WASHINGTON—Depending on who you talk to, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s resignation on Monday was his way of showing his disagreement with the White House strategy in Iraq and Syria, the president’s way of sending a message that he’s changing directions on his policy toward the Islamic State or the ouster of a defense secretary who hadn’t become part of Barack Obama’s inner circle. Give it a few more days, and you can bet other guesses will be made.
Most of the media buzz hovers around why Hagel is leaving rather than who is succeeding him. Hagel has said he will remain at the Pentagon until the White House selects a successor, who must be confirmed by a GOP-controlled Senate next year.
According to The New York Times, administration officials said Obama decided to remove Hagel because he “often struggled to articulate a clear viewpoint and was widely viewed as a passive defense secretary.” Politico quoted a senior defense official who said the departure was “a mutual decision” prompted by no single disagreement. The Wall Street Journal said Hagel had “clashed privately” with White House national security officials over administration strategies in Ukraine and Syria and complained about the slow pace of decision-making.
A former combat veteran and Nebraska senator who shared Obama’s anti-Iraq war rhetoric, Hagel came into office confronted with the challenges of withdrawing from Afghanistan and shrinking the Pentagon’s budget.
Soon after, he was at the head of preventing a coup against Egypt’s first-ever democratically elected president, stabilizing Iraq and Syria, and devising a strategy against the Islamic State’s uprising– none of which were successful.
Experts like Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, assert that Hagel was not the core of the Obama administration’s foreign policy problem, and that blaming him is “quite unfair.”
“You could argue that other people might have other innovative, effective solutions, but he did not cause the problem nor is he the problem,” he said. “The primary reason is with President Obama’s unwillingness to get engaged in Iraq or Syria. He’s become a lightening rod for a policy that goes much deeper than him, for which other people have greater responsibilities.”
Others like Phillip Lohaus, research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said Hagel’s resignation was designed to send a message to the public.
“The foreign policy with regards to ISIS has not been working, and somebody in the administration needed to signal that they are changing directions,” Lohaus said. “The president is thinking about this, and there is no better way than to oust a high-level cabinet member.”
But Hagel was in a no-win situation with unattainable policy objectives, according to senior research fellow Dakota Wood at The Heritage Foundation.
“You can’t say that the secretary of defense is responsible for carrying out a policy that cannot be achieved, when the objective is to destroy ISIS without providing a framework for which that can be done — because it can’t be done by airstrikes alone and taking a ground component off the table,” Wood said.
Experts across the board said Obama’s national security policy that was tightly controlled by a small group of aides, including National Security Advisor Susan Rice, left Hagel on the edges of the decision-making process
“Two former secretaries of defense and finally Secretary Hagel are making the same charge that micromanagement and the dysfunctional nature of a tightly controlling, insular circle prevents them from having any meaningful and effective advising,” Wood said, referring to former Defense Secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta’s open criticisms of the Obama administration’s management.
“It’s in the increasing desire of the White House to control and manage every aspect of military affairs,” Gates said in a joint appearance with Panetta at a defense forum earlier this month.
But former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley wondered what the point of his resignation was if Hagel were really more of an outsider.
“While all White Houses make changes after a political defeat, it’s not clear what problem SecDef Hagel’s departure is intended to solve,” he wrote on Twitter.
Hagel had becpme increasingly public in his divergence from the administration’s policy, which The New York Times said he also expressed in a sharp memo to Rice regarding his “concern about the overall Syria strategy.”
Speculation on Hagel’s replacement has focused on Michele Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense, and Ashton B. Carter, a former deputy secretary of defense, are top candidates to replace Hagel.
According to Lohaus, the next selection for Hagel’s position will indicate the Obama administration’s foreign policy stance in moving forward. For example, as opposed to a “defense intellectual type”, the appointment of a former general would “send a message that Obama wants to take a hard line against ISIS.”
“He wanted to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the reality on the ground is what it is,” Lohaus said. “If you look at his team, who all hold a similar opinion and don’t view America’s role as getting involved in additional combat operation, it will take a rare person who has a lot of respect within the White House to tell him, if that’s what it takes.”
Wood added that it would be challenging to find an “Obama loyalist” who is also qualified to lead a much more aggressive foreign policy agenda.
“Even all of these strong candidates are going to reconsider two, three, four times whether they are going to take that job,” he said. “If they feel the pattern is going to continue in which their advice is unheard, why would they want to take that job?”
