This
is the most important article I and a number of my friends have read
assessing the position of the US in our world. It is long but it is
worth reading every word. Do yourself a favor and find a quiet place to
read it.
"Then again, every president confronts his share of apparently intractable dilemmas. The test of a successful presidency is whether it can avoid being trapped and defined by them. Did Obama inherit anything worse than what Franklin Roosevelt got from Herbert Hoover (the Great Depression) or Richard Nixon from Lyndon Johnson (the war in Vietnam and the social meltdown of the late ’60s) or Ronald Reagan from Jimmy Carter (stagflation, the ayatollahs, the Soviet Union on the march)?
I first want to bring down the intro by my insightful friend, Roger Gerber:
"Then again, every president confronts his share of apparently intractable dilemmas. The test of a successful presidency is whether it can avoid being trapped and defined by them. Did Obama inherit anything worse than what Franklin Roosevelt got from Herbert Hoover (the Great Depression) or Richard Nixon from Lyndon Johnson (the war in Vietnam and the social meltdown of the late ’60s) or Ronald Reagan from Jimmy Carter (stagflation, the ayatollahs, the Soviet Union on the march)?
Then
again, the next American president might not have options of the sort
that Obama enjoyed when he took office in 2009. By 2017, the U.S.
military will be an increasingly hollow force, with the Army as small as
it was in 1940, before conscription; a Navy the size it was in 1917,
before our entry into World War I; an Air Force flying the oldest—and
smallest—fleet of planes in its history; and a nuclear arsenal no larger
than it was during the Truman administration."
I first want to bring down the intro by my insightful friend, Roger Gerber:
A
prior note cited Mark Durie's reference to the West's "theological
illiteracy" of Islam; and our outgoing Defense Intelligence Chief,
General Flynn, recently warned - referring to the Islamists - that
""These are people who have a very deeply rooted belief system that is
just difficult for Americans to comprehend". Unfortunately, in the wake
of the barbaric beheading by the "Islamic State" of American reporter
Jim Foley, the remarks of our national leaders evidenced precisely the
lack of comprehension to which Durie referred and of which Gen. Flynn
warned. Pres. Obama, in expressing his outrage at the beheading,
stated: "ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly
Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents.” This is
truly risible since, in the words of Robert Spencer, "Islamic law
mandates death for heretics and apostates, and that is what the Islamic
State jihadis consider their Muslim victims to be." Our Secretary of
State averred that "ISIL is...an ugly insult to the peaceful religion
they violate every day with their barbarity." Again, we are fed the
anodyne bromide that Islam is a "peaceful religion" as though its
traditional mainstream doctrine did not mandate a choice of conversion
or death to those who do not fall within the rubric of "people of the
book"; the latter are granted the "privilege" of avoiding death by
submission through payment of Jizya and adhering to the numerous Muslim
dictates applicable to dhimmis. The following article addresses the
Middle East indirectly; it is focused primarily on foreign policy
generally and it is distributed to the Middle East list because it does
contextualize U.S. Mideast policy and address the role of the United
States in confronting the major issues affecting the Mideast.
The Meltdown
By Bret Stephens - August 19, 2014
In
July, after Germany trounced Brazil 7–1 in the semifinal match of the
World Cup—including a first-half stretch in which the Brazilian soccer
squad gave up an astonishing five goals in 19 minutes—a sports
commentator wrote: “This was not a team losing. It was a dream dying.”
These words could equally describe what has become of Barack Obama’s
foreign policy since his second inauguration. The president, according
to the infatuated view of his political aides and media flatterers, was
supposed to be playing o jogo bonito, the beautiful game—ending wars, pressing resets, pursuing pivots, and restoring America’s good name abroad.
Instead, he crumbled.
As
I write, the foreign policy of the United States is in a state of
unprecedented disarray. In some cases, failed policy has given way to an
absence of policy. So it is in Libya, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and, at least
until recently, Ukraine. In other cases the president has doubled down
on failed policy—extending nuclear negotiations with Iran; announcing
the full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
Sometimes
the administration has been the victim of events, such as Edward
Snowden’s espionage, it made worse through bureaucratic fumbling and
feckless administrative fixes. At other times the wounds have been
self-inflicted: the espionage scandal in Germany (when it was learned
that the United States had continued to spy on our ally despite prior
revelations of the NSA’s eavesdropping on Chancellor Angela Merkel); the
repeated declaration that “core al-Qaeda” was “on a path to defeat”;
the prisoner swap with the Taliban that obtained Sergeant Bowe
Bergdahl’s release.
Often
the damage has been vivid, as in the collapse of the Israel–Palestinian
talks in April followed by the war in Gaza. More frequently it can be
heard in the whispered remarks of our allies. “The Polish-American
alliance is worthless, even harmful, as it gives Poland a false sense of
security,” Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister and once one of
its most reliably pro-American politicians, was overheard saying in
June. “It’s bullshit.”
This
is far from an exhaustive list. But it’s one that, at last, people have
begun to notice. Foreign policy, considered a political strength of the
president in his first term, has become a liability. In June, an NBC/Wall Street Journal
poll found that Americans disapproved of his handling of foreign
affairs by a 57-to-37 percent ratio. Overseas, dismay with Obama mounts.
Among Germans, who greeted the future president as a near-messiah when
he spoke in Berlin in the summer of 2008, his approval rating fell to 43
percent in late 2013, from 88 percent in 2010. In Egypt, another
country the president went out of his way to woo, he has accomplished
the unlikely feat of making himself more unpopular than George W. Bush.
In Israel, political leaders and commentators from across the political
spectrum are united in their disdain for the administration. “The Obama
administration proved once again that it is the best friend of its
enemies, and the biggest enemy of its friends,” the center-left Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit noted in late July. It’s an observation being echoed by policymakers from Tokyo to Taipei to Tallinn.
But
perhaps the most telling indicator is the collapsing confidence in the
president among the Democratic-leaning foreign-policy elite in the
United States. “Under Obama, the United States has suffered some real
reputational damage,” admitted Washington Post columnist David
Ignatius in May, adding: “I say this as someone who sympathizes with
many of Obama’s foreign-policy goals.” Hillary Clinton, the president’s
once loyal secretary of state, offered in early August that “great
nations need organizing principles, and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not
an organizing principle.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s
national-security adviser, warned in July that “we are losing control of
our ability at the highest levels of dealing with challenges that,
increasingly, many of us recognize as fundamental to our well-being.”
The United States, he added, was “increasingly devoid of strategic will
and a sense of direction.”
And there was this: “What kind of figure will Obama cut at Omaha?” Roger Cohen, the reliably liberal New York Times
columnist, wondered on the eve of the 70th D-Day commemoration at Omaha
Beach in June. “I wish I could say he will cut a convincing figure.”
But, he continued:
Obama at bloody Omaha, in the sixth year of his presidency, falls short at a time when his aides have been defining the cornerstone of his foreign policy as: “Don’t do stupid stuff.”… He falls short at a time when Syria bleeds more than three years into the uprising… Obama falls short at a time when Vladimir Putin, emboldened by that Syrian retreat and the perception of American weakness, has annexed Crimea… Obama falls short as Putin’s Russian surrogates in eastern Ukraine wreak havoc… He falls short, also, when the Egyptian dreams of liberty and pluralism that arose in Tahrir square have given way to the landslide victory of a former general in an “election” only a little less grotesque than Assad’s in Syria.
Are
we all neoconservatives again? Not quite—or at least not yet. Even as
the evidence of the failure of Obama’s foreign policy abounds, the
causes of that failure remain in dispute. Has the world simply become an
impossibly complex place, beyond the reach of any American president to
shape or master? Is the problem the president himself, a man who seems
to have lost interest in the responsibilities (though not yet the
perquisites) of his office? Or are we witnessing the consequences of
foreign-policy progressivism, the worldview Obama brought with him to
the White House and that he has, for the most part, consistently and
even conscientiously championed? Not surprisingly, many of the president’s supporters are attracted to the first explanation.
In
this reading, the U.S. no longer enjoys its previous geopolitical
advantages over militarily dependent and diplomatically pliant allies,
or against inherently weaker and relatively predictable adversaries. On
the contrary, our economic supremacy is fading and we may be in
long-term decline. Our adversaries are increasingly able to confront us
asymmetrically, imposing high costs on us without incurring significant
costs for themselves. Limited budgetary resources require us to make
“hard choices” about the balance between international and domestic
priorities. What’s more, the sour experiences of Iraq and
Afghanistan—another bad Bush legacy—limit Obama’s options, because
Americans have made it plain that they are in no mood to intervene in
places such as Syria or over conflicts such as the one in Ukraine. As
the president told an interviewer in 2013,“I am more mindful probably
than most of not only our incredible strengths and capabilities but also
our limitations.”
It
would be wrong to dismiss this argument out of hand. Can Obama fairly
be blamed for the quarter-century of misgovernance in Kiev that created
conditions in which Russian separatists in Crimea and Donetsk would
flourish? Was there anything he could realistically have done to prevent
Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, or to steer Egyptian politics in the tumultuous
years that followed? Is it his fault that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki pursued vendettas against Iraq’s Sunni leaders, creating the
political conditions for al-Qaeda’s resurgence, or that Hamid Karzai has
proved to be such a disappointing leader for Afghanistan? If the price
of better relations with Pakistan was ending the program of drone
strikes, was that a price worth paying?
Then
again, every president confronts his share of apparently intractable
dilemmas. The test of a successful presidency is whether it can avoid
being trapped and defined by them. Did Obama inherit anything worse than
what Franklin Roosevelt got from Herbert Hoover (the Great Depression)
or Richard Nixon from Lyndon Johnson (the war in Vietnam and the social
meltdown of the late ’60s) or Ronald Reagan from Jimmy Carter
(stagflation, the ayatollahs, the Soviet Union on the march)?
If
anything, the international situation Obama faced when he assumed the
presidency was, in many respects, relatively auspicious. Despite the
financial crisis and the recession that followed, never since John F.
Kennedy has an American president assumed high office with so much
global goodwill. The war in Iraq, which had done so much to bedevil
Bush’s presidency, had been won thanks to a military strategy Obama had,
as a senator, flatly opposed. For the war in Afghanistan, there was
broad bipartisan support for large troop increases. Not even six months
into his presidency, Obama was handed a potential strategic game changer
when a stolen election in Iran led to a massive popular uprising that,
had it succeeded, could have simultaneously ended the Islamic Republic
and resolved the nuclear crisis. He was handed another would-be game
changer in early 2011, when the initially peaceful uprising in Syria
offered an opportunity, at relatively little cost to the U.S., to depose
an anti-American dictator and sever the main link between Iran and its
terrorist proxies in Lebanon and Gaza.
Incredibly,
Obama squandered every single one of these opportunities. An early and
telling turning point came in 2009, when, as part of the Russian reset,
the administration abruptly cancelled plans—laboriously negotiated by
the Bush administration, and agreed to at considerable political risk by
governments in Warsaw and Prague—to deploy ballistic-missile defenses
to Poland and the Czech Republic. “We heard through the media,” was how
Witold Waszczykowski, the deputy head of Poland’s national-security
team, described the administration’s consultation process. Adding
unwitting insult to gratuitous injury, the announcement came on the 70th
anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet pact, a stark reminder that Poland could
never entrust its security to the guarantees of great powers.
And
this was just the beginning. Relations would soon sour with France, as
then-President Nicolas Sarkozy openly mocked Obama’s fantasies of
nuclear disarmament. “Est-il faible?”—“Is he weak?”—the French
president was reported to have wondered aloud after witnessing Obama’s
performance at his first G20 summit in April 2009. Then relations would
sour with Germany: A biography of Angela Merkel by Stefan Kornelius
quotes her as telling then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown that she
found Obama “so peculiar, so unapproachable, so lacking in warmth.” Next
was Saudi Arabia: U.S. policy toward Syria, the Kingdom’s Prince Turki
al-Faisal would tell an audience in London, “would be funny if it were
not so blatantly perfidious, and designed not only to give Mr. Obama an
opportunity to back down, but also to help Assad butcher his people.”
Canada—Canada!—would be disappointed. “We can’t continue in this state
of limbo,” complained foreign minister John Baird about the
administration’s endless delays and prevarications over approving the
Keystone XL pipeline.
And
there was Israel: “We thought it would be the United States that would
lead the campaign against Iran,” Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon noted in
March in a speech at Tel Aviv University. Instead, Obama was “showing
weakness,” he added. “Therefore, on this matter, we have to behave as
though we have nobody to look out for us but ourselves.”
This
was quite a list of falling-outs. Still, most such differences can
usually be finessed or patched up with a bit of diplomacy. Not so
Obama’s failures when it came to consolidating America’s hard-won gains
in Iraq, or advocating America’s democratic values in Iran, or pursuing
his own oft-stated goal in Afghanistan—“the war that has to be won,” as
he was fond of saying when he was running for the presidency in 2008. As
for Syria, perhaps the most devastating assessment was offered by
Robert Ford, who had been Obama’s man in Damascus in the days when
Bashar al-Assad was dining with John Kerry and being touted by Hillary
Clinton as a “reformer.”
“I
was no longer in a position where I felt I could defend the American
policy,” Ford told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in June, explaining his
decision to resign from government. “There really is nothing we can
point to that’s been very successful in our policy except the removal of
about 93 percent of some of Assad’s chemical materials. But now he’s
using chlorine gas against his opponents.”
None
of these fiascos— for brevity’s sake, I’m deliberately setting to one
side the illusory pivot to Asia, the misbegotten Russian Reset, the
mishandled Palestinian–Israeli talks, the stillborn Geneva conferences
on Syria, the catastrophic interim agreement with Iran, the de facto
death of the U.S. free-trade agenda, the overhyped opening to Burma, the
orphaned victory in Libya, the poisoned relationship with Egypt, and
the disastrous cuts to the Defense budget—can be explained away as a
matter of tough geopolitical luck. Where, then, does the source of
failure lie?
For
those disposed to be ideologically sympathetic to the administration,
it comes down to the personality of the president. He is, they say, too
distant, not enough of a schmoozer, doesn’t forge the close personal
relationships of the kind that Bush had with Tony Blair, or Clinton with
Helmut Kohl, or Reagan with Margaret Thatcher. Also, he’s too
professorial, too rational, too prudent: He thinks that foreign-policy
success is a matter of hitting “singles and doubles,” as he put it on a
recent visit to Asia, when what Americans want is for the president to
hit home runs (or at least point toward the lights).
Alternatively,
perhaps he’s too political: “The president had a truly disturbing habit
of funneling major foreign-policy decisions through a small cabal of
relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly
politics,” recalled Vali Nasr, the academic who served as a State
Department aide early in Obama’s first term. “Their primary concern was
how any action in Afghanistan or the Middle East would play out on the
nightly news.”
Another
theory: The president is simply disconnected from events, indifferent
to the details of governance, incompetent in the execution of policy.
Last fall, following the disastrous rollout of the ObamaCare website, it
emerged that the president had not had a single private meeting with
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for more than
three years—an indicator, given that this was his highest political
priority, of the quality of attention he was giving lesser issues. It
also turned out that the president had gone for nearly five years
without knowing that the National Security Agency was bugging the phones
of foreign leaders. In a revealing portrait from October 2013 in the New York Times,
the president was described as “impatient and disengaged” during White
House debates about Syria, “sometimes scrolling through messages on his
BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum.” The president is also known to
have complained to aides about what he called “decision fatigue,”
demanding memos where he can check “agree,” “disagree,” or “let’s
discuss.”
The most devastating testimony of all came from Obama himself. Prepping for an interview on 60 Minutes after a late-night dinner in Italy, Politico
reported, the president complained about his hard lot: “Just last night
I was talking about life and art, big interesting things, and now we’re
back to the minuscule things on politics”—those “minuscule things”
being the crisis in Ukraine and his own health-care plan. Then there was
this detail, about a presidential excursion in March as the crisis in
Crimea was unfolding:
At a leisurely dinner with friends on that Saturday night, Obama expressed no regrets about the mini-vacation at the lush Ocean Reef Club resort or the publicity surrounding the trip, which reportedly required planes, five helicopters, more than 50 Secret Service agents and airspace restrictions over South Florida. After a difficult few weeks dealing with an international crisis, he relished the break, which included two rounds of golf.
Even
allowing that presidents can get work done on the fairway and make
executive decisions between fundraising events (Obama did 321 of them in
his first term, according to the Washington Post, as compared
with 173 for George W. Bush’s first four years and 80 for Reagan’s),
there is still the reality that the American presidency remains a
full-time job that requires something more than glancing attention.
Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Germany’s former defense minister, described
Obama as “probably the most detached President [in] decades.” William
Galston, my (liberal) fellow columnist at the Wall Street Journal
and a former aide to Bill Clinton, has noted that “this president
doesn’t seem to be as curious about the processes of government—whether
the legislative process or the implementation process or the
administrative or bureaucratic process.”
Even
the ordinarily sympathetic Washington press corps has cottoned to the
truth about Obama’s style of management. “Former Obama administration
officials,” the Washington Post’s Scott Wilson reported last
year, “said the president’s inattention to detail has been a frequent
source of frustration, leading in some cases to reversals of diplomatic
initiatives and other efforts that had been underway for months.”
Should
any of this have come as a surprise? Probably not: With Obama, there
was always more than a whiff of the overconfident dilettante, so sure of
his powers that he could remain supremely comfortable with his own
ignorance. His express-elevator ascent from Illinois state senator to
U.S. president in the space of just four years didn’t allow much time
for maturation or reflection, either. Obama really is, as Bill Clinton
is supposed to have said of him, “an amateur.” When it comes to the
execution of policy, it shows.
And
yet this view also sells Obama short. It should be obvious, but bears
repeating, that it is no mean feat to be elected, and reelected,
president, whatever other advantages Obama might have enjoyed in his
races. In interviews and press conferences, Obama is often verbose and
generally self-serving, but he’s also, for the most part, conversant
with the issues. He may not be the second coming of Lincoln that
groupies like historians Michael Beschloss (who called Obama “probably
the smartest guy ever to become president”) or Robert Dallek (who said
Obama’s “political mastery is on par with FDR and LBJ”) made him out to
be. But neither is he a Sarah Palin, mouthing artless banalities about
this great nation of ours, or a Rick Perry, trying, like Otto from A Fish Called Wanda, to
remember the middle part. The myth of Obama’s brilliance paradoxically
obscures the fact that he’s no fool. The point is especially important
to note because the failure of Obama’s foreign policy is not,
ultimately, a reflection of his character or IQ. It is the consequence
of an ideology.
That
ideology is what now goes by the name of progressivism, which has
effectively been the dominant (if often disavowed) view of the
Democratic Party since George McGovern ran on a “Come Home, America”
platform in 1972—and got 37.5 percent of the popular vote. Progressivism
believes that the United States must lead internationally by example
(especially when it comes to nuclear-arms control); that the U.S. is as
much the sinner as it is the sinned against when it comes to our
adversaries (remember Mosaddegh?); and that the American interest is
best served when it is merged with, or subsumed by, the global interest
(ideally in the form of a UN resolution).
“The
truth of the matter is that it’s a big world out there, and that as
indispensable as we are to try to lead it, there’s still going to be
tragedies out there, and there are going to be conflicts, and our job is
to make sure to project what’s right, what’s just, and, you know, that
we’re building coalitions of like-minded countries and partners in order
to advance not only our core security interests, but also the interests
of the world as a whole.” Thus did Obama describe his global outlook in
an August 2014 press conference.
Above
all, progressivism believes that the United States is a country that,
in nearly every respect, treads too heavily on the Earth:
environmentally, ideologically, militarily, and geopolitically. The
goal, therefore, is to reduce America’s footprint; to “retrench,” as the
administration would like to think of it, or to retreat, as it might
more accurately be called.
To
what end? “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the
United States of America,” Obama said on the eve of his election in
2008. If Obama-Care is anything to go by, that fundamental
transformation involves a vast expansion of the entitlement state; the
growth of federal administrative power at the expense of Congress and
the states; the further subordination
That,
at any rate, is the theory. Practice has proved to be a different
story. If the United States were to go into retreat, to turn inward for
the sake of building some new social democracy, just what would take the
place of Pax Americana abroad? On this point, Obama has struggled to
give an answer. “People are anxious,” he acknowledged at a fundraiser in
Seattle in July:
Now, some of that has to do with some big challenges overseas…Part of people’s concern is just the sense that around the world the old order isn’t holding and we’re not quite yet to where we need to be in terms of a new order that’s based on a different set of principles, that’s based on a sense of common humanity, that’s based on economies that work for all people.
A new order that’s based on a different set of principles: Just what could that new order be? In the absence of a single dominant power, capable and
willing to protect its friends and deter its foes, there are three
conceivable models of global organization. First, a traditional
balance-of-power system of the kind that briefly flourished in Europe in
the 19th century. Second, “collective security” under the supervision
of an organization like the League of Nations or the United Nations.
Third, the liberal-democratic peace advocated, or predicted, by the
likes of Immanuel Kant, Norman Angell, and Francis Fukuyama.
Yet,
with the qualified exception of the liberal-democratic model, each of
these systems wound up collapsing of its own weight—precisely the reason
Dean Acheson, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and the other postwar
statesmen “present at the creation” understood the necessity of the
Truman Doctrine, the Atlantic Alliance, containment, the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and all the rest of the institutional
and ideological architecture of America’s post–World War II leadership.
These were men who knew that isolationism, global-disarmament pledges,
international law, or any other principle based on “common humanity”
could provide no lasting security against ambitious dictatorships and
conniving upstarts. The only check against disorder and anarchy was
order and power. The only hope that order and power would be put to the
right use was to make sure that a preponderance of power lay in safe,
benign, and confident hands.
In
1945 the only hands that fit that description were American. It remains
true today—even more so, given the slow-motion economic and strategic
collapse of Europe. Yet here was Obama, blithely proposing to substitute
Pax Americana with an as-yet-unnamed and undefined formula for the
maintenance of global order. Little wonder that leaders in Tehran,
Beijing, and Moscow quickly understood that, with Obama in the White
House, they had a rare opportunity to reshape and revise regional
arrangements in a manner more to their liking. Iran is doing so today in
southern Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Beijing is extending its reach in
the South and East China Sea. Russia is intervening in Ukraine. It’s no
accident that, while acting independently from one another, they are all
acting now. The next American president might not be so
cavalier about challenges to the global status quo, or about enforcing
his (or her) own red lines. Better to move while they can.
Then again, the next American president might not have options of the sort that Obama enjoyed when he took office in 2009. By
2017, the U.S. military will be an increasingly hollow force, with the
Army as small as it was in 1940, before conscription; a Navy the size it
was in 1917, before our entry into World War I; an Air Force flying the
oldest—and smallest—fleet of planes in its history; and a nuclear
arsenal no larger than it was during the Truman administration.
By
2017, too, the Middle East is likely to have been remade, though
exactly how is difficult to say. As I write, the Islamic State of Iraq
and Syria, which had seized eastern Syria and most of Anbar Province in
Iraq in June, is now encroaching simultaneously into Lebanon and Iraq’s
Kurdish regions. It is too soon to tell what kind of nuclear deal the
West will strike with Iran—assuming it strikes any deal at all. But
after years of prevarication on one side and self-deceit on the other,
the likeliest outcomes are that a) Iran will get a bomb; b) Iran will be
allowed to remain within a screw’s twist of a bomb; or c) Israel will
be forced, at great risk to itself, to go to war to prevent a) or b)
because the United States would not do the job. As for Asia and our
supposed pivot, a comment this spring by Assistant Secretary of Defense
Katrina McFarland could not have been lost on Chinese—or, for that
matter, Japanese—ears. “Right now,” she said, “the ‘pivot’ is being
looked at again because candidly it can’t happen.” There just aren’t
enough ships.
And these are just the predictable
consequences of the path we’ve been taking under Obama. What happens if
there’s more bad news in store? If Vladimir Putin were to invade one,
or all, of the Baltic states tomorrow,
there is little short of nuclear war that NATO could do to stop him,
and the alliance would stand exposed as the shell it has already become.
Or, to take another no-longer-implausible scenario, is it inconceivable
that Saudi Arabia, unhappy as it is over the Obama administration’s
outreach toward Tehran, might choose to pursue its own nuclear options?
The Saudis are already widely believed to own a piece of Pakistan’s
nuclear arsenal; why not test one of the weapons somewhere in the Saudi
desert as a warning shot to Tehran, and perhaps to Washington also?
Or
how about this: What if inflation in the United States prompts the
Federal Reserve finally to raise interest rates in a major way? What
effect would that have on commodity-dependent emerging markets? And what
if the crisis in the Eurozone isn’t over at all, and a second deep
recession brings a neo-fascist such as Marine Le Pen to power in France?
The depressions of the 1920s and ’30s were caused, not least, by
America’s original retreat from the world after it soured on
international politics and the promise of global democracy. Now Obama is
sounding the same retreat, for many of the same reasons, and probably
with the same consequences.
In a prescient 2004 essay in Foreign Policy,
the historian Niall Ferguson warned that “the alternative to [American]
unipolarity” would not be some kind of reasonably tolerable world
order. It would, he said, “be apolarity—a global vacuum of power.” “If
the United States retreats from global hegemony—its fragile self-image
dented by minor setbacks on the imperial frontier—its critics at home
and abroad must not pretend that they are ushering in a new era of
multipolar harmony, or even a return to the good old balance of power.
Be careful what you wish for.”
For
nearly 250 years it has been America’s great fortune to have always
found just the right leadership in the nick of time. Or perhaps that’s
not quite accurate: It has, rather, been our way first to sleepwalk
toward crisis and catastrophe, then to rouse ourselves when it is almost
too late. As things stand now, by 2017 it will be nearly too late. Who
sees a Lincoln, or a Truman, or a Reagan on the horizon?
Still,
we should not lose hope. We may be foolish, but our enemies, however
aggressive and ill-intended, are objectively weak. We may be a nation in
deliberate retreat, but at least we are not—at least not yet—in
inexorable decline. Two years ago, Obama was considered a foreign-policy
success story. Not many people entertain that illusion now; the tide of
public opinion, until recently so dull and vociferous in its opposition
to “neocons,” is beginning to shift as Americans understand that a
policy of inaction also has its price. Americans are once again prepared
to hear the case against retreat. What’s needed are the spokesmen, and
spokeswomen, who will make it.
Since
I am writing these words on the centenary of the First World War, it
seems appropriate to close with a line from the era. At the battle of
the Marne, with Germany advancing on Paris, General Ferdinand Foch sent
the message that would rally the French army to hold its ground. “My
center is yielding. My right is retreating. Situation excellent. I am
attacking.” Words to remember and live by in this new era of headlong
American retreat.
About the Author
Bret Stephens is the foreign-affairs columnist and deputy editorial-page editor of the Wall Street Journal. In 2013 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. His first book, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder will be published by Sentinel in November.
