By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Barack Obama had a foreign policy for about five years,
and now he has none.
The first-term foreign policy’s assumptions went
something like this. Obama was to assure the world that he was not George W.
Bush. Whatever the latter was for, Obama was mostly against. Given that Bush
had left office with polls similar to Harry Truman’s final numbers, this seemed
to Obama a wise political approach.
If Bush wanted garrison troops left in Iraq to secure the
victory of the surge, Obama would pull them out. If Bush had opened Guantanamo,
used drones, relied on renditions, reestablished military tribunals, and
approved preventive detention, Obama would profess to dismantle that war on
terror — even to the point where the Bush-era use of the word “terrorism” and
any associations between it and radical Islam would disappear.
If Bush had contemplated establishing an anti-missile
system in concert with the Poles and Czechs, then it must have been unwise and
unnecessary. If Bush had unabashedly supported Israel and become estranged from
Turkey, Obama would predictably reverse both courses.
Second, policy per se would be secondary to Obama’s
personal narrative and iconic status. Obama, by virtue of his nontraditional
name, his mixed-race ancestry, and his unmistakably leftist politics, would win
over America’s critics to the point where most disagreements — themselves
largely provoked by prior traditional and blinkered administrations — would
dissipate. Rhetoric and symbolism would trump Obama’s complete absence of
foreign-policy experience.
Many apparently shared Obama’s view that disagreements
abroad were not so much over substantive issues as they were caused by race,
class, or gender fissures, or were the fallout from the prior insensitivity of
Europe and the United States — as evidenced by a Nobel Prize awarded to Obama
on the basis of his stated good intentions.
Third, Obama had a clever recipe for concocting a new
disengagement. He would mesh the increasing American weariness with
intervention abroad and fears over a shaky economy with his own worldview about
the dubious past role of the United States. The result might be that both
libertarians and liberals, for differing reasons, would agree that we should
stay out of problems abroad, that a struggling lower class and middle class
would agree that money spent overseas was money that could be better spent at
home, and that critiques of America’s past would seem not so much effusions
of leftist ideology as practical reasons
why the United States should disengage abroad.
Finally, to the degree that any problems still persisted,
Obama could either contextualize them (given his legal training and
community-organizing experience), or talk loudly and threaten. For example, by
referencing past American sins, by an occasional ceremonial bow or apology, by
a bit of psychoanalysis about “macho shtick” or the schoolboy Putin cutting up
in the back of the room, an exalted Obama would show the world that he
understood anti-social behavior and could ameliorate it as a counselor does
with his emotional client. The world in turn would appreciate his patience and
understanding with lesser folk, and react accordingly. Again, in place of
policy would be the towering personality of Barack Obama. And if all that did
not work, a peeved Obama could issue deadlines, red lines, and step-over lines
to aggressors — and reissue them when they were ignored.
Note what was not so integral to the Obama foreign
policy. There was little sense of history and geography that might explain why
crises transcend personalities. There was scant awareness that sometimes states
act selfishly and immaturely. And just as individuals do, nations can interpret
magnanimity as weakness to be exploited rather than as beneficence to be
appreciated.
There was little appreciation of the postwar system
created by the United States over the last 70 years, which had created vast
global wealth and security, primarily because of the unique role of the United
States in suppressing local and regional challenges to the international order.
Obama had little apparent awareness that the U.S. picked friends and enemies
not on the shallow basis that the former were wholly good and the latter
abjectly evil, but rather on the basis that in an imperfect world some nations
shared some of our ideas about politics, the market, and the need for an international
system, and others did not, to the point of using violence.
And so we got “reset” with Russia, following on the idea
that Bush had unduly alienated Putin, that Putin would appreciate that Obama
marked a new frontier in the American presidency, and that Russia could see
Obama was empathizing with Putin’s post–Cold War dilemmas. Who cared that
reset, in fact, was negating a reasonable response to Putin’s aggression in
Georgia, or that Russian territorial aims historically transcended ideology, or
that Russia had not always played a positive role in the postwar order?
In the Middle East, Obama felt that reach-outs and
Cairo-style oratory would assure the Islamic world that he would never
intervene in its affairs. Obama supposedly understood historic Middle East
grievances, and his own personal story was proof of that insight. Again, Obama
did not so much reject prior American policy as not really understand it in the
first place: appreciation of Israel’s unique democracy and pro-American
sentiment, assurance that Iran must not go nuclear, advocacy for gradual
liberalization to avoid the false choices between dictatorship and Islamism,
resistance to new Chinese and old Russian expansionism in the Middle East, and
protection of the sometimes odious but nonetheless stable Persian Gulf
sheikhdoms that so much of the world depended upon to export oil.
The Middle East is now in chaos after the Cairo-like
speeches, the pressures on Israel, the red lines in Syria, the on-again,
off-again sanctions on Iran, the lead-from-behind bombing of Libya and
subsequent Benghazi chaos, the flipping and flopping over Egypt, and the
alienation of the monarchical Persian Gulf allies. The one constant is not so
much doubt about American intent as it is agreement that the U.S. does not know
what it is doing, and that there is not much reason to care even if it did know
what it was doing.
Obama seemed likewise ignorant of our postwar position in
the Pacific, namely that successful nations like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea,
Australia, and perhaps the Philippines depended on ironclad guarantees of
security so that they did not need to go nuclear in order to protect themselves
again historical Chinese and Russian expansionism, or North Korean nuclear
lunacy.
Obama failed to grasp that our Pacific allies were very
much interested in continuity with past American policy and little interested
if at all in Obama’s iconic status, his rhetorical sermonizing, or his
half-baked tutorials about past American lapses. They did not wish to hear that
Obama understood China’s dilemma about translating economic power into military
influence or squaring the circle of capitalism and Communist autocracy. They
only wanted to be reassured that China would not disrupt the landscape of the
last 60 years, in which they had reached a level of freedom and affluence
unrivaled in their histories.
In a word, Barack Obama did not understand that the
world’s challenges preceded George W. Bush and would outlive Barack Obama, much
less that he was a steward charged with preserving the U.S.-inspired postwar
stability. He failed to see that much of the anger with Bush had been over Iraq
between 2004 and 2008. To the degree the U.S. was unpopular, this resulted
largely from entrenched critics abroad amplifying American domestic opposition
to the Iraq War and to the so-called war on terror. Yet by 2009, the Iraq War
was largely over and won, and the war on terror had largely established
protocols to prevent another 9/11-scale attack. In most other regards, Bush had
simply carried on a bipartisan foreign policy not much different from that of
Bill Clinton, Bush’s father, or Ronald Reagan.
Obama did not grasp that being against Bush meant for the
most part opposing that bipartisan foreign policy of the previous 30 years — with
regard to Venezuela and Cuba, to the Middle East, and to Russia, China, and
India. Such knee-jerk opposition inevitably caused embarrassment when Obama was
forced to quietly accept or even expand Bush’s war on terror, and to assure
Asia and Europe that things were still as they had been before he took office.
Sometime in late 2013 Barack Obama seemed to sense that his foreign policy had
failed, and that in almost every area of the globe things were more dangerous
than when he entered office — and scarier because of his own initiatives.
And what now? Blaming Bush had a shelf life of four
years, proved nihilistic, and can’t be continued for the next three. No one
abroad cares that Obama is either leftwing or the first African-American
president or that he speaks well from a teleprompter. Hope and change have
become a sort of embarrassment. Another Cairo speech would earn guffaws. More
loud reaching out to Turkey, Cuba, and Venezuela would earn eye-rolling. China
has heard it all before. Iran is calibrating how to time its nuclear acquisition
with the ending of Obama’s second term. Israel is politely tuning out. Putin is
wondering: Can all these gifts be for real, or might there still be some
elaborate ruse?
But mostly, our enemies now are ready to test us, and our
friends will soon consider distancing themselves from us. So much so that even
Obama’s occasional wise initiatives, like a trade deal with Japan, will go
nowhere, given that there is no upside in supporting America, and no downside
in opposing it.
We had a bad foreign policy and now we have no foreign
policy — and sadly, we can only hope that is an improvement.
No comments:
Post a Comment