The events of the last
few weeks have demonstrated to pretty much anyone but the diehard
believers that U.S. President Barack Obama's foreign policy initiatives
have been a failure.
America is now less
respected and less feared on the international stage than it has been
for many years, and it is being challenged regularly by countries who
see little or no downside to confronting the U.S. The administration's
outreach initiatives -- to the Muslim world, Egypt, Turkey, Russia,
China, and Iran -- have produced neither cooperation nor progress.
Even Chuck Todd, the
NBC journalist who once worked for a Democratic presidential candidate
(Tom Harkin in 1992), whose wife is a consultant for the Democratic
Party and "progressive causes," and whose liberal leanings are thinly
disguised on the air or in print, offered this assessment:
"Our country's ongoing
spat with Russia is the latest in what's been a frustrating year on the
foreign policy front for the White House and President Obama
specifically," he said.
"From Egypt to Syria to
Russia and China, there have been more setbacks than successes. While
we like to think other countries once quaked in the face of U.S. power,
that hasn't been the case since, well, the Iraq war. More recently, the
Edward Snowden saga highlighted just how hard it is for the U.S. to get
China and Russia, specifically, to bend. The limits of U.S. power in
this flatter world are becoming more noticeable by the day. Egypt might
be the best example of that, as the administration has tried many
avenues to try and get the country's current leadership to back off on
its split with the Muslim Brotherhood."
The latest blowback from Egypt is a video of a belly dancerinsulting
Obama and U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Ann Patterson for their support of
the Muslim Brotherhood, the only organization the Obama administration
has gotten behind in the two plus years of turmoil that have rocked the
country since the overthrow of the Mubarak government.
The president has now
canceled a summit meeting with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, but
he still plans to attend the G-20 summit in Saint Petersburg, in order,
presumably, to publicly express his displeasure with the Russians for
granting asylum to Edward Snowden, the leaker of information on NSA data
gathering. The move brings back memories of former President Jimmy
Carter responding to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 by
canceling America's participation in the summer Olympic Games in Moscow
later that year.
The comparisons of Carter and Obamaare
becoming ever more common. Carter was dealt his political demise when
he ran for re-election in 1980 against Ronald Reagan, winning fewer
states than any other presidential candidate in history running for a
second term, losing in the Electoral College by 489-49. Carter, a
southerner, never won the love of the mainstream liberal press, and Ted
Kennedy's challenge to Carter from the Left for the nomination in 1980
weakened his position in the general election that fall.
Obama has been
protected by the liberal press ever since his bid for the Democratic
nomination in 2008. A major factor in this regard is the president's
race. No liberal reporter wanted to be seen as blocking this
breakthrough for the country of electing its first black president, and
for the same reason, they have been loathe to see him fail or lose his
re-election bid in 2012.
When he sought the
nomination in 2008, so-called investigative reporters for mainstream
newspapers, magazines and broadcast networks were uninterested in
Obama's ties to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, or radical Weather Underground
member Bill Ayers, or Palestinian activists Ali Abunimah and Rashid
Khalidi, or his voting record as a state legislator in Illinois or in
the U.S. Senate. Obama was hailed as academic, cerebral, calm,
brilliant, dispassionate, post-racial, a healer to our divided politics,
and of course the anti-Bush, which mattered greatly to those who hated
the former president for all kinds of reasons, not least of which were
cultural (including that Bush was from Texas, and was openly Christian).
The continued unrest in
Egypt, where the government currently in power seems to view Obama as
supportive of a resurrection of the Muslim Brotherhood, and in Syria,
where the death count now exceeds 100,000, and the fact that al-Qaida
dominated jihadists are now leading the fight against the regime, with
weapons supplied by the U.S., indicates just how much our influence has
declined in the region.
The Benghazi cover-uphad
multiple purposes, though the most important at the time was to
maintain the campaign's narrative about the Obama first-term foreign
policy "achievements" (Osama bin Laden was dead, al-Qaida was on the
run, the long costly foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were over or
ending). But as Roger Simon points out, it was also important to shield
from public view the extent to which the administration had made common
cause with the Islamists -- on the rise throughout the region. Simon
argues, much as Dinesh D'Souza did in his movie "2016,"
that Obama is obsessed with imperialism, and colonialism, and
sympathizes with people and movements that have fought it. He sees his
own country as having been on the wrong side of history:
"Obama is a postmodern
agnostic par excellence. But like so many schooled in post-modernism and
cultural relativism, he has an immediate and intense enmity for
anything that smacks of imperialism -- and an equally intense desire to
be seen as supportive of (although certainly not to live like) the
downtrodden of the Earth.
"Which leads us back to
Benghazi. You don't have to be Muslim to love the Muslim Brotherhood or
even, consciously or unconsciously, sympathize with the goals, if not
the actions, of al-Qaida. You just have to have been imbued with a blind
hatred of imperialism. That's all you need."
The recent resumption
of peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, shepherded by
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, has been one of the few foreign
policy successes in recent months. But there is little reason to believe
these talks will prove any more productive than earlier efforts. Even
multi-decade peace processor Aaron David Miller is skeptical.
"Neither [Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas nor [Prime Minister Benjamin]
Netanyahu wants to say no to America's top diplomat and take the blame
for the collapse of negotiations. This proved sufficient to get them
back to negotiations, but more will be required to keep them there, let
alone to reach an accord. Right now, neither has enough incentives,
disincentives, and an urgent desire or need to move forward boldly.
"Unfortunately, right
now, the U.S. owns this one more than the parties do. This is not an
ideal situation. It would have been better had real urgency brought
Abbas and Netanyahu together rather than John Kerry."
In essence, neither
side wanted to say no to Kerry, nor to Obama, but now with the talks
moving to the region, and out of the D.C. media overload, the momentum
will likely disappear and all the familiar hurdles defining the conflict
-- most important of which is that the Palestinians do not now, and
have never accepted the permanence of Israel as a Jewish state -- will
reappear. This guarantees that there is no intersecting set of
compromises that will produce an end to Palestinian claims and an end to
the conflict.
When the talks break
down, what will Obama do? Given his sympathy for the underdog, and his
obsession with imperialism (is there any way given his worldview that he
would not see Israel as an imperialist creation?) it is predictable
where he will put his foot down on the scale, if he chooses to do so.
With the rest of his foreign-policy agenda collapsing, maybe this is
where he makes his stand. The president will not face the electorate
again, and the only job he may seek after he leaves office might be U.N.
secretary-general, where a history of pressuring Israel is an important
credential.
Israel hopefully understands the
worldview of the president of its greatest ally. It is why it will need
to think about its strategic future as if it is alone.
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