Hot Spots
11/26/2015
President Obama's Foreign Policy
I was going through a pile of Foreign Affairs magazines I haven’t had a chance to really look through and I saw this piece by Bret Stephens from the September/October 2015 issue that still rings true post-Paris attacks and the current foreign policy debate in the United States. [Some of you will recognize Mr. Stephens’ name from his perch at the Wall Street Journal, where he is always ‘must read’ in my book.]
So following are a few passages from his piece titled “What Obama Gets Wrong.”
“Start with the promises, of which Obama made plenty when he came to office. The prison at Guantanamo Bay was to be shut within a year. Relations with Russia would be ‘reset.’ The United States’ good name would be restored in such places as Cairo, Istanbul, and Damascus. Israeli settlement expansion would end, and peace with the Palestinians would be forged. Much of this was to be achieved, so it seemed, through the sheer moral force of Obama’s personality and the compelling logic of his ideas. Yet none of it occurred....
“As for U.S. enemies, the core of al Qaeda might be weaker today than it was when Obama took office, but the groups he once cavalierly dismissed as jihad’s ‘JV team’ are vastly more potent, successful, and aggressive. The Russian economy may have been badly hit by the fall in global oil prices, but Ukraine is bracing for the next phase in a Russian offensive that Obama has opposed with only token measures. The deal with Iran exchanges billions of dollars in tangible economic relief for Tehran – some of which will be used to fund anti-American proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, and Afghanistan – in return for the paper promise of a temporary lull in Iran’s nuclear program.
“And as for the country’s friends, here’s a sampler of some of their more candid views. Then Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, secretly taped in 2014: ‘The Polish-American alliance is worthless, even harmful, as it gives Poland a false sense of security. It’s bullshit.’ Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, in a 2014 speech: ‘If your image is feebleness, it doesn’t pay in the world.’ The former Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal, in public comments in 2013: U.S. policy towards Syria ‘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.’ Earlier this year, Obama invited the heads of state of the Gulf Cooperation Council for a meeting at Camp David. Most sent their deputies and understudies in their place – a gesture of contempt that can be translated from Arabic into English in two words.
“Such views are not merely reflex reactions to specific administration policies. They are a response to the broader drift of American policy under Obama, his effort to recast the fundamental tenets of the country’s approach to the world. (Gideon) Rose (Obama supporter) suggests that Obama has sought to rightsize the United States’ strategic priorities, focusing on the solid liberal core as opposed to the unstable, and possibly hopeless, periphery. This interpretation seems to have little foundation in anything Obama has said, and even less in what he has done. What, for instance, has been the relative weight of the administration’s attention to, say, improving military interoperability within NATO as opposed to berating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for approving construction in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo?
“The truth is that Obama’s idea of U.S. foreign policy is that there should be less of it, that the United States generally ought not to meddle in the internal affairs of other states and certainly not do so without a UN warrant, and that Washington should focus on what it does at home more than on what it does abroad. This doctrine is ‘nation building here at home,’ and it finds advocates among both left-wing progressives, who want it for the sake of bigger government, and right-wing libertarians, who want it for the sake of smaller deficits. That’s why Obama’s foreign policy polled well in his first few years in office.
“Now, however, the consequences of that foreign policy are becoming more obvious. The rebalance from the periphery to the core that Rose celebrates as an act of prudence has created power vacuums that have been filled by the likes of the self-declared Islamic State, or ISIS. The sense that Obama’s redlines are all negotiable, that his talk of all options being on the table is pure bluster, has led the country’s foes to believe that they can do as they please. And his faithlessness toward traditional friends has raised unsettling questions about the value of being a U.S. ally (just ask former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak) and caused some to wonder whether they shouldn’t seek other patrons and otherwise do what they must to protect their interests, regardless of Washington’s wishes.
“All of this has been compounded by frequent and sometimes unaccountable incompetence in execution, most obviously in the efforts to defeat the Islamic State but also in the feckless response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea (which invited further aggression) and the mishandling of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians (which resulted in last summer’s war with Hamas). ‘The Obama administration proved once again that it is the best friend of its enemies, and the biggest enemy of its friends,’ the Israeli commentator Ari Shavit noted last year....
“Since the end of World War II, U.S. presidents of both parties have recognized that foreign and domestic policy do not have to be pursued at the expense of each other. It may be a truism that the country cannot be strong abroad unless it is strong at home, but it’s also a fact that the country’s economic prosperity depends on its security abroad – not only in the core of the liberal democratic world but often well beyond it, too....
“The world has already entered an era in which global disorders, spurred by American retreat, are proliferating at rates that are increasingly hard to contain, much less defeat, and those disorders are blurring whatever distinction there might once have been between the core and the periphery. As that line vanishes, many more observers are likely to start seeing virtue and wisdom in an expansive vision of American power, as opposed to the cramped one Obama has offered.”
Next Hot Spots in a few weeks.
Brian Trumbore
