By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Don't step over the line and re-militarize the Rhineland.
Absorbing Austria would cross a red line. Breaking up Czechoslovakia is
unacceptable. Get out of Poland by the announced deadline. The rest was
history.
Don't dare blow up another American military barracks
overseas. Don't ever consider another attack on the World Trade Center. Don't
even try blowing up one more American embassy in East Africa. Don't ever put a
hole in a U.S. warship again. The rest was history.
President Obama issued yet another one of those sorts of
warnings to stop the violence to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych just
before protestors drove him out of office. "There will be consequences if
people step over the line," Obama threatened.
Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser,
amplified that veiled warning. He called the Ukrainian government repression
"completely outrageous" -- as opposed to just outrageous or
completely, completely outrageous.
Secretary of State John Kerry joined the chorus of
condemnation by hinting at economic sanctions if Yanukovych didn't stop his
violent crackdown on protestors.
Why does this rhetorical assault sound familiar?
Over the last five years, Obama has issued serial
deadlines to Iran to cease and desist from its ongoing enrichment of uranium.
All the while, more Iranian centrifuges went online.
Later, Obama turned from deadlines to red lines. He
threatened Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with one about using chemical
weapons. "A red line for us," the president warned, "is we start
seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized."
Assad moved over that American red line, using chemical
weapons to gas his own people, and is now winning the war against the Syrian
insurgents. In the end, an embarrassed Obama was reduced to denying that he had
never issued a red line in the first place: "I didn't set a red line. The
world set a red line."
The administration's latest cry of "outrageous"
does not seem so absolute either. Remember, the president himself used that
exact adjective to condemn the IRS scandal when it was revealed that the tax
agency was inordinately focusing on conservative groups.
Later, after various key IRS officials had invoked the
Fifth Amendment, resigned or abruptly retired, Obama brushed off the scandal.
It was, he said, mostly a media event conjured up by "outraged"
journalists. Somehow, a scandal that the president once decried as
institutional abuse ended up as a media melodrama perpetrated by unduly
outraged reporters.
Will the Ukrainian mess now abate due to Kerry's hints at
sanctions?
Given Kerry's loud global-warming sermonizing and the
administration's serial threats, bad actors abroad probably believe that
burning too much coal is more likely to anger the U.S. than shooting protestors
or gassing enemies.
After the Obama administration finally assembled a
coalition of allies to impose tough sanctions against Iran, and after the trade
embargoes began to bite the theocracy, Obama, without warning his coalition,
abruptly relaxed those embargoes and entered into talks with the Iranians.
The message? Imposing sanctions is a difficult business.
When they finally work, they are likely to be abruptly lifted if the squeezed
nation sends out a few peace feelers and wants to feign appearing reasonable.
The U.S. has now shot so many rhetorical arrows that its
quiver of indignation is empty -- and the world's troublemakers may know it. An
administration that ignores almost all of its own Obamacare deadlines surely
cannot expect others to abide by any timetables it sets abroad.
There may be no viable solutions to the violence in Syria
or Ukraine. The messes in Egypt and Libya, the Chinese provocations to their
neighbors, the North Korean lunacy and the spiraling violence in Venezuela
certainly have no easy answers. But not knowing quite what to do is not the
same as knowing certainly what not to do.
Although the U.S. alone seems to honor its promised
deadlines of withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, the world's aggressors sense
that the Obama administration's bluster is predictably to be followed by more
bluster. Therefore, they have decided to risk aggrandizements while they can.
In the mind of Vladimir Putin, today Ukraine, tomorrow the Baltic States or
Eastern Europe. For the Iranian theocrats, if chemical WMD are OK in Syria, why
not nuclear WMD in Iran? For China, when Japan backs off, why shouldn't Taiwan,
South Korea or the Philippines?
Such a seemingly insignificant loss of deterrence is how
wars often start -- when an aggressive nation bets that loud words signal that
consequences will never follow. So it is emboldened to up the ante to try
something even riskier.
America's step-over line/deadline/red line outrage is
long past monotonous and empty -- and the result has been an ever scarier
world.
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