By Victor Davis Hanson
Monday, January 21, 2013
John Brennan, Chuck Hagel, and John Kerry will be
confirmed. The three will provide a force-multiplying effect on the Obama
foreign policy of disengagement. The chameleon Brennan will be very different
from David Petraeus at the CIA; Hagel is no circumspect Leon Panetta; and there
was a reason why the appointment of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state was
greeted with praise in a way John Kerry’s will not be. The trio is less
competent than their predecessors, but also perhaps more representative of a country
on its way to a $20 trillion national debt and a “lead from behind” foreign
policy of managed decline.
Let us take stock of the world since 2008. Reset with
Russia was an abject failure; and relations with Vladimir Putin have never been
frostier — and pettier, as even the U.S. adoption of Russian orphans has now
ended. Nothing is more counterproductive than to lecture a proud rival nation
from a position of looming financial and military weakness.
China remains China: an enigma, as liberals wait for its
new wealth to translate into political reform, while conservatives expect
instead that Chinese profits will more likely lead to a powerful authoritarian
military eager to challenge America. The more Obama talks of global arms
reduction and a nuclear-free world, coupled with a lower U.S. profile, the more
likely South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan will be to make contingency plans to go
nuclear.
Not since the end of World War II has the Mediterranean
world been such a mess. On the northern shore, the insolvent Spain, Italy, and
Greece threaten to bring down the entire European Union. None of the three can
continue to borrow as before, nor apparently can they cut back enough to remain
solvent. None has a military to speak of — in a neighborhood increasingly dangerous.
To the east, Syria is on its way to becoming Somalia —
but a quagmire much closer to Europe. The West goes back and forth, sometimes
fearful that the thug Assad won’t go, sometimes worried that what would replace
him would be far worse. Likewise, Mohamed Morsi’s new Egypt is now a mix of
Iran and Haiti, a theocracy ruling over a wrecked economy, a nonexistent
tourist industry, and a massive flight of capital and expertise. In a year,
Morsi may pull off the impossible feat of making Hosni Mubarak look good. Why
we continue to give sophisticated weaponry to this fascistic, anti-Semitic
ex-professor from southern California remains unexplained. Turkey is an Obama
favorite; but why is not quite clear, as it clamps down on internal dissent,
becomes increasingly Islamist in the imperial-Ottoman sense, and grows as
hostile to Israel as it was once friendly.
Leading from behind turned Libya from an odious but
secure dictatorship into a chaotic terrorist haven. Hostage executions now
characterize Algeria. The understandable intervention by the French in Mali to
stop an Islamic takeover is nonetheless the sort of unilateral
“neo-colonialist” operation that they used to smear Americans for — a fact that
is mostly ignored by American liberals and seen with Schadenfreude by
conservatives. Obama has forged an odd domestic coalition that supports his
deliberate diminution of American power abroad: liberals who like the savings
abroad in order to splurge at home and who resent the use of raw power;
conservatives who are in no mood to support intervention given the demagoguery
they suffered over the war on terror and Iraq. The result is that nothingness
has become the new Obama foreign policy.
Relations with Israel have reached an all-time low, but
will further descend with the ascent of John Brennan at the CIA and Chuck Hagel
at Defense. Both will let Obama at last be Obama, and he, by admission, alone
knows what is in Israel’s best interests. The Iranian nuclear weapon is a
matter of when, not if; the only mystery is how clever will be the
foreign-policy establishment’s post-facto rationalizations about how Iran can
be contained. But if a nuclear Iran is supposed to be managed like nuclear Pakistan,
what neighbor will play the role of India to keep it in check?
After all that, no wonder the Obama administration is now
“pivoting” toward Asia. Let us hope that the Sea of Japan does not turn into
another Mediterranean. In any case, new American oil and gas drilling on
private land, Obama’s own personal story, his thinly disguised distaste for
European traditions, and the demographic reality in the U.S. of a relatively
smaller European-American population make the changes easier to take for a people
exhausted by European ankle-biting, Islamic terrorism, corrupt oil intrigue,
and the one-election, one-time “Arab Spring.” Goodbye, Mediterranean.
Our war on terror is now reduced to euphemisms and
symbols about moderate Islam — masking a deadly escalation in targeted
assassinations via drones. That paradox is quite sustainable because the
American progressive media decided that waterboarding three confessed
terrorists for information about future terrorist plots was an intolerable
crime, whereas rendering 3,000 suspected terrorists mute through
remote-controlled Hellfire missiles is not. Because we no longer have a truly
honest and independent press, the limits of tolerance for U.S. mishaps have
expanded as never before. Losing an ambassador and three other Americans in
Benghazi, with no real idea of why they were so vulnerable or, indeed, why they
were all there in the first place, is a curious artifact, not a scandal.
Al-Qaeda was declared on the run by the Obama administration — an ironic truth,
because it is metastasizing in new directions, to Algeria, Libya, Mali, Syria,
Somalia, and Yemen, even as we declare jihadism to be a personal journey.
The George McClellan–like plan for leaving Iraq and
Afghanistan on strict timetables, after much lost American blood and treasure,
perhaps will bring a sense of release to Americans who are tired of both those
ungrateful places. Yet soon some disturbing videos of what our abdications
wrought — reminiscent of Saigon in 1975 or Kurdistan in 1991 — may usher in as
much moral embarrassment for us as joy for our enemies.
Looming behind these changes in U.S. foreign policy is
the reality of borrowing nearly $6 trillion in four years, with another $4
trillion scheduled in the Obama second term. That massive indebtedness — known
as “investments” or “stimulus” — will weaken U.S. influence and eventually
ensure huge defense cuts in the manner of the 1990s. As it is now, behind
almost every current American foreign initiative is the reality that 40 cents
on the dollar are borrowed to pay for it — a fact well appreciated by our
opportunistic enemies in waiting.
As the U.S. slowly withdraws, in the manner of the
British before and after World War II, all the old hot spots that have receded
in our memory — Cyprus, the Aegean between Greece and Turkey, the Falklands,
the 38th Parallel, the Persian Gulf, contested islands off Japan — will become
news again. If Afghanistan does not return to its pre-9/11 status as a
terrorist haven, then Somalia, Sudan, or Yemen will have to do.
In short, interested parties rightly assume the U.S.
cannot or will not intervene abroad. They envision making opportune territorial
adjustments during this remaining four-year window of opportunity — just as
China invaded Vietnam, Russia went into Afghanistan, Communists infiltrated
Central America, and Islamists stormed our embassy in Tehran in the waning
years of the Carter administration.
Will the world lament the consequences of a U.S. retreat?
Not likely.
A theme of Western philosophy from Plato to Tocqueville
has been the people’s preference for equality, rather than greater freedom and
prosperity with the attendant cost of inequality. The idea of an America more
or less the same as other countries — imperiled by debt, class tensions, and
festering social problems, and without a global footprint — will be welcome
news to most of the world, even as their own neighborhoods become much poorer
and more dangerous places.
Indeed, the worse the U.S. performs, and the lower the
American profile abroad, the more the world likes Barack Obama — almost as if
to say, “At last, they’re just like us.”
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