By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, January 07, 2016
Changes of administrations usually mark dicey times in
American foreign policy. But transitional hazards will never be greater than in
2016.
Over a span of just a few months in mid 1945, new
president Harry Truman lost all trust in Soviet Union strongman Josef Stalin —
in a way that Truman’s predecessor, the ailing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, never
had during nearly four years of World War II.
Ensuing American foreign policy jerked from a pragmatic
Lend-Lease alliance with a duplicitous Communist superpower to a tense Cold
War.
President John F. Kennedy was young, idealistic, cocky —
and without the military reputation of his predecessor, the much more
experienced former general Dwight D. Eisenhower. Soon after JFK’s inauguration
in 1961, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev predictably began testing Kennedy’s
mettle as commander-in-chief, from Berlin to Cuba.
Kennedy’s eventual restoration of American deterrence
during the Cuban blockade marked the scariest phase in Cold War history.
By 1980, as lame duck Jimmy Carter neared the end of his
first and only term, the Russians had sought to absorb Afghanistan. Communist
insurrections kept spreading in Central America. China went into Vietnam. The
new theocracy in Iran still held American diplomats and employees hostages.
Most aggressors had logically accelerated their
risk-taking before the newly elected, mostly unknown (but volatile-sounding)
Ronald Reagan took office in 1981.
Or, in their hubris, might they ramp up their
belligerence one last time before the arrival of a new president who will more
likely be supportive of the U.S.-led postwar order?
China, with impunity, has fortified seven newly created
artificial islands located in the hotly disputed Spratlys archipelago, a
strategic pathway positioned in the heart of the South China Sea. Has China now
set a precedent that any nation can build artificial but sovereign islands in
the Pacific, replete with automatic territorial claims to surrounding waters?
If so, will Iran or Russia in 2016 create new islands out
of thin air in the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, or the Atlantic? Or will
the next president have to warn the Chinese that no nation can in godlike
fashion birth permanent fortified islands in the middle of international sea
lanes?
Will Beijing seek to push the envelope even more in 2016,
fearful that the next president in 2017 — whether Hillary Clinton or a
Republican — could be more like Truman or Reagan than Carter or Barack Obama?
Russian president Vladimir Putin has come to expect that
his border aggressions do not risk much Western pushback. Will Putin continue
to take risks after the departure of Obama, who would rather lecture the
Russian leader than stop Russian aggression, more worried about keeping intact
his legacy as a Nobel Peace Prize winner than preserving post–Cold War borders?
The Islamic State is only about two years old, but it
already has already carved out huge swaths from Syria and Iraq in its dreams of
a new Islamic caliphate that will remake the entire Middle East. So far,
Western responses have been anemic.
But can the Islamic State afford to gamble that under the
next president, 75 percent of U.S. combat missions against ISIS will return to
their base without firing a shot or dropping their bombs, as has been the case
under the Obama administration? Prepare for stepped-up Islamic State offensives
during a last-chance year of the Obama presidency.
Over the last seven years, the world has become
acclimatized to the lead-from-behind role of the United States. Under Obama,
friends and enemies bet that America was conflicted about the wisdom and
morality of the entire American-led postwar global enterprise and reacted
accordingly.
But — who knows? — the next American president might
identify radical Islam as the catalyst for terrorism directed at the West.
Cuba in 2017 might no longer be seen as a newfound friend
but as an old-time violator of human rights.
Next year, will the Islamic State still be seen as a
“jayvee” organization, or as an existential danger to the U.S. homeland?
In all of these cases, uncertainty rather than assured
continuity in present U.S. foreign policy is likely — largely because the
stubborn and tone-deaf Obama administration has lost the support of the
American public on almost all of its foreign-policy initiatives, from signing
the Iran pact, to dealing with terrorism, to handling China and Russia.
Unfortunately, the predictable corrections under a new
president in 2017 will make 2016 more dangerous than any year since 1980.
No comments:
Post a Comment