By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, March 19, 2016
Russia announces the withdrawal of its forces from Syria.
The decision is a surprise — President Obama is shocked. This is a feeling he
experiences often.
He was astonished when Vladimir Putin intervened in the
Syrian conflict in 2015. He was startled when ISIS conquered a fair portion of
Mesopotamia in 2014. He was jarred when Putin invaded Crimea, and launched a
proxy war in eastern Ukraine that same year. Rogue states pursue policies
contrary to what Obama the Wise sees as their self-interest, and the
presidential response never varies. He is stunned. He is saddened. He is filled
with sangfroid.
Bewilderment happens when reality dispels illusions. I
used to think President Obama’s illusions were simply the product of his
ideology, of his faith in the universality of human reason, in the idea of
historical progress, of his ambivalence toward American power. But after
reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s epic, absorbing, revealing interview with the
president in The Atlantic, I have
come to a different conclusion. It’s not just ideology that drives Obama’s
cluelessness. It’s narcissism.
If there is a theme to Goldberg’s article, it is this:
Barack Obama knows better. He knows better than the “foreign-policy
establishment” that his team snidely dismisses as controlled by Jewish and Arab
money. He knows better than the elected leaders of Great Britain, France, and
Israel, and the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, of whom he is so
contemptuous. (Angela Merkel of Germany, Goldberg reports, is “one of the few
foreign leaders Obama respects.”) And he knows better than his critics, whose
arguments he pores over in obsessive detail, coming up with explanations,
rebuttals, and straw men to dismiss them.
Why does Obama know better? Not out of any intense study
of or reflection on diplomatic and world history and international-relations
theory. Not because he served in the military or in the diplomatic corps or
held senior posts in government prior to election as president. What graces
Obama with superior insight and prudence is the simple fact of his own
existence. He is his own proof of his superiority.
Goldberg tells us about one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s
visits to the States. “The Israeli prime minister launched into something of a
lecture about the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives, and Obama
felt that Netanyahu was behaving in a condescending fashion, and was also
avoiding the subject at hand: peace negotiations.” So Obama interrupted him.
“Bibi, you have to understand something,” Obama said.
“I’m the African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this
house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the
United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I
do.”
Now, Barack Obama is a tremendously accomplished man. He
is clearly very intelligent and well read, he graduated from Columbia and
Harvard, he is the author of two highly praised books and will no doubt write
many more in the years to come, he went from nothing to president of the United
States in less than a decade, he has outfoxed his Republican opponents at
nearly every turn. But his reply to Netanyahu is a colossal non sequitur, a
category error of enormous proportions. It makes absolutely no sense.
In what mental universe other than the president’s does
being raised in Hawaii and Indonesia and spending adulthood rising through the
academy and U.S. political institutions grant someone a deep (or even
superficial!) understanding of Zionism, of the Holocaust, of four wars for
survival over 25 years, of unending terrorist violence directed toward
civilians, of hijackings and kidnappings and bombings and stabbings, of SCUD
attacks from Iraq, rockets from Lebanon and Gaza, incitement and
de-legitimization campaigns from Tehran? Conversely, what in President Obama’s
life story leads him to comprehend the Palestinians, addicted to enmity and
resentment and violence, victims of institutional collapse and official
corruption, awash and adrift in the worst movements of the last 100 years, from
nationalism to socialism to pan-Arabism to Islamic fundamentalism?
Note the reverse snobbery when Obama tells Netanyahu, “You think I don’t understand what you’re
talking about, but I do.” (My emphasis.) Maybe the elected leader of an
American ally was doing nothing more than trying to explain his view of his
region and the source of his reluctance to comply with the president’s demands.
Or does Obama actually believe that buried in every disagreement with him is an
assumption of his inferiority, disrespect for his heritage and upbringing? If
that were the case, then it would be next to impossible to challenge his
authority. One would be acting always in bad faith. Which is exactly what he so
often accuses his opponents of doing.
This idea of Barack Obama’s existential power, this
notion that his very being is what gives him empathy with and moral authority
over the world, has gripped the president and his supporters from the
beginning. “What does he offer?” asked Andrew Sullivan in December 2007. “First
and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential rebranding
of the United States since Reagan.” His international background, son of a
Kenyan and a Kansan, who spent time in Indonesia and Pakistan, is why Obama
declared himself a “citizen of the world” in his 2008 Berlin speech. And his
personal familiarity with Islam inspired him to deliver the Cairo speech in
2009, when, as Goldberg puts it, “he spoke about Muslims in his own family, and
his childhood years in Indonesia, and confessed America’s sins even as he
criticized those in the Muslim world who demonized the U.S.”
Seven years later, the Greater Middle East that Obama
sought to reshape by his mere appearance and oratory is a dumpster fire. State
collapse, sectarian war, slavery, crucifixion, beheadings, chemical warfare,
genocide characterize the region. The foreign leader who has most consistently
outwitted him, Vladimir Putin, enjoys free rein in Eastern Europe and Syria.
And the region of the world to which Obama hoped to “pivot” — here too for
partly biographical reasons — is engulfed in a deepening territorial dispute
between China and the nations it bullies.
Confidence is one thing. But Obama is more than
confident. He’s narcissistic. He looks at the world and sees nothing but his
reflection: rational, cool, unmoved, and always right. When reality surprises
him, it’s not because he’s in error. It’s because Putin or Assad or the mullahs
have failed to live up to the standards he’s set for them. Forget about them
being true to themselves. They’re not being true to Barack Obama. And Barack
Obama, lest we forget, is all that matters.
No comments:
Post a Comment