6 Bad Assumptions President Obama Should Leave Behind in Hawaii

As the Obama administration anticipates the president's return to the White House next week from his Hawaii vacation, many senior staff and cabinet officials are likely preparing to meet with President Obama to discuss their strategic plans for the upcoming year. For the national security team, this can be an opportune time to not only map out their future plans but also to revisit some of the assumptions that have shaped their foreign policy during the administration's first five years.

Policy assumptions are often unstated; they are the stuff of an administration's worldview and the conceptual pillars that undergird the policies themselves. For these reasons and others, questioning policy assumptions can be a hard exercise. Doing so demands a willingness to admit possible error, can threaten multiple bureaucratic interests and scarce resources invested in current policy lines, and requires time and perspective that is hard to come by amidst the frenetic pace of the daily in-box and crisis management. This can be an especially fraught process for mid-level staff who risk being labeled “disloyal” or “unsupportive” of the president's agenda, and fear that raising a voice of dissent could mean losing their access, their influence, or even their job.

All this is made even more difficult by the notorious “White House bubble” that afflicts Democratic and Republican presidencies alike and can induce a delusion that current policies are succeeding when in fact they are not. A helpful prerequisite is for administration principals – beginning with President Obama, and including National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel – to set the right tone by telling their policy staffs, especially their strategic planners, that policy assumptions can and should be reviewed.

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• Al Qaeda is on the ropes. The administration's laudable successes in decimating much of the original core al Qaeda leadership seems to have blinded it to the mutation and resurgence of many affiliated terrorist franchises, including al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabab, al-Nusra Front, and others. As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross points out, al Qaeda had a very good year in 2013. Ignoring that does not bode well for American interests in 2014.

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