Steve Coll and Ryan Lizza Discuss ISIS and Obama's Foreign-Policy Crisis

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Political Scene (The New Yorker)

Episode: Steve Coll and Ryan Lizza Discuss ISIS and Obama’s Foreign-Policy Crisis

Date: September 6, 2014
Host: Dorothy Wickenden
Guests: Steve Coll (Staff Writer, Dean of Columbia Journalism School), Ryan Lizza (Washington Correspondent)

Overview

This episode delves into President Obama’s response to the simultaneous crises of ISIS’s rise in Iraq and Syria and the Russian incursion into Ukraine. The conversation examines the internal and external dynamics shaping U.S. foreign policy, the limits of American and allied intervention, the complexities of coalition-building, and the consequential debates within the Democratic Party—particularly between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—about America’s role in the world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Obama’s Approach to ISIS and The “No Strategy Yet” Gaffe

• Obama’s evolving stance: The President’s admission of lacking a clear strategy against ISIS leads to examination of the challenges facing U.S. and coalition responses in Iraq and Syria.
• Coalition dynamics: Allies (notably Britain, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, and the UAE) are on board with degrading and destroying ISIS but not all details or responsibilities are worked out, especially regarding action in Syria.
  • Steve Coll (02:51):
    “Some nations have decided…to support the initial Obama defense of the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq and the use of airstrikes to protect vulnerable religious minority populations in Iraq. Now there’s a discussion about…a policy that would also reach and undermine ISIS inside Syria.”
• Strategic deadlock: The president’s hesitancy partly reflects concerns about getting ahead of allies and the Pentagon, and uncertainty about possible intervention methods in Syria.

2. The Limits of U.S. Power in Sectarian Conflicts

• Constraints without full intervention: American influence is sharply constrained absent the use of ground troops; the underlying cross-border Sunni-Shiite conflict complicates external solutions.
  • Steve Coll (04:29):
    “What is American power without military intervention? Well, we’ve seen not much. We can support refugees, selectively support the Kurds…[but] we can’t change the balance of these two civil wars.”
• Long-term strategy: To defeat ISIS, coalition partners must address not just military threats, but the political alienation of Sunni populations in both Iraq and Syria.
  • Steve Coll (05:02):
    “The strategy has to be to not only address ISIS control and degrade it…but also to come up with a long term solution for Sunni self governance and stability.”

3. The Democratic Policy Debate: Obama vs. Clinton

• Hillary Clinton’s criticism: Clinton’s belief in building coalitions and earlier support for arming Syrian rebels is contrasted against Obama’s caution and skepticism about successful intervention.
  • Ryan Lizza (08:14):
    “Hillary has wanted it to be known that she was an early advocate for aiding the anti-Assad rebels...that if the United States had aided the rebels earlier on, we wouldn’t have had that vacuum that ISIS was able to create.”
  • Obama’s rebuttal: He views this as “revisionist history,” doubting moderate rebels could have succeeded (08:14).
• Public Opinion: U.S. voters are skeptical of deeper involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts, leading politicians—from Obama to Republicans like Rand Paul—into difficult recalibrations.
  • Ryan Lizza (10:30):
    “There’s no doubt that public opinion polls…do not support the U.S. dropping bombs all over the Middle East.”
• Role reversals: Noted inversion of party reputations, with Clinton cast as hawkish and some Republicans, like Rand Paul, seeking a less interventionist path—until pressures force their positions to shift (11:05).

4. The Syrian War and Roots of ISIS

• Civil war as catalyst: The panel underscores that Syrian instability, more than U.S. decisions, created the conditions for ISIS’s rise.
  • Steve Coll (11:59):
    “The mess that has arisen in Iraq and Syria is not a result of American policy as much as a result of the Syrian war… That’s what ISIS feasts on.”
• Counterfactuals and internecine Democratic debate: The “what if” debate over arming the rebels is ongoing, but ultimately unresolvable—underscoring the intractability of the underlying conflicts.

5. ISIS’s Media Strategy and Goals

• Terror as spectacle: ISIS’s gruesome killings grab global attention, but also provoke inevitable U.S. military responses—possibly exactly as ISIS intends.
  • Steve Coll (14:56):
    “They want to establish…a new caliphate…They want a state of conflict that heightens their own legitimacy and that recruits volunteers to fight on their behalf, and that brings money to their cause.”
• Danger in U.S. response: The challenge for the U.S. is to counter ISIS as a real threat without overinflating their stature or falling into the trap of endless confrontation.

6. Saudi Arabia’s Double Role in Extremism

• Tough diplomacy: The U.S. is caught between reliance on Saudi support and frank recognition that Saudi-funded networks still promote extremism.
  • Steve Coll (17:29):
    “The situation that shocked us on 9/11…really hasn’t changed very much, except that the Saudis no longer are interested so much in following our lead…But there is, in fact, a coalescence of interest. Everybody has an interest in stopping ISIS from fulfilling its ambitions.”

7. NATO’s New/Old Role Amid Russian Aggression

• Renewed relevance, limited power: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gives NATO a renewed sense of purpose but also exposes the alliance’s limitations, especially outside its core Article 5 responsibilities.
  • Steve Coll (21:35):
    “I think [the Ukraine ceasefire is] very fragile. I’m not even sure it’s real. And NATO has virtually no power to enforce it… NATO’s new role is its old role.”
• Potential existential crisis: There is fear that Russia might test NATO’s resolve by stirring trouble inside a member state, thus triggering the collective defense clause—a prospect far more serious than Ukraine, which is outside NATO.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Obama (on ISIS, 01:57):
  “Their horrific acts only unite us as a country and stiffen our resolve to take the fight against these terrorists. And those who make the mistake of harming Americans will learn that we will not forget and that our reach is long and that justice will be served.”

• Steve Coll (on the difficulty of building Sunni autonomy, 05:02):
  “Now what then? Putting all these people around a table and saying this is the problem, what’s the solution? What do you do? I think there are probably very different approaches in Iraq and Syria.”

• Ryan Lizza (on party politics, 10:30):
  “You have Republicans like Rand Paul…describing Hillary as a war hawk…inverting the traditional distinction between Democrats and Republicans.”

• Steve Coll (on the nature of ISIS, 14:56):
  “Their idea, which was Al Qaeda’s idea, is if you go to war with the biggest military power in the world, then you must be important.”

• Steve Coll (on NATO’s constraints, 21:35):
  “NATO’s role. NATO’s new role is its old role…If Russia did in Estonia… what it’s doing now in Ukraine…you’d have to go to combat.”

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Key Timestamps

• 01:57: (Obama’s declaration on ISIS)
• 02:51: (Steve Coll explains coalition agreement and NATO role)
• 04:29; 05:02: (Limits of U.S. power, and Sunni grievances)
• 08:14: (Clinton vs. Obama on intervention)
• 10:30-11:12: (Public opinion and shifting party positions)
• 11:59: (Origins of the current chaos—Syrian civil war)
• 14:56: (ISIS’s goals and use of media terror)
• 17:29: (Saudi Arabia’s role in extremism and U.S.-Saudi tensions)
• 21:35: (NATO’s limitations in Ukraine and collective defense dilemma)

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Conclusion

This episode offers a nuanced, in-depth look at why President Obama’s foreign policy—especially as it pertains to ISIS and Russia—has struggled to find a successful formula. Through debate and historical context, Coll and Lizza illuminate the intractable complexities on the ground, the challenges of coalition leadership, partisan debates about intervention, and the enduring impact of legacy wars and destabilized states on U.S. power and policy in the world.

Transcript

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[C]

Your website this is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Friday, September 5th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker.

[D]

We will not be intimidated.

[C]

After the videotaped beheadings of two American journalists, President Obama said that the US Will degrade and destroy isis, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

[D]

Their horrific acts only unite us as a country and stiffen our resolve to take the fight against these terrorists. And those who make the mistake of harming Americans will learn that we will not forget and that our reach is long and that justice will be served.

[C]

That was Obama speaking on Wednesday in Estonia. He then traveled to a NATO meeting in Wales, where he met about ISIS and about the Russian incursion into Ukraine. Steve Kahl and Ryan Lizza are here today to talk about Obama's ongoing foreign policy crises. So, Steve, Obama is emerging from a terrible summer. The current news about the ceasefire in Ukraine and the agreement between the US and its allies to destroy ISIS should at least temporarily change the storyline. But Obama really set himself up for all of this by admitting not long ago that we don't have a strategy yet on isis. What has this coalition agreed to exactly?

[D]

Well, we know some of it, but not all of it. And I'm not sure that they're done negotiating amongst themselves for their shared agenda. NATO and other allies have signed up for the goal that the President articulated to degrade or destroy isis. Some nations have decided, I think, to support the initial Obama defense of the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq and the use of airstrikes to protect vulnerable religious minority populations in Iraq. Now there's a discussion about how you develop a policy that would also reach and undermine ISIS inside Syria. That's what the President was referring to when he said we don't have a policy yet. I think in context, he might have been worried that the Pentagon was getting ahead of him in nominating airstrikes on Syrian territory or reviving plans to arm and equip and train so called moderate rebels in Syria. And it sounded like he wanted to slow down that part of the discussion. And I'm not sure, even with the staunchest of allies who seem already to have declared their willingness to support him, like Britain and Australia, what those governments think about strategy on the ground inside Syria, that's where the knot is tied the tightest.

[C]

So Obama has been criticized for acting weakly and belatedly in Iraq and Syria. And this no strategy gaffe, at least as has been presented in the press, came two years after he made his comment about drawing a red line in Syria. How much power does the United States, the US President, have in these battles within Shiite and Sunni Islam?

[D]

What is American power without military intervention? Well, we've seen not much. We can support refugees, we can selectively support the Kurds and respond to humanitarian crises like the one on Mount Sinjar this summer where the Yazdis were stranded. But we can't change the balance of these two civil wars, essentially.

[C]

But what about with the participation of our allies? And what combinations of tactics can we bring to bear when we're all presumably in it together?

[D]

Obviously, if it were easy, it would have been done by now. It's very, very difficult and uncertain work. But I think the idea that the coalition will start to work on starts from a fresh recognition that what's at issue is the Sunni populations of Iraq and Syria. That those populations are essentially now one. The border between them means nothing, that they have been influenced and to some extent seized by isis. That's the issue. So you have this cross border Sunni population. Now what are its problems? It's alienated from the two governments in the states that it happens to reside. So they're at war. The Sunnis are at war with Assad in Damascus and they're also estranged from and to some extent at war with the Shiite led government in Baghdad. And it's in the context of that grievance and the suffering and the displacement, the refugees, the bombardment, the killing over the last two or three years that ISIS has arisen and captured this Sunni agenda and this population. So the strategy has to be to not only address ISIS control and degrade it and defeat it, attack it, but but also to come up with a long term solution for Sunni self governance and stability. And that's where the regional allies that support these Sunni populations and have funded them and have worried about them much more than for example, the Obama administration has done come into play. And those are Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, other Arab states that have really been aggravated by the suffering that Sunnis in Syria and Iraq have endured. Now what then? Putting all these people around a table and saying this is the problem, what's the solution? What do you do? I think there are probably very different approaches in Iraq and Syria. Iraq, we see already military action against ISIS from the air and on the ground in Syria. You have to go back to the very difficult question. How do you undermine ISIS from within? You're not going to send in an external invasion force. Are you going to build rebels up? Are there any rebels to build up? People are doubtful about that. How do you get tribal leaders and other potential dissidents that are now in ISIS's orbit to revolt? So I'm quite sure that this roundtable conversation will go back to the question how do we defeat ISIS from within while putting pressure from outside Ryan, just.

[C]

To step back a little bit and see the Obama administration's foreign policy in a broader perspective. You wrote a piece for the magazine, I believe, four years ago about Obama's foreign policy when Hillary Clinton was still Secretary of State. She has recently criticized Obama for not having what she described as an organized principle. Obviously there are political reasons there. As the 2016 elections come up. She did have issues though at the time with Obama have done differently in dealing with ISIS and Putin if she were president now.

[E]

Yeah, I think that their debate that started in 2007 and 08 in the Democratic primaries in a less robust way, carried into the administration. If you remember the 2011 debate over whether intervene in Libya, Obama through that, at least in the early stages, seemed either reluctant or at the very least didn't show his cards to his advisors. And it does seem that he was sort of pushed into the direction of intervention by folks, by Hillary Clinton, through NATO, however, through NATO and Samantha Power, although he was, I think most accounts suggest he was firmly behind it, that he wasn't sort of rolled by them in any way. But again, she was a little bit more on the side of the humanitarian interventionists that wanted if you could build a coalition and you could do it the right way to protect the Libyans in Benghazi. And then of course, the big one that you just referred to is on Syria. And this is something that Hillary Clinton has, through her interviews recently and through her memoir of her time in the Obama administration, has been very willing to talk about. A lot of the other debates she hasn't been willing to talk about. But on Syria, she has wanted it to be known that she was an early advocate for aiding the anti Assad rebels. You've had this sort of public debate that has now happened between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with Hillary Clinton saying if, and this is the argument that a lot of Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham make that if the United States had aided the rebels earlier on, we wouldn't have had that vacuum that ISIS was able to create. In other words, we would have supported the moderates and the moderates would now be the strongest anti Assad force. As I think Obama told our boss David Remnick, that that is just revisionist history and he never believed that that was likely. So, yeah, I think she comes out of that Clinton worldview of the 90s where Democrats became very comfortable with the use of power. And I don't think, despite her regrets about her Iraq war vote, I don't think she's changed all that much. I do think.

[C]

Sorry to interrupt. Where does public opinion stand right now about our involvement in the region? It was one of the reasons, obviously, Obama did not want to get further involved.

[E]

Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that public opinion polls do not, for the last several years, do not support the US Dropping bombs all over the Middle East. And there's one Republican candidate right now out there, Rand Paul, who actually believes this could be an advantage if he wins the nomination and runs against Hillary Clinton. You have this strange situation where, you know, you have Republicans like Rand Paul who are actually describing Hillary as a war hawk and sort of inverting the traditional distinction between Democrats and Republicans and basically saying that she's, she's too hawkish for the country right now.

[D]

I saw today, though, that Rand Paul came out saying he's not an isolationist and he would have hit ISIS harder than Obama did. So he's pivoting, too.

[C]

Everyone's pivoting. The wind is shifting.

[E]

He really, I mean, it's very complicated for him. And he gets a lot of these issues kind of he goes back and forth on. Because I think he misjudged, to answer your question about the public, Dorothy, I think he's misjudged a little bit where the Republican primary electorate is on something like isis. And if you look, if you watch Fox News or listen to the sort of talk radio crowd on the right, they are right now not where Rand Paul was a few weeks ago on isis. And as Steve pointed out, he has moved.

[C]

But, Steve, it's not as though the Bush Cheney administration initiated a winning strategy with their preemptive war in Iraq. Obviously, they're all piling on now. The Republicans aren't exactly on firm ground here.

[D]

No. But the mess that has arisen in Iraq and Syria is not a result of American policy as much as a result of the Syrian war. The Syrian war is the instability, the most disruptive war the Middle east has had in a generation or two. 200,000 dead, almost 10 million displaced. There are more Syrian refugees in the world now than from any other country. That's what ISIS feasts on, the suffering of that war and that warose from the Arab Spring, from convulsive events that nobody forecasted, and as it turned out, nobody could control even the populations that created these revolutions. So the policy debate gets a little bit narrower and it goes back to what Ryan was describing about arming and equipping the rebels. Was there anything that the Obama administration, its allies, others, could have done to alter the course of the Syrian war, to create more stability, to resolve the war earlier, to create a better balance of forces, et cetera? And that's what the debate between Hillary Clinton and Obama, and it's going to surface in 16 again and again, will be about. And it'll be a frustrating debate because it's a complete counterfactual and nobody can resolve it. But it is, as Ryan was saying, it's quite vivid and pretty unusual, even if you discount it for the fact that Hillary now needs to run away from Obama in order to run in 16 the language that each of them uses to describe and defend their position. You know, Obama says it's a fantasy to think that you could have built up a moderate rebel force in Syria and changed the course of the war. These were pharmacists, he said at one point. Pharmacists, you know, well, we had a revolution of pharmacists, too. So I don't know. I mean, there is a recognition, I think, in that debate that the hard problem was and remains the Syrian war.

[C]

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[B]

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[C]

Steve, ISIS leaders know that they can command the world's attention for weeks with barbaric videotapes of the executions they commit against us and other citizens. But as Dexter Filkin says in a New Yorker blog post this week, they also know, presumably, they couldn't have made the prospect of American airstrikes more likely if they had sent a video to President Obama begging him to drop more bombs. So what is their goal here?

[D]

Well, we can take them at face value. First of all, they want to establish what they regard as a new caliphate, a state governed by their interpretation of Islamic principles and Islamic law in the territory that used to belong to the states of Iraq and Syria and really objectively doesn't belong to anybody at the moment. So they've declared their intention to rule it. By the way, they're not the only proclaimed caliphate in the world at the moment. Boko Haram is proclaiming a caliphate in northern Nigeria and threatening north Northern Nigeria's largest city. It's another sort of invisible crisis that plays at the bottom of like a seven, but is about to be potentially another really shocking disaster. And they want a state. They want to rule the state. They want to fund the state with its resources, so oil fields they've seized, taxes paid by businesses and so on. And then what do they want from the United States or from the rest of the world? Well, they want a state of conflict that heightens their own legitimacy and that recruits volunteers to fight on their behalf, and that brings money to their cause. So their idea, which was Al Qaeda's idea, is if you go to war with the biggest military power in the world, then you must be important. And so the narrative, the video narrative, the media narrative, I think, is a kind of calculated way to describe and elevate their own kind of ambition. And it's a dilemma for the United States because since they do represent an objective threat, we will respond to them as already happened. But how do you avoid the trap that the Bush administration fell into of essentially putting them on equal footing with a state that has a $14 trillion economy and a military that's bigger than all the other militaries in the world combined and so on? Why would you end up in a media narrative with them that puts them as your most fearsome foe?

[C]

Steve, I want to ask you another question about how we fight terror. I was talking in the office yesterday with Lawrence Wright, our colleague, and others about Saudi Arabia, which is, correct me if I'm wrong, the biggest state sponsor of extremism and also a putatively key friend of the United States in that region. Why can't Obama speak bluntly to the Saudis about this, especially given that our dependence on their oil now is far less significant than it was in the years when we were truly close to them?

[D]

Well, he can if he had the right relationship with the royal family and with King Abdullah. I'm sure this is a conversation that has been had quite bluntly in private, going back to the bush administration after September 11th. Obama has inherited a decade of estrangement between the United States and Saudi Arabia. We are no longer intimate partners. We don't trust one another. They're tired of being yelled at about what they regard as an existential sectarian threat from Iran, which is related to the doctrinal conflict between Sunni and Shi', ism, the royal family. The state of Saudi Arabia has always been weak, and it doesn't have much capacity. But it shares power with the clerical establishment in Saudi Arabia that are funded by the state and buy Saudi Arabia's oil. And that establishment, in turn funds proselytizing networks and jihadi volunteers and so on. So the situation that shocked us on 9 11, frankly, really hasn't changed very much, except that the Saudis no longer are interested so much in following our lead. They see China as their future customer. They know that we're not buying as much oil as we used to and that we don't need them for security reasons, the way we did during the Cold War and so on. So I think actually, rather than grabbing them by the lapels and trying to shake them into recognition of our interests, you actually would be better advised to do what I imagine the Biden administration will do, which is to point out to the Saudi royal family that ISIS is a threat to its own existence, that if it spills across Saudi borders and fires the imaginations of underemployed, undereducated Saudi youth, Riyadh is next. And so everybody in the region has an interest in tamping this thing down and stabilizing the Sunni territory of Syria and Iraq. That's going to require working with bedfellows that you may otherwise find frustrating, as we find the Saudis and they find us. But there is, in fact, a coalescence of interest. Everybody has an interest in stopping ISIS from fulfilling its ambitions to go after Jordan and everyone else in the Sunni neighborhood.

[C]

Ryan getting back to the recent meeting in Wales. Decades ago, when I worked at the New Republic, one of the office jokes was about one of the world's most boring headlines was wither NATO. But that was in the post Soviet era.

[E]

That came behind worthwhile Canadian initiatives.

[C]

Yes, exactly. Yes. I might remind people that you worked there, too, a little bit after I did.

[E]

They were still talking about it.

[C]

Yes, exactly. But now we do have to ask again, seriously, what have those talks revealed about NATO's new roles in the world?

[E]

Well, I think that what to do about ISIS in some ways almost overwhelmed what to do about Putin and Ukraine at the NATO summit. One of the things that I've learned from the diplomatic community in Washington is that there's a longing for the days of George H.W. bush and Bill Clinton, who are both very eager to be on the phone with allies to do the sort of hard work that building coalitions entails.

[C]

As would Hillary Clinton, presumably.

[E]

Presumably, yeah. As Secretary of State, which what did she do? She traveled around the world talking, you know, she about talked. She sort of reveled in that work. And it does seem that both of the crises that he's facing right now require that kind of work. It's ironic because whenever a question of military intervention comes up, the first thing that Obama and people in his administration say is, well, we need a coalition to deal with this problem, and we need some partners to step up, and we need to have the people who are in the region want to solve this problem as much or more than we want to. And yet at the same time, there is this Constant criticism that Obama himself has not been willing to do the hard work to sort of create the conditions for those coalitions.

[C]

So Steve, what about the ceasefire in Ukraine? How fragile is it and how much power does NATO have to enforce it?

[D]

I think it's very fragile. I'm not even sure it's real. And NATO has virtually no power to enforce it.

[C]

That's what I thought you were going to say.

[D]

You know, NATO's role. NATO's new role is its old role. After the Soviet Union broke up, NATO struggled to define an out of area mission beyond the defense of Europe against the Soviet Union, which no longer exists, against Russia, which at the time was cooperative and attending NATO summits. And now an alliance that managed to limp through the post Cold War period proved itself in Afghanistan perhaps better than some people would credit it. That did hang together. A lot of NATO countries deployed to Afghanistan, didn't want to be there, fought together, exposed weaknesses, but also some solidarity. So all that's now that out of area mission for NATO. It yields to the core Article 5 agreement that an attack on one member of NATO is an attack on all. And Obama went to Estonia because this was really a grave summer beyond Ukraine, because it signaled the possibility that Putin could play the same game with Russian speaking populations Inside an Article 5 member of NATO like Estonia, stir up trouble, deny that he's there, send in people in plain clothes and challenge NATO. Obama most of all to respond to go to war essentially because that's what it would be. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. Ukraine has no prospect of becoming a member of NATO. And that's why the west has had to watch in frustration as Putin dismembers the country. And he's not done yet. You know, he's moving from town to town in eastern Ukraine. He's building supply lines from Crimea to Donetsk. He joked this week, or maybe not with humor intended, that he could take Kyiv in two weeks. I mean, if he went after the heart of Ukraine and if he went after Western Ukraine, NATO might rouse itself to some kind of military action. But by and large the question now is will NATO have the policy, the deterrence, the preparation to respond to a stealth intervention in a NATO member country that's backed on Russia's border and does its public have the will to, essentially you'd have to go to combat if Russia did in Estonia or Lithuania, what it's doing now in Ukraine and what it's done before in Georgia and other places.

[C]

Okay, thank you both so much, Ryan. Liza is the magazine's Washington correspondent and Steve Collins, a staff writer and the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.

[B]

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[F]

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[E]

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