So…what should we be doing in foreign
policy now?
The
pessimism out there is palpable, and for good reason. They’re all right. Richard Fernandez: Olympus has fallen. Bryan Preston:
We are so screwed. Stephen Green (VodkaPundit): Pastis in our time. National Review: On Syria, from bad to worse. Victor Davis Hanson: Putin – Saruman Come Alive.* Peggy Noonan: Team
Obama, people who know nothing – really nothing – about
history. Kori Schake (Foreign
Policy): Obama speech remarkably – alarmingly – flabby. Ann Coulter: Syrial losers. Jackie Gingrich Cushman: Obama on Syria:
Following from behind. Hal G.P. Colebatch
(American Spectator): Obama as Queeg:
A few cruise missiles short in the leadership
arsenal.
On it
goes. Daniel Henninger:
The Laurel and Hardy Presidency:
The past week was a perfect storm of
American malfunction. Colliding at the center of a serious foreign-policy crisis
was Barack Obama's manifest skills deficit, conservative animosity toward Mr.
Obama, Republican distrust of his leadership, and the reflexive opportunism of
politicians from Washington to Moscow.
…this week [Obama] turned himself,
the presidency and the United States into a spectacle. We were alternately
shocked and agog at these events. Now the sobering-up has to
begin.
The world has effectively lost its
nominal leader, the U.S. president. Is this going to be the new normal? If
so—and it will be so if serious people don't step up—we are looking at a
weakened U.S president who has a very, very long three years left on his term.
…
… left alone, the global market in
aggression won't clear. Like a malign, untreated tumor, it will grow. You can't
program it to kill only non-Americans. The world's worst impulses run by their
own logic. What's going to stop them now?
What, indeed?
Henninger doesn’t offer any answers. (And he’s wrong about
“conservatives” and “Republicans” being singular stalkers of the bomb-Syria
quest – if not about the implied negativism and lack of constructive content in
their political approach. Almost no
organized faction in America thinks it’s a good idea to bomb Syria.) But he does ask the right question. So, OK, Olympus has fallen. What the heck do we do
now?
That’s harder to see than what has gone wrong, which at
this point is convoluted but still parsable. Let’s take a moment to review,
not-quite-James Michener-style, how we got to where we are. It matters; it matters why we crashed
into a brick wall, and why it’s all unsustainable.
The
backstory
World
War II ended, the Cold War developed, and a globally connected world’s main
power dynamic became that of clashing “superpowers.” The main sociopolitical dynamic became
what I will call “borrowing for justice”:
nations proclaiming it “justice” to indenture their future taxpayers to
the hilt, so politicians could distribute favors today to complacent,
increasingly dependent constituencies.
Even
under this regimen – even heavily burdened by the state – liberal capitalism
still ran rings around illiberal socialism, and eventually, Soviet socialism
imploded and one of the two superpowers collapsed. In the ensuing twenty years of relative
“peace,” Western nations may have spent money on small wars, but their spending
to capitalize and maintain their military forces has
plummeted to levels not seen since the
mid-1930s, as
a percentage of GDP.
But
the “peace dividend” turned out to be not so much the savings on military
hardware as a heedless, leisure- and prosperity-enabled enthusiasm for
increasingly globalized regulation. The bureaucratic approach to human life
– appoint regulators, subject as much as possible to centralized regulation,
punish and extort the non-compliant – has gradually come to replace borrowing
for justice as the most active, energetic sociopolitical dynamic of our
time. And regulation, that heady
rush, arrogates to itself a supranational charter, proposing to decide for all
mankind everything from whether we may own firearms to what living quarters and
health care we shall have, what kinds of businesses and jobs we may create, and
what kinds of energy we shall use.
The
vision for this has been there for a long time now, from before Woodrow Wilson
and before Marxist socialism. But
it takes an extraordinarily quiescent geopolitical landscape to make this
regulatory impulse seem feasible across international boundaries. Even the European Union has not found it
easy going. Still, the Western left
has written its post-Cold War political script with regulatory supranationalism
as the basic plot. It is the
eschaton being immanentized in a post-modern, post-socialism-vs.-capitalism
environment.
Obama’s “czars” were always a step ahead of him in this
regard. Where he has Alinskyite
tendencies – protest, maneuver, undercut the existing order – his czars have for
the most part been zealous regulators: bureaucrats with a positive (not
necessarily a morally good, but a proactive) agenda. Seen in that light, Samantha Power and
Susan Rice are humanitarian-force czars, in charge of proactively administering
the compliance of other nations with a supranational regulatory
order.
I
find this conceptual outline more explanatory than any other about why Team
Obama reverted so reflexively to the proposal for a Tomahawk-slap punishment of
Bashar al-Assad. It isn’t actually
in character for them, as a use of national power; all things being equal, we’d
expect Obama to seriously propose
negotiating Assad’s chemical weapons away from him, before hoeing the well-worn
row of a light bombing.
But
when Team Obama is punishing non-compliance, in the guise of a regulatory
bureaucracy, it can be quite determinedly, even viciously, punitive. Team Obama takes regulatory compliance
seriously, in a way it doesn’t take the conventional, strategic use of
international power. “Of course,”
Team Obama would say. “Of course, punishing regulatory
non-compliance is a proper use of bombs and missiles, just as it is a proper use
of law enforcement, the courts, the penal system, the executive’s authority, and
the tax code. You don’t negotiate
with regulatory miscreants. You hit
‘em hard.”
The
problem is that the quiescent global environment isn’t actually out there to be
administered in this fashion.
Someone in the rest of the world always has a reason for being
non-compliant, and has to be addressed in those old, conventional terms of raw
power, if you want your plan to
stick. Bashar al-Assad has no
intention of losing his civil war just because Barack Obama declares him to be
out of compliance with a supranational regulation. Assad’s patrons Russia and Iran bring
the same recalcitrance to the regulatory-supranationalist
dynamic.
Reality
check
Regulatory supranationalism is only as enforceable as
the reach of the strongest nation’s national power. And that reach depends on the old-school
pillars of national power: conventional military power; cultivated, voluntary
consensus (alliances, treaties); and realistic “red lines,” based on defensible
declarations of interest.
These
quantities are always in a do-loop with each other; it’s just usually easier to
see one element of the loop than the others at any given time. What the American people have seen about
the Syria crisis is that Obama’s “red line” is well out of sync with the level
of our military power and the defensibility of our interest, given the absolute
character of those elements today.
My
sense is that the people have seen this more instinctively than through the lens
of specific expertise. But their
vision is remarkably clear, for all that.
America is out of position in
2013 to enforce regulatory compliance on Syria. The apparatus of power isn’t there; the
consensus manifestly isn’t there (almost everyone in Europe has fallen away);
and the interest in question is out on a limb, due to these unpropitious factors
in the loop, waiting for gravity to kick in.
If we
had done things differently since 1945, we might be in a position to enforce
compliance on Assad in 2013. But we
borrowed for justice instead of
capitalizing our military forces.
With the election of Obama, we Americans put our chips on regulatory
supranationalism instead of on the
conventional use of national power. The latter could be used effectively to
squeeze Assad out of Syria, whereas the former cannot, and indeed – because it
proposes to substitute regulatory for political accountability – has no
intention to.
By
the same step – electing Obama – Americans chose to accept punitive regulation
of our national economy, to the extent that we don’t have the option today of
outgrowing our current fiscal woes, and undertaking to borrow for justice and
recapitalize our military at the same time. We are in a regulatory straitjacket of
our president’s making: one he has no intention of
undoing.
We
made the Obama choice, in turn, because we had decided some decades before to
enforce ignorance in our population – indeed, to enforce a false narrative –
about history and human nature. All
these choices and dynamics are inseparable, and it is essential that we
understand that. We cannot correct
just one of them. We are beyond the
point of marginal amelioration.
That,
ultimately, is the reason why the Syria crisis has been such a spectacularly
appalling crash and burn. Because
of everything we’ve been doing, we
have been way out on a limb for some time now. Because of the sum total of the
character of his administration, and due at least partly to the character of the
people that elected him – not solely, in other words, because of who he is –
President Obama is an avatar of all that is unsustainable, unrealistic, and
false about America’s current political course.
So…what do we
do?
Daniel Henninger is right: we have more than three years
to go before we can elect a new president.
Is there any national-security option for us that is not completely
beyond the abilities and character of the Obama
administration?
Let’s look at the problem in light of
the three pillars of national power.
The temptation is strong to look first at military power. But all things have not been equal for
some time now, and the most important pillar to consider today is actually what
our interests and “red lines” truly are. ...
[See the rest at links]
CDR, USN (Ret.)
Hemet, CA
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