AN UNMITIGATED DISASTER…OBAMA’S FOREIGN POLICY
http://www.robinshepherdonline.com/face-reality-obamas-foreign-policy-is-an-unmitigated-disaster/#more-1785
Face reality: Obama’s foreign policy is an unmitigated disaster
Over dinner in London with an American friend from the Washington think tank community the other night, I found myself mouthing words about Barack Obama that I’m no longer sure I can keep repeating while simultaneously retaining any sense of self respect. “Cynical, but not hostile,†was how I characterised my views of the 44th president.
Part of my defence would certainly centre on the argument that after eight years in which my fellow Brits and Europeans ditched sober and reasoned analysis of Obama’s predecessor in favour of something little better than an ad hominem hate fest, I’ll be damned if I’m going to fall into the same trap. And I won’t.
But after the selling out of central and eastern Europe to Putin’s Russia over missile defence, the contorted and self-defeating speech on Afghanistan last week, and the administration’s farcical handling of Iran’s nuclear programme, it is becoming increasingly impossible to avoid the conclusion that we might well have another Jimmy Carter on our hands after all.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d still take American leadership of the Western world under Obama over the pretensions to great power status of a newly revamped European Union whose recently appointed foreign policy supremo, Lady Ashton, spent the early 1980s as treasurer of the pro-Soviet Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
But for those of us who believe that the West has a duty to secure democracy where it already exists and to enhance its chances of taking hold where it does not, it’s all beginning to look like a choice between the hangman’s noose or your head on a block.
Reflexive opponents of Obama may say that I’m well behind the curve on all this. Perhaps I am. I still think, though, that, once elected, it was fair to give him a chance to prove his critics wrong. But unless he’s about to perform one of the great U turns, it looks like he’s already blown it.
Putin must be rubbing his hands in glee — he got an end to the missile defence programme, humiliating Warsaw and Prague in the process, with absolutely nothing in return. Ukraine and Georgia now look less likely fully to withdraw from the Russian ambit than ever. With Obama’s pledge to send in 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan but start withdrawing them 18 months later he has effectively told the Taliban (and anyone wavering between backing them and the government in Kabul) that all they have to do is sit it out in the mountains for a year and a half and then America will run away.
And on Iran, it just goes from one empty gesture to another as the regime first came out last week with the “shock†announcement that it was planning 10 new uranium enrichment sites and, after Obama and the Europeans responded with the blood curdling threat to “consider the possibility†of tougher sanctions in January, it is now reported that Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, has upped the ante and said they want 20.
It’s all falling apart. Obama may not think he is engaged in a zero sum game with the likes of Vladimir Putin, the Taliban and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but all the signs are that they think they’re engaged in one with him. They smell fear, they sense weakness and they’re pressing home their advantage.
To be honest, I’d be delighted to be wrong. I do not want to live in a world where an aggressive dictatorship in Russia now feels it has the upper hand in significant parts of its former empire. I do not want to live in a world where the Taliban can now calculate that it is simply involved in a waiting game ahead of its ultimate triumph in Afghanistan. And I do not want to live in a world where the Iranian dictatorship can now be increasingly confident that the United States lacks the will to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.
But can anyone really dispute that this is the world in which we now live?
Robin Shepherd is Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society, the London-based think tank
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