By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, May 28, 2015
For a time, reset, concessions, and appeasement work to
delay wars. But finally, nations wake up, grasp their blunders, rearm, and face
down enemies.
That gets dangerous. The shocked aggressors cannot quite
believe that their targets are suddenly serious and willing to punch back.
Usually, the bullies foolishly press aggression, and war breaks out.
It was insane of Nazi Germany and its Axis partners to
even imagine that they could defeat the Allied trio of Imperial Britain, the
Soviet Union, and the United States.
But why not try?
Hitler figured that for a decade America had been unarmed
and isolationist. Britain repeatedly had appeased the Third Reich. The Soviets
initially collaborated with Hitler.
Hitler met no opposition after militarizing the
Rhineland. He annexed Austria with impunity. He gobbled up Czechoslovakia
without opposition.
Why shouldn’t Hitler have been stunned in 1939 when
exasperated Britain and France finally declared war over his invasion of
distant Poland?
Six years of war and some 60 million dead followed, re-establishing
what should have been the obvious fact that democracies would not quite commit
suicide.
By 1979, the Jimmy Carter administration had drastically
cut the defense budget. Carter promised that he would make human rights govern
American foreign policy. It sounded great to Americans after Vietnam — and even
greater to America’s enemies.
Then Iran imploded. The American embassy in Tehran was
stormed. Diplomats were taken hostage. Radical Islamic terrorism spread
throughout the Middle East. Communist insurrection followed throughout Central
America. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. China went into Vietnam.
Dictators such as the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev and
Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini assumed that Carter no longer was willing to protect
the U.S. postwar order. Or perhaps they figured that the inexperienced American
president was too weak to respond even had he wished to do so.
Then, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in 1980 on the
promise of restoring U.S. power. At first, both America’s friends and enemies
were aghast at Reagan’s simplistic worldview that free markets were better than
Communism, that democracy was superior to dictatorship, and that in the
ensuring struggle, the West would win and the rest would lose.
Foreign media damned Reagan as a warmonger for beefing up
the U.S. defense budget, reassuring America’s allies and going after terrorists
with military force.
From 1981 to 1983, Reagan was caricatured even at home as
a cowboy — not the statesman later to be known for restoring U.S. prestige and
global stability, and for helping to bring down Soviet imperial Communism.
Barack Obama, like Carter, came into office promising a
sharp break from past U.S foreign policy. The public was receptive after the
costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the recent financial meltdown on Wall
Street.
Troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan on pre-announced
deadlines. The post-surge quiet in Iraq fooled Obama into eagerly yanking out
all U.S. peacekeepers.
A new outreach to radical Islam went to ridiculous
lengths. The Muslim Brotherhood was invited to Obama’s speech in Cairo that
claimed the West owed cultural debts to Islam for everything from the
Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
Terms like radical Islam, jihad, and Islamic terror were
excised from the official American vocabulary and replaced by a host of silly
euphemisms.
In symbolic tours, Obama offered apologies for past
American behavior in the Middle East and Asia. He bowed to both theocratic
sheiks and the Asian monarchs.
The defense budget was cut. Reset with Vladimir Putin’s
Russia assumed that the Bush administration, not Putin’s prior aggression in
Georgia and threats to Crimea, had caused the estrangement between Moscow and
Washington.
Predictable chaos followed as the U.S. became an observer
abroad. The Islamic State appeared to fill the vacuum in Iraq. Syria imploded.
So did most of North Africa. Iran sent agents, surrogates, and special forces
into Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, even as it pressed on to get a bomb.
China stepped up its violations of the waters and
airspace of America’s traditional Asian allies. Putin did the same in Eastern
and Northern Europe.
By 2015, America’s enemies had created chaos and defined
it as the new normal.
The next president will face a terrible dilemma. To
restore order, he or she will have to convince our allies that we are recommitted
to their security.
Any red lines issued will have to be enforced. Aggressors
such as Russia, China, Iran, and the Islamic State will have to be warned to
cease and desist or face pushback from far stronger U.S.-led coalitions. Just
as Reagan’s return to normal U.S. foreign policy was considered radical after
the Carter years, so too the next administration will be smeared as dangerously
provocative after Obama’s recession from the world stage.
The Obama foreign policy cannot continue much longer without
provoking even more chaos or a large war. Yet correcting it will be nearly as
dangerous.
Jumping off the global tiger is dangerous, but climbing
back on will seem riskier.
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