Tuesday, July 03, 2012
The 2012 election will hinge on the economy, not on U.S.
foreign policy, unless there is a major overseas crisis — an Israeli attack on
Iran, an Iranian detonation of a nuclear weapon, a Middle East war, a North
Korean attack, or something of that sort. That said, there is much to lament in
the current administration’s foreign policy. But Mitt Romney should be careful
in critiquing the status quo, given that it is full of paradoxes and
contradictions.
The war on terror? Forget the absurd euphemisms like “overseas
contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters,” the hypocrisy of railing
against waterboarding three known terrorists while blowing up over 2,000
suspected terrorists (and anyone near them), and the half-hearted efforts of
both using and trying to close Guantanamo and envisioning Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed in a civilian court. What Obama said he wanted to do and what he
actually did do are quite different things. In truth, he embraced or expanded
almost all the Bush-Cheney protocols that he demagogued against as a state
legislator, a senator, and a presidential candidate. That he gave George W.
Bush absolutely no credit for surging in and saving Iraq, or setting up the
procedures for operations like those that killed bin Laden, is again a matter of
ingratitude, not foreign policy, given that the war on terror is now a
successful eleven-year continuum.
But there is one caveat. Words ultimately have
consequences. The constant naïveté from the administration — the
characterization of the Muslim Brotherhood as largely “secular,” the
mythography of the Cairo speech, the taboo against using the phrase “radical
Islam” — may have been designed to offer a politically correct mask for Obama’s
continuance of the Bush-Cheney protocols, but it may also have had the effect
of suggesting to our enemies that the U.S. is ambiguous about radical Islam and
does not necessarily connect it with anti-American terrorism.
In general, given American exhaustion over Afghanistan
and Iraq, combined with the economic crisis, the Obama administration correctly
gauged the public desire for no more interventions, but it finessed that
isolationist impulse into its own sense of a multipolar world where America was
merely one among many nations.
Aside from the war on terror, then, what are the ten
legitimate areas of criticism?
1. Securitygate. The Obama administration has leaked the
most intimate secrets about U.S. covert operations — the cyber war against
Iran, the Predator-drone assassination program, the Yemeni double agent, the
bin Laden raid — in a transparent attempt to chest-thump over the once covert
anti-terrorism efforts. This was a shameful thing, and we have not yet felt the
full consequences of this disaster.
2. The administration initially did not care much about
the Arab Spring, but was dragged into it by the looming fall of Hosni Mubarak.
Leading from behind in Libya was incoherent, and what followed Qaddafi was more
incoherent. Not going into Syria was wise, even if the reasons for not going in
were again muddled. Obama remains ashamed of Iraq and ostracizes it (even as it
so far remains the most stable of the new Arab consensual governments), and he
makes no distinction between the Muslim Brotherhood and secular democratic movements.
In other words, rather than encouraging those who thought the Arab Spring might
offer a pluralistic society, Obama stood back as Islamists, Khomeini-style,
took control, and he then ex post facto labeled them democrats, even though, as
in the case of Hamas and the Iranian theocrats, they favor one free election,
just one time.
3. Russian reset is mostly a failure. Embarrassing the
Czechs and the Poles over missile defense got us little. Putin has been no help
with Iran. An occasional peep about Russian human rights was unceremoniously
swatted down. Putin now assumes Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics
fall under his own Russian Monroe Doctrine. A new loose axis of Russia, China,
Iran, and North Korea threatens to create a nuclear buffer to U.S. interests.
4. Obama has snubbed our closest allies, so much so that
should the U.S. ever find itself again in need of a coalition, it is hard to
imagine who would join it. Canada got mostly ingratitude for its presence in
Afghanistan, and it is still furious over the Keystone Pipeline debacle. Our
once closest ally, Great Britain, recognizes that the United States is now
neutral on the Falklands (a.k.a. the Maldives), and that if Argentina were to
invade again, the U.S. would probably withhold help. Israel knows that the
U.S., at best neutral, votes present on the Middle East and does not much worry
that Israel may soon be surrounded by Islamist frontline states. Whether we
would fully supply Israel in its next war is legitimately in doubt. In contrast,
Turkey, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood, for the first time in history,
believe that America is more sympathetic to their causes than to Israel’s.
Anti-democratic Venezuela and Cuba, and their Latin American kindred Communist
states, also sense that the U.S. is a friend of such totalitarian movements — a
suspicion shared by the vanishing number of regional democrats.
5. President Obama was quiet when nearly 1 million
Iranian protesters hit the streets in the spring of 2009, almost as if he felt
his own multicultural bona fides should be given a chance to finesse the
Khomeinist theocracy — or as if the pro-democracy protesters were some sort of
inauthentic neocons. It was a shameful decision at a rare time when the Iranian
people were looking for pro-democracy affirmation — offering the last chance to
stop the Iranian bomb without some sort of military intervention.
6. The new emphasis on Asia is so far in utter confusion.
Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are less, not more, assured that a diffident U.S.
would come to their defense in case of an existential crisis. Are they still
under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, or is the umbrella itself shrinking fast?
Simultaneously borrowing from and lecturing China leads to the image of U.S.
impotence. The timing of looking eastward was terrible, as NATO sinks into
irrelevance at precisely the moment when an insolvent southern Europe is waging
a propaganda war against an ascendant Germany. As the euro zone unravels, a
strong U.S. presence in Europe is needed more than ever.
7. Despite the growing anti-democratic tendencies of the
Erdogan government in Turkey, Obama has structured his Middle East policy
around that government, unconcerned that its policy of insidious Islamization
is a model for slowly subverting what follows from elections.
8. The apologies, contextualizations, and bowing were
trivial gestures, but in aggregate they added to the sense of U.S. diffidence
and decline. As they became right-wing talking points, they also became rarer —
a reflection that Obama’s own advisers understood that the optics of his
one-worldism were becoming harmful to U.S. interests.
9. The addition of $5 trillion in national debt was
disastrous in terms of U.S. foreign policy. It lost us what leverage we had
over China. It destroyed any credibility in advising the European Union about
its own financial meltdown. It curtailed options in the Middle East. Massive
defense cuts loom. In this regard, the associated decisions not to open federal
lands to new oil and gas leasing, and to cancel Keystone, were also
strategically dense, given that an additional 2 to 3 million barrels of North
American production would have given us greater leeway in the Persian Gulf and
lessened our exposure to foreign creditors.
10. With a little deft diplomacy, Obama could have
salvaged a vestigial American presence to monitor the security of Iraqi
democracy and blunt Iranian subversion. The failure to attempt this was an
especially ironic lapse, given that the administration now wants to radically increase
U.S. troop levels in nearby monarchical Kuwait.
The key for the Romney campaign is not, in the manner of
the anti-Bush unthinking Left, to offer blanket condemnations, given that on
many aspects of the war on terror, Obama, to his credit, continued the
successful policies that he inherited. In contrast, there are plenty of
policies that are Obama’s own — and therefore quite dangerous.
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