Obama and Weakness
On April 1, 2001, a Chinese fighter jet collided with an American EP-3 surveillance plane. The aircraft was forced to make an emergency landing on the island of Hainan. The plane’s 24 crew members were detained by the Chinese, sparking a tense international crisis.
The 10-day incident ended with a letter of mutual apology in which the Republican administration told the Chinese that they were “very sorry” for entering Chinese airspace. Emboldened by that apology and the weakness it revealed (a “national humiliation,” according to the Weekly Standard), China launched its long-intended invasion of Taiwan while the North Koreans began shelling Seoul in a coordinated assault to roll back Western influence in Asia.
Wait, sorry. No invasion or shelling followed the apology. Nor did a neo-communist tide engulf Asia. Despite the devastated pride of several editors in Washington, the U.S. emerged from the mini-crisis with its super power status in tact.
Perhaps it was that narrow escape that prompted Senator Joseph Biden to muse recently about the prospects of “an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.” “That guy” being his running mate and presidential contender, Barack Obama.
The notion that an incoming administration, particularly one that would be led by someone as inexperienced as Senator Obama, will be tested by adversaries is a fairly anodyne (if politically uncomfortable) observation. Yet the comment has been seized on as proof that Obama is weak and that such weakness would invite incalculable danger.
Writing in National Review, Peter Hegseth asserted “that our enemies see Barack Obama as a more accommodating, and weaker, foe. Unfriendly regimes and networks — from oil-rich dictators to radical Islamists — will seek to exploit a tepid American foreign policy.”
Columnist Ralph Peters, in the New York Post, went further still. Not only would Obama’s weakness invite a challenge from Iran, but Russia would take the opportunity to gobble up Ukraine, al-Qaeda would “pull out all the stops” to kill Americans (apparently up to this point they haven’t been giving it their all), Lebanon would “disintegrate” and Bolivian President Evo Morales would go on a military rampage.
Whew. For a movement that values strength, it’s remarkable how much energy is spent worrying aloud. It’s also a curious reading of the current geopolitical landscape. At least during the Cold War, such charges of capitulation had Democrats surrendering to an honest-to-goodness Evil Empire, with the capacity to literally destroy the United States. Today it’s … Evo Morales.
Conservatives insist that the world is a dangerous place. And indeed it is. But it’s considerably less dangerous today than when the young and inexperienced President Kennedy was schooled by Nikita Khrushchev during their first summit. Even the combined might of Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea pales before the threat the U.S. faced from Soviet communism. Can you be a world class appeaser without a world class enemy?
It’s hard to tell from Obama’s meager legislative record if there’s much to the charge that he’s an inveterate squish. Obama supported the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006. He supports expanding NATO to include Georgia and Ukraine. He supports expanding the size of the Army and has repeatedly suggested that he would launch unilateral military strikes into Pakistan in an effort to kill bin Laden. He has pledged to send additional troops into Afghanistan to push back against the Taliban insurgency.
Though he objected to the Iraq war (a position most Americans now agree with), he has selected a Democrat who voted for the war as his running mate. There doesn’t appear to be a dovish litmus test for potential cabinet members. Indeed, during his own debate, Senator Biden boasted about his early advocacy of military force in the Balkans. He even urged an intervention in Sudan. Say what you will about these policies – they’re not pacifism.
Nor does Obama seem poised to recruit his national security team from the ranks of Code Pink or MoveOn.org. Richard Danzig, widely rumored to be in the running for the job of National Security Advisor should Obama win, comes from that frothing pit of anti-war sentiment that is … the U.S. Navy.
Perhaps this is why the locus of conservative ire is focused mainly on Obama’s pledge to negotiate “without preconditions” with the leaders of North Korea, Venezuela, and especially, Iran at the presidential level. Though he has attempted to walk-back his earlier statements regarding conditions, Obama has staunchly defended his insistence that “tough diplomacy” can be brought to bear to disarm the Mullahs of Iran. In this, Obama finds himself in the company of many traditional Republican realists – men like Colin Powell, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger – who have long insisted that talking to enemies does not materially weaken the U.S.
Senator McCain, however, has seized on Obama’s position as proof of his “reckless judgment.” McCain has not disavowed dialogue, mind you. “This is not to suggest that the United States should not communicate with Iran our concerns about their behavior,” he said in a speech back in May.
This formulation is telling, for it explains what’s really behind the critique of Obama as the reincarnation of Jimmy Carter, or worse, Neville Chamberlain. It’s not about projecting strength. It’s about authority.
Many of Senator McCain’s advisers hold the view that the United States, as the world’s preeminent power, can only be secure if it enforces its writ throughout the globe. Robert Kagan, a McCain adviser and a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment, dubbed it “benevolent global hegemony.” But McCain supporter and columnist Charles Krauthammer, writing in 2001, had a blunter formulation:
“America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”
In other words, America is not merely a global cop. We don’t simply enforce rules. We make them. In the neoconservative formulation, America is a global schoolmarm, hectoring and punishing the recalcitrant and belligerent nations of the world. Just as a school teacher would never deign to discuss the rules of the classroom with an unruly student, so too the U.S. cannot sit down with the leaders of rogue states. To do so, Senator McCain warned, would “legitimize” them. “You will sit down across the table from [Iran] and that will legitimize their illegal behavior,” McCain said.
The conflation of American security with hegemonic privilege, and the corresponding obsession with perception, has had an enormously corrosive effect on the traditional (indeed traditionally Republican) understanding of American interests. Rather than identify a discrete set of issues that require resolution, the over-riding interest of the United States becomes the preservation of its global authority - wherever it is contested. It becomes correspondingly harder to resolve issues that require the U.S. to accept a sub-optimal outcome because any trade-off is seen as lethal admission that America’s will is not so implacable.
But reality always trumps perception. And so a posture that assumes nearly limitless power to sustain naturally runs aground. The Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs only accelerated in the face of the Bush administration’s diplomatic rebuffs and demands. The exercise of American power in Iraq and Afghanistan has not shocked the world (much less Iran or Pakistan) into toeing the U.S. line, but instead exposed the limits of what even the world’s best conventional force can accomplish. America’s heedless attitude toward Russian concerns over NATO expansion and missile defense did not exactly dim their appetite for adventurism in the Caucasus.
For eight years, conservatives have devoted a disproportionate amount of time fretting about the ephemera of policy, while the objective measures of American power – her military, her economy - have weakened. Jettisoning the preservation of global authority uber alles, as Obama appears willing to do, does not mean that the U.S. would suddenly enjoy one diplomatic success after another. To paraphrase Cool Hand Luke “some nations, you just can’t reach.”
But it does mean that the U.S. will become a more discerning power and thus, a more durable one.
