Q&A: David Sanger outlines ‘Obama doctrine’

David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, spoke at the Wilson School on Monday as part of the “Leadership and Governance Program.” Sanger discussed his most recent book Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. He spoke with the ‘Prince’ after his lecture.

The Daily Princetonian: You said in your lecture yesterday that you believe the public needs to be able to conduct a true debate over the use of drones and cyber warfare. How is this debate going to be conducted while these programs remain classified?

David Sanger: That’s the essence of a democracy. What people keep confusing is — people keep saying, “Well, the program’s classified.” Of course the program’s classified. Well, what part are you classifying? You’re classifying how you build a drone, how you control a drone, where we’re basing the drones, maybe, although a bunch of that’s been made public. I can understand the security around that. I get that. It’s the same thing for nuclear weapons. You aren’t publishing diagrams of those.But, you know, the essence of a democracy is you set some rules about how it is you’re going to use a new weapon. This debate has happened, we forget, every time the United States has had a new weapon of war. This happened with the airplane. It happened certainly around nukes and ballistic missiles. Of course we’re going to have this debate about cyber. The problem is, we don’t have as much time to have this debate as we did for the others because there are so many other countries that have been doing it. The U.S. government has never acknowledged having the technology for offensive cyber weapons. So you can’t debate the limits on their use if you don’t acknowledge that you’ve got the weapon. And we went through a little of this with drones. Eventually the president himself said we have drones. The media, human rights groups, others forced on the government of the United States a public discussion about the rules under which we will construct drone strikes. Now there’s a public discussion about whether we got to have a drone court as oversight. None of that would have happened if you didn’t have a free press that was able to go do this. Do the CIA or the Air Force or anybody else or any other government officials want to be forced into that debate? No, because they want the maximum freedom. But that’s why we’ve got competing institutions.

DP: You emphasized Obama’s “light footprint strategy” and use of “remote-control war” in your lecture yesterday. Do you think these strategies comprise the “Obama doctrine?”

DS: I think they’re a part of it. I think part one is as few to no troops on the ground as possible. Part two is low to no casualties, and, if we can avoid it, let’s not spend a lot of money. Part three is a humility to recognize that we cannot rewire societies, that we’re not going to turn Iraq or Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy. I frequently say: Democracy is a fabulous import — if you want it, you can bring it in — but it’s a crummy export. You can’t just say, “I’m selling this to you.” You gotta want it, deep in your society. A fourth element, and I think one of the most important parts of the Obama doctrine, is the United States can act unilaterally when its direct interests are challenged. Direct, relevant interests. But if our interests are indirect, like in Libya, I think Obama has been fairly insistent that countries that have much more direct interests take the lead, whether that’s NATO in the Libya case, whether it’s China and South Korea when dealing with North Korea. That’s the doctrine as I’ve seen it.

DP: In your book, you write that some people say that Obama does not believe in American exceptionalism. Do you think that Obama believes in American exceptionalism to some degree?

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DS: I think he believes, based on what he has said and what he has done, that the United States has unique assets that only he can contribute because of our military reach and because of our moral force. The world isn’t going to go look to China to go defend defenseless people from Syrian or Libyan dictators. They’re not turning and saying, “What’s [Xiyi King] going to go do about this?” But they are turning and saying, “What’s Barack Obama going to go do about this?” And that’s an important thing to preserve; that’s a great source of our soft power, the attractiveness of our system, our democracy, our culture. But I think he’s tempered that by the recognition that, if you let that go unchecked, you end up in many Iraqs and many Afghanistans. And if you don’t define and limit your mission, you’ll get American forces dying around the world, and you ask, “What was our direct interest here?”

DP: A New York Times review of your book suggests that your reporting provides evidence that the United States is essentially at war with Iran. Is that your view?

DS: I would say that we are in a low-intensity conflict, but I would not say that we are in any kind of a declared war. I would say we are in a persistent, low-intensity daily confrontation with Iran. We’re not amassing casualties, thank God. It’s more like the days of the Cold War.

DP: Your new book has been praised for the level of access that you were able to get into the Obama administration. How were you able to get so much access, and what was the experience like?

DS: Well, I’m not sure my access has been as good as advertised. And I didn’t talk to Obama himself for “Confront and Conceal” at all, though I’ve interviewed him for stories. I think two things: One is, I’m working for The New York Times. So this isn’t about me, it’s about the Times. And I think the second, and the more important in this regard, is that I think over time if you write about this stuff every day, people come to their own conclusions about whether you’re serious about the subject matter, so they’re willing to go talk to you because they think you’re taking it seriously and they know you’re writing about it in a way that’s going to get read, and they want to explain what they do. That’s the main reason people talk to journalists generally.