By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, February 03, 2015
The Wise People of American foreign policy — Madeleine
Albright, General Jack Keane, Henry Kissinger, General James Mattis, George
Shultz, and others — recently testified before Congress. Their candid and
insightful collective message dovetailed with the worries of many former
Obama-administration officials, such as one-time defense secretaries Robert
Gates and Leon Panetta, as well as a former director of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. Their consensus is that
the U.S. is drifting, and with it the world at large: The Obama administration
has not formulated a consistent strategy to cope with the advance of
second-generation Islamic terrorism. It is confused by the state upheavals in
the Middle East. It is surprised by the aggression of Putin’s Russia and the ascendance
of an autocratic China. Our allies in Europe, much of democratic Asia, and
Israel all worry that the U.S. is rudderless, as it slashes its military budget
and withdraws from prior commitments.
While I think the symptomology of an ailing, herky-jerky
United States is correct, the cause of such malaise is left unspoken. The Obama
team — with its foreign policy formulated by President Obama himself, National
Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, White
House consigliere Valerie Jarrett, Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton, and present Secretary of State John Kerry — is not in
fact befuddled by the existing world. Instead, it is intent on changing it into
something quite different from what it is.
So far from being chaotic, current U.S. foreign policy is
consistent, logical, and based on four pillars of belief.
1. Readjustments in the global order are long overdue.
The exceptional postwar influence of the United States
did not result in a fair and just world and is thus in need of major
recalibration. The use of military force abroad in recent decades has almost
always been mistaken, proving a waste of lives and money, as it either has
promoted the status quo rather than aiding the deserving and needy, or has
promoted only the interests of those who mouth U.S. platitudes and falsely
claim they are legitimate. The role of an all-powerful United States is not
always beneficial, as it sets global norms according to our privileged tastes.
For America to quietly recede and give other nations a chance to direct their
own affairs and become global actors would be far more equitable, leading to a
world that far better represents heretofore unrepresented billions of people.
Such transformation is always messy; occasional violence and unrest are the
price of equitable readjustments. Change is always misinterpreted and
mischaracterized by reactionaries whose interests abroad are imperiled by any
progress that leads to greater equality and fairness and to the end of
unwarranted hierarchy and privilege.
2. All nations and interests act rationally — if given a
chance.
Human nature is not tragic but is better understood from
a therapeutic perspective. Most nations, in fact, interpret outreach as
magnanimity leading to reciprocity, not as weakness deserving of contempt. Evil
is not inherent in the world because of human failings such as timeless envy,
jealousy, narcissism, greed, and vanity. Rather, to the degree that evil is
absolute and not a relative construct, it is a transient condition and a
curable symptom of poverty and absence of education. Leaders caricatured and
demonized as a Cuban Stalinist, an Iranian theocrat, a Russian former KGB
agent, and a plutocratic Chinese apparatchik in fact think no differently from
us. But they have too often not been accorded a voice because the U.S. sought
to bully them rather than reason with them. Polarizing and out-of-date labeling
such as calling ISIS or the Taliban “terrorists” or “Islamists,” or reducing
Bowe Bergdahl to a “traitor,” serve no purpose other than to simplify complex
issues in ways that caricature those with whom we differ.
Instead, if we reduce our military profile and show other
nations that what we are really interested in is fundamentally transforming
U.S. society into a more equitable and fair place, our erstwhile enemies will
begin to appreciate that we too are human and thus share their common
aspirations. Ideals, persuasion, feelings, and intent are now the stuff of
foreign policy, not archaic and polarizing rules of deterrence, balance of
power, military readiness, and alliances.
3. Do abroad as we try to do at home.
The legacy of Barack Obama will be found mostly in
foreign policy and especially in his forging of new ties with formerly
ostracized regimes. Obamacare, the doubling of U.S. debt, the anemic recovery
over the last six years, the near destruction of the Democratic Party at the
state level and in Congress, the alphabet soup of scandals — GSA, IRS, NSA, VA
— are not the stuff of a successful presidency, whatever the efforts of the
solicitous media. Accordingly, Nobel Laureate Obama logically sees that
history’s positive verdict on his tenure must come from abroad. He will
normalize relations with Castro’s Cuba and let others worry whether there is
any reciprocity on issues of longstanding disagreement. History will record the
fact of normalization, not transient details concerning human rights. Obama
will bring Iran into the fold of nations — its nuclear-weapons program soon
accorded the status of Pakistan’s. He will work with Islamic radical groups
such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, acknowledging their legitimate
grievances and helping them to forge a new generation of Middle Eastern
leaders. He has not given up on Erdogan’s Turkey as a logical bridge between
Islamic and Western nations. He has tried to reset relations with Putin and will
try again, as he stealthily promised President Medvedev before the 2012
elections. Israel will be accorded the status of Switzerland or Belgium, a
minor entity deserving of normal U.S. relations, but not of extraordinary
American commitments.
There are two pragmatic foreign-policy themes here:
First, there is nothing newsworthy in working with our same old, same old
allies like the Europeans, Israel, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and Canada, and
reassuring them through our tired advocacy of the boring mantras of free-market
capitalism, constitutional government, and a global order characterized by
Western notions of rule of law and freedom of the seas, trade, and
communications. In contrast, assuaging rogue regimes earns legacy headlines in
the fashion of Kissingerian détente or Nixon’s going to China. Second, the
world at large and the Left in particular will acknowledge and appreciate that
Obama sought to flip the U.S. from being the bulwark of the established global
order to being a protester with the masses at the barricades. If the power and
influence of the United States is put on the side of global hope and change, we
will see fundamental transformation in the world abroad as we have seen it at
home. Contrary to popular opinion, the Obama legacy will not be found at home
but abroad, in reordering the global role of the U.S. from an establishment
power to a revolutionary force for change.
4. Don’t sweat the details.
Obama himself is a prophet, not a bureaucrat. The details
of his grand vision will be left to younger, fresher functionaries who can sort
out the confusions of implementation — why terrorism and Islamism are taboo
words, or why trading terrorists for the deserter Bowe Bergdahl was a wise
idea, or why nothing really happened at Benghazi, or why pulling all our troops
out of Iraq had no effect on the creation of ISIS, or why setting timetables
for withdrawal from Afghanistan does not encourage the Taliban, which is not a
terrorist organization, and so on. Sometimes these inexperienced idealists will
fumble and will be embarrassed publicly, but Obama himself will not intervene
to correct the minutiae of inconsistencies in the implementation of his vision.
Once-in-a-lifetime emissaries of change do not stoop to that. Who would have
asked Mandela what was his position on NATO? Who wonders about Gandhi’s
attitude toward Israel? Prophets are not like us and have no responsibility to
articulate details or insist on logical consistency, much less to worry about
how others of less talent implement their grand visions.
* * *
Keep these themes in mind, and the last six years will
make better sense. The Middle East is not a mess, but a place in a needed stage
of transition as it frees itself from Western domination and a new order slowly
emerges. To the degree that we need a large military, it is preferable to
envision it as an executive agency for enacting social change without the
clumsy impediment of Congress, especially in terms of race, women’s issues, and
gender preferences. It can do the best work for stability abroad by shrinking
itself. Terrorism is in the eye of the beholder and always a relative concept
that Westerners pathologically insist is absolute. As far as the world abroad
goes, China is a more authentic enterprise than Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan,
which are the products of U.S. Cold War nation-building in our own image, not
of indigenous revolutionary self-creation. U.S. Cold War culpability — in Iran,
Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, South America, Cuba — is a burden that must be addressed
through various means. The rules of nuclear proliferation are a Western
construct. Israel is an abnormality, a Western outpost of capitalism and
privilege where it has never really belonged, an irritant that should be
treated like any other country as much as politically possible. Latin American
grass-roots socialism is not Stalinism, but rather an extension of what Obama
is trying to do at home.
I think the world now seems a chaotic place only if you
assume that the Obama administration wished to be like its predecessors.
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