HE CALLS himself a “pretty good” poker player. Barack Obama’s poker-buddies, including Illinois politicians who played with him weekly when he was a state senator, tend to agree. Quizzed by profile-writers, they have described a cautious, canny card player. Mr Obama would bluff only if he had halfway-decent cards, they recalled. When opponents bet high, Mr Obama would not engage unless he held a strong hand of his own. As president, he is said to favour a more demure card game, spades. That may be just as well. At a bumpy moment in history, Mr Obama is strikingly, even confoundingly, reluctant to bluff.
When needs must, Mr Obama can summon the language of superpower resolve. Speaking on September 3rd in Estonia—an ex-Soviet republic reborn as an eager member of NATO and the European Union—the president struck a stalwart tone. “You lost your independence once before. With NATO, you will never lose it again,” he told young Estonians in Tallinn, their capital. Mr Obama backs plans to rotate American forces continuously through the Baltic republics. But such promises are rooted in treaty obligations. Alas for Ukraine, as Mr Obama frequently points out, it is not a member of NATO. So America has played an ambiguous role there, criticising Russian aggression and leading a push for sanctions against Mr Putin’s inner circle. “Borders cannot be redrawn at the barrel of a gun,” Mr Obama told Estonians. But he also made clear America would not use military power to enforce that principle in Ukraine.
Other presidents have often embraced strategic ambiguities, using them to unsettle and deter adversaries. Mr Obama takes a different view, using speeches and press briefings to shut options down. There will be no military solution to the Ukrainian crisis, he has volunteered several times. Instead America will use diplomatic and financial levers to help Ukraine, and to prod Russia to see that its “brazen” actions are self-defeating in the long run. Nor is this Mr Obama’s sole area of anti-bluffing. Republicans jumped on his remark on August 28th that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for dealing with the fanatics of the Islamic State (IS): proof, they charge, that a feckless president has no idea how to stop the world spiralling into chaos. In Tallinn Mr Obama—a touch peevishly—insisted he had been narrowly talking about a military strategy in Syria that might need congressional approval.
Actually, that understates Mr Obama’s foreign-policy candour. American military power can put a temporary lid on such menaces as IS, but that does nothing to force Iraqis or other regional players to take responsibility for their security, he has said many times. In Mr Obama’s not-very-swaggering words, America’s proper role is to promote a more inclusive Iraqi government, to “cobble together” a regional coalition to degrade and curb IS, and, in the long term, to “stabilise Syria in some fashion”.
Mr Obama has also taken to downplaying domestic expectations. September 1st, Labour Day, saw the president in Milwaukee addressing a friendly crowd of trade unionists. As he often does nowadays, two months from mid-term elections which could see Republicans take full control of Congress, Mr Obama assured the crowd that America’s economy was recovering, even if watching the TV news was one long “downer” of grim headlines. But the passage that struck Lexington, watching alongside burly folk in union T-shirts, some in Stars-and-Stripes hard hats, touched on the frustration of seeing much of his agenda blocked by Congress. Mr Obama did not pretend that this would change soon. Before the 2012 elections Democrats swore that Republicans’ “fever” would break if Mr Obama were re-elected. Now, the president merely urged his allies in the unions to wear Republicans down, putting their faith in persistence and organisation. Sometimes campaigners have to take half a loaf, or even a quarter, he added. Progress can be slow.
Given that the president is canny as well as cautious, what explains his willingness to show his cards like this? Listen to Mr Obama, and the idea seems to be that dashing false hopes can be usefully bracing. The president often makes America sound like a parent who needs to intervene less if other countries are to grow up and take responsibility for problems only they can fix.
Lots of Americans agree. Straw-polled near Milwaukee’s lakefront, locals talked with passion about Americans deployed to war zones since 2001, returning home with physical and mental scars. Supporters praised the president for shunning tangled, sectarian conflicts in Iraq and Syria, while sceptics called him too cautious. Nobody wanted American troops on the ground.
No, we can’t
In domestic politics, too, Mr Obama’s downbeat tone has its own logic. He approaches November’s elections with dismal approval ratings, but must do what he can to boost Democratic turnout. Few would listen if he promised the whole nation hope, change and unity, as he once did. Instead, he addresses Democrats, urging them to channel their frustration into getting organised.
Yet Mr Obama’s tactics carry risks. Many Americans are used to the clout that comes with being a global cop, even if they are tired of the role. The president is describing political reality. But “We don’t like that reality,” says Roger Quindel, a Vietnam veteran watching the Milwaukee speech. Confronted with images of American journalists being murdered by Islamic radicals, many Americans agree. Almost a third say their country does too little to solve world problems, finds a new Pew poll, up from 17% in November, with the biggest swing among Republicans.
Mr Obama is right that America cannot fix the world alone. His message of tough love is supposed to make coalition-building easier (and to his credit, holding back American support has just helped to push a bad prime minister out in Iraq). The problems start when the world hears not canniness but indifference. Compared with that, even bluster is better.
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