Obama’s Foreign-Policy Failures Go Far Beyond Iraq by George Melloan
http://online.wsj.com/articles/george-melloan-obamas-foreign-policy-failures-go-far-beyond-iraq-1403823564?KEYWORDS=george+melloan
Retreat abroad and bigger government at home has made the U.S. weaker.
‘What would America fight for?” asked a cover story last month in the Economist magazine. Coming from a British publication, the headline has a tone of “let’s you and him fight.” But its main flaw is that it greatly oversimplifies the question of how the U.S. can recover from its willful failure to exert a positive influence over world events.
That failure is very much on display as Iraq disintegrates and Russia revives the “salami tactics” of 1930s aggressors, slicing off parts of Ukraine. Both disasters could have been avoided through the exercise of more farsighted and muscular American diplomacy. A show of greater capability to manage “domestic” policy would have aided this effort.
The U.S. is still militarily powerful and has a world-wide apparatus of trained professionals executing its policies, overt and covert. It has an influential civil society and a host of nongovernmental organizations with influence throughout the planet, not always but mostly for the better. It has a preponderance of multinational corporations. Although confidence in America has waned significantly, it is still looked to for leadership in thwarting the designs of thugs like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Syria’s Bashar Assad and Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei.
Yet President Obama has followed a deliberate policy of disengagement from the world’s quarrels. He failed to bluff Assad with his “red line” threat and then turned the Syrian bloodbath over to Mr. Putin, showing a weakness that no doubt emboldened the Russian president to launch his aggression against Ukraine. The errant Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, beset by a Sunni-al Qaeda insurgency, has been told, in effect, to seek succor from his Shiite co-religionists in Iran. Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry amazingly urges America’s only real friends in the area, the Iraqi Kurds, not to abandon the ill-mannered Mr. Maliki in favor of greater independence and expanded commerce (mainly oil) with our NATO ally, Turkey.
Mr. Obama cites opinion polls purportedly showing that Americans are “war weary.” Probably what the polls really reflect is something else entirely, dismay at the wasted blood and treasure that resulted from Mr. Obama’s unilateral declaration of defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead of whining about “war weariness,” an American president should understand his historical role. The U.S. can’t just withdraw from the responsibilities that have derived from its enormous success in making itself the look-to nation for peoples aspiring to safer, freer and more prosperous lives. The costs of failure are too high, as we have seen in the many thousands of lives lost in Syria.
U.S. policy will continue to be measured not only by its willingness to fight but by how effectively it moves to counter troublemakers before trouble happens. An effective president would call a halt to U.S. disarmament, rather than citing it as an accomplishment. He would move to strengthen the hands of America’s friends, like the new Ukrainian government and the Kurds of the Middle East, by providing them with economic and military aid. He would abandon the disastrous policy of trying to schmooze and appease cutthroats like Vladimir Putin.
Although it might seem too much to ask, an effective president would say to the world that the American politico-economic system still works. That means acknowledging not only today’s private-sector achievements, like the boom in domestic natural-gas and oil production due to homegrown technological advancements, but history’s lessons as well. In World War II, America quickly became the “Arsenal of Democracy.” Its great war machine was created by the inventive know-how and productive skills of millions of private citizens who for generations before the war had seized the opportunities available in a free-market economy to build large mass-production business organizations.
At its best, foreign policy is the sum total of how a nation presents itself to the world’s peoples. That includes its quality of life and standard of living, its know-how in producing goods and services, its organizational skills, its cultural and economic creativity. All those things say, “Look at us. You can be happier and healthier if you follow our lead.”
The American image has been tarnished by the progressives who took control of the U.S. government in 2009. They set about to expand the state’s power, which was exactly what had destroyed the productive drive and creative skills of the post-World War II Russians and Chinese. They made a hash of health insurance, grossly distorted finance and destroyed personal savings by manipulation of the credit markets. They conducted a war on fossil fuels, handing a victory to Russia, which uses its hydrocarbon exports to exercise political influence in Europe. They weakened the dollar by running up huge national debts and wasted the nation’s substance on silly projects like “fighting global warming.”
U.S. interests in the Middle East, Asia and Europe are threatened as aggressors and terrorists become bolder. An American president doesn’t have to sit back and watch. The Economist asked a mischievous question, but it revealed a disappointment of the world’s expectations of America.
Mr. Melloan, a former columnist and deputy editor of the Journal editorial page, is the author of “The Great Money Binge: Spending Our Way to Socialism” (Simon & Schuster, 2009).
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