missile strike, to announce that he would give the Russians and Syrians time to come up with a plan for the UN to take control of Syria’s chemical weapons stocks. Russia, it appears, was emboldened to propose such a plan, after John Kerry in a news conference, made the offhand comment that Assad could avoid war, if he turned over “every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week, adding quickly, that Assad "isn't about to do it, and it can't be done."  In others words, Obama supported a plan that his Secretary of State had said was unworkable.

One way of interpreting these decision-making slips is to argue that they represent Obama’s customary fecklessness and unreliability. Certainly some of his long-standing critics believe this to be true. Another way is to emphasize Obama’s open mindedness, his ability to tolerate uncertainty and to respond to changing events with agility. Certainly, some of his long-standing supporters believe this.

I propose a different tack. I'll assume that Obama is customarily a disciplined decision maker, in the specific sense that he relies on an extended process of consultation with his staff and cabinet members, as well as on debates among them, before making a decision. However, this mode of decision-making creates delays, and may result in many false starts and premature conclusions. Yet, as long as these twists and turns take place in private, they actually help Obama grow comfortable with a particular decision. As one analyst writes, “President Obama is almost defiantly deliberative, methodical and measured, even when critics accuse him of dithering. When describing his executive style, he goes into Spock mode, saying, 'You've got to make decisions based on information and not emotions.'

His decision in 2009 to increase troop levels in Afghanistan had this character. As the New York Times reports, “The three-month review that led to the escalate-then-exit strategy is a case study in decision making in the Obama White House — intense, methodical, rigorous, earnest and at times deeply frustrating for nearly all involved. It was a virtual seminar on Afghanistan and Pakistan, led by a president described by one participant as something “between a college professor and a gentle cross-examiner.”

In other words, I will assume that Obama is most satisfied when he avoids impulsive decisions even when this process creates delays, false starts and frustration. This assumption has the merit of suggesting that his opponents and supporters are both expressing partial truths. To his opponents, he meanders through his decision making process giving the appearance of undisciplined thinking, to his supporters his path to a decision, however indirect, depends on a rational consideration of all alternatives. If this is true, how do we account for what appears to be his impulsive decision making in the Syria case? In this case he appears to have made decisions too quickly and to have acted out, rather than thought through, his different options.

I am drawn here to the distinction between ambiguity and uncertainty. Uncertainty describes our lack of knowledge about the facts, or our inability to predict the future accurately. Ambiguity describes our inability to ascribe meaning to facts we may already know with certainty. Thus for example when Obama made the decision to kill Osama Bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan he faced some imponderables. Was Bin laden actually there? Would the Pakistanis detect a Navy Seal intrusion and send troops to confront them? Would the Seals kill someone that they mistook for Bin Laden? But while these uncertainties were fodder for the decision making process, Obama had no doubt as to the meaning of this undertaking namely; to weaken Al-Qaida and to revenge the death of the thousands killed in 9/11. This is why he made finding Bin Laden such a priority.

Meaning in this sense is linked to the story we tell ourselves about our experience, to a narrative that links different facts together into a comprehensible composite.  One hypothesis is that Obama stumbled in responding to Syria’s use of chemical weapons, because he lacked a story he believed in. Was the Syrian crisis the story of an enemy threatening us or our allies, a story of an evil government acting immorally, a story of a proxy war between powerful states, a story of the Arab spring in which democratic forces confronted authoritarian ones, or finally a story of a religious war between two Muslim sects. Each potential story reinforced the viability of different strategies, for example to act as a proxy in a proxy war, to stay out of a religious war, or to support democratic movements. Obama in a candid moment acknowledged that he wished he did not have puzzle his way through this dilemma. “I would much rather spend my time talking about how to make sure every 3- and 4-year-old gets a good education than I would spending time thinking about how can I prevent 3- and 4-year-olds from being subjected to chemical weapons and nerve gas.” The New York Times, notes that " current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his Blackberry or slouching and chewing gum." In other words, Obama stumbled on the ambiguity of the situation he faced and had an impulse to withdraw from the difficulty. 

This hypothesis, while admittedly speculative, has the merit of shedding some light on Obama’s decision to impose a “red line” in the first instance. Psychologists describe a thinking process called, “reaction formation.” This happens when for example, a person who feels hostility toward a friend, masks it from himself through a stance of being overly solicitous. We say that the person finds his hostile feelings to be unacceptable to himself, and so conceals them, without consciously intending to do so, by showing exaggerated feelings of kindness. This leads to situations in which, as the saying goes, a person “kills with kindness.” (It is also the meaning of Shakespeare’s famous phrase in Hamlet, “the lady doth protest too much.”)

One hypothesis is that facing the pressure that ambiguity created, Obama tried to reject that pressure by projecting outward a stance of certitude, by in fact drawing a red line. It was as if he were saying, “I will respond to ambiguity in the domain I can’t control, by eliminating ambiguity in the domain I can.” This, despite the fact that from a strategic point of view a nation state often gains leverage by projecting ambiguity. This is why the Israelis for the longest time did not acknowledge that they had built an atomic bomb, why the United States has no clear red line for triggering the defense of Taiwan from attacks by China, and why Saddam Hussein suggested, without ever explicitly saying so, that he had weapons of mass destruction. (This bluff of course was his undoing, as bluffs sometimes are, but that does not mean bluffing is never a path to victory. After all, it helped him project power in the Arab world.)

To say that Obama rejected the psychological pressure that ambiguity imposed on him personally, by projecting it outward, is to say that he allowed his psychological vulnerability, in the moment, to shape his fate making decision. This is the opposite of disciplined decision making. Is this too harsh a claim? Perhaps, but one hypothesis is that his process of personalizing a decision is one occupational hazard of the way he makes decision in the first instance.

Return to the description of his decision-making about Afghanistan. “It was a virtual seminar on Afghanistan and Pakistan, led by a president described by one participant as something “between a college professor and a gentle cross-examination.” Obama does not rely on what one scholar calls “brokers” to assemble knowledge and then present it to Obama. “The most striking characteristic of Obama’s decision-making style was his personal involvement in the details of policy. Rejecting the use of an honest broker, either in principle or because of the personalities of the staffers he chose, Obama himself delved deeply into the major policies of his administration.”

In this way of deciding, the people close to him, particularly White House staff members who have no independent power bases, can become extensions of his own thinking process. If this is true he is vulnerable to thinking through them rather than with them. The danger here is that his thinking may become solipsistic, particularly when facing ambiguity. This danger is compounded by the fact that his staff members, in contrast to his cabinet officials have as their primary task the defense of his political interests. Chuck Hegel or John Kerry can represent the independent perspectives of the groups and interests they lead and manage, namely the military and the State Department. In this way they bring in the wider world into the decision making process. But the White House staff must represent in the end, their best understanding of the president’s own interests.  This hypothesis may explain why in fact he did not consult with Kerry or Hegel before deciding to turn the decision to bomb Syria over to Congress. This may also explain how Obama could change his mind after conferring with his chief of staff alone.  It also gives an account of why some journalists characterized Obama as making policy by “thinking out loud.” Failing to engage the military and State Department as links to the world outside the White House, he remained in the seminar room, where thinking out loud is quite acceptable.

Obama supporters may argue of course that these twists and turns, these false starts may all prove irrelevant if in the end the Russian plan for collecting and turning over Syria’s stockpiles to the UN, succeeds. Syria cannot use chemical weapons and the US has not bombed Syria, avoiding in this way collateral damage and the death of more innocent people. But this argument presumes that the pressing issue facing Obama is chemical weapons, rather than the Syrian crisis writ large. After all conventional weapons have already killed more than 100,000 people, millions of Syrian citizens have been displaced, creating certain trauma for a generation to come, and the war is destabilizing Iraq by reviving the conflict between Shiites and Sunnis. The question remains what stance should the U.S. take toward this conflict? How can Obama bring meaning to the ambiguities that underlie these events? 

One hypothesis about decision making in the face of ambiguity is that a decision maker can find a compelling narrative in such a situation by drawing on his feelings, his gut, as well as his thoughts. Feelings are synthesizers, they enable us to value facts and give them color, according to our dispositions, interests and hopes. George W. Bush relied perhaps too much on his feelings, for example, knowing his gut that the War against Saddam Hussein was a war for democracy in the Middle East. In retrospect, this proposition was simplistic, and revealed Bush’s own failures as the gutsy “decider,” (as he once described himself). Obama may face the opposite dilemma. He stays too much in his head plumbing for facts, that however accurate and numerous, can never on their own confer meaning.  This can reinforce his natural cautiousness. But as we saw in the case of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis, it can also lead him to act impulsively.