Posted on 03/22/2013 6:19:16 AM PDT by Kaslin
Editor's Note: This column was coauthored by Bob Morrison.
Before he became a China scholar, our friend Steve Mosher was an engineer. He likes to say that if you are an engineer whose bridges collapse or whose highways break up, you’re likely to lose your Professional Engineer’s license. But if you are a social scientist, or a history professor and all your ideas collapse under the weight of evidence, you get tenure. And if you are a liberal journalist who gets it all spectacularly wrong, you get promoted.
Andrew Sullivan is a case in point. He waxed lyrical about the Advent of Barack Obama. Even better than the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Obama would stop terrorists dead in their tracks. Here’s a famous paragraph of Andrew Sullivan in full gush mode:
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
We elected Barack Obama president in November 2008. And those young Pakistanis all swooned, right? They made sure to wear some flowers in their hair as Islamabad vied with San Francisco to host a summer of love.
Not so much. In the Year Four of the Age of Obama, only seven percent of Pakistanis had confidence in the American president. They must not be watching enough TV. The PEW poll ofinternational attitudes toward President Obama last spring showed some more dismal results. President Obama’s standing in Pakistan may have been a chilly 7% but he was little better thought of in these Muslim-majority lands:
Lebanon: 39% Egypt 29% Tunisia 28% Turkey 24% Jordan 22%
Interestingly, America’s president seems to register warmer feelings—though still below freezing level—in those Muslim-majority lands to whom we do not give foreign aid. Is that a clue? If we cut them all off, would we see a rebound of U.S. respect from the locals.
That was the PEW International poll and last spring. More recently, we see this headline:
World Poll: Image of U.S. Declines.
This time, it’s the Gallup organization that finds that in most regions of the world, U.S. standing in President Obama’s fourth year in office has slipped. In Europe, respondents were asked if they approved/disapproved of U.S. leadership. That score dipped from 42% in 2011 to 36% last year. The Gallup Poll of 130 countries showed median approval dropped last year from 49% to 41%.
This is no partisan view on our part. We certainly do not take comfort from low ratings given for our country and its leaders by people abroad. We recall with fondness those times when it was said: “Politics stops at the water’s edge.”
The fact is President Obama’s standing in the world is still higher than that enjoyed by President Bush. But this much should be clear: Obama has been no panacea. The over-the-top nonsense that was typical of too many writers in the run-up to the 2008 election has proven to be unfounded.
Our country's Founders appealed to “a candid world” in our Declaration of Independence. They showed “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind.” We should care about what our neighbors around the world think of us.
But we should not let their view determine our policy on such vital questions as whether to stop Iran building a nuclear weapon or whether to back an Egyptian government that shows no regard for human rights, especially the freedom of religion.
What we are likely to find—as President Eisenhower and President Reagan found—is that a strong policy of the United States that forthrightly confronts the enemies of freedom but avoids “nation building” is the best policy.
Better a Big Stick than a series of big and sticky interventions. Afghanistan, for example, is no more likely to be a functioning democracy after 12 years of U.S. entanglement than it was after six. Nor would Afghanistan be “stable’ if we stayed there a hundred years. The refusal of this country to respect freedom of religion will condemn it to more centuries of barbarism. No amount of U.S. aid can help if a people believe their neighbors who worship differently should be killed. And that, unfortunately, is what Afghans do believe.
Liberals have clearly gotten it wrong on foreign policy. It’s a challenge to conservatives to get it right.
Nor reading The New York TASS.
QFT, especially the bolded part. Bring our people back to the 21st Century and allow the Afghans to wallow in the 6th Century. However, since they've proven a propensity for terror, keep a close eye on them with our 21st Century technology. Any sign of such foolish terroristic endeavors should be acknowledged with the application of force via UAV.
Conservatives should renounce nation building. It doesn't work.
The neo-cons should be kicked to the curb...
And for that to happen, the GOP has to decide that we’re going to stop carrying water for the Israel lobby. That’s why the neo-cons came into the GOP: They saw that the post-’68 Democratic Party, and absolutely the post-’73 DNC, was going to be hostile to Israel’s interest, and so the rather recently left-wing American Jews who were pro-Israel decided that their foreign interests out-weighed their domestic agenda and they’d hitch their wagons to the GOP.
The GOP used to be a pretty isolationist party in foreign affairs, and it’s high time we got back to those roots. Until the Bushes came along, wars were predominately made by the Democrats, and people who got tired of war voted for the GOP.
Now we have the two Bush wars saddled around the necks of conservatives, and Bush Jr. blew away any notions of the GOP being fiscally conservative.
The Saudis have much more sway with the GOP than the Israelis, see James Baker.
Yes, they do. Entirely too much. We could end that tomorrow if we produced enough crude to eliminate the 10% of our crude that we get from the Saudis.
The Israeli capture of GOP foreign policy, however, is rooted in nothing as tangible as oil. It’s based on really idiotic fealty to some notion of Israel being an “ally” or some such (ask the USS Liberty survivors about that “ally” idea).
Are you saying that, if Israel is attacked we should do nothing?
Or are you saying that we should stop being dragged into preemptive actions?
I'm not trying to be contentious. Far from it; what you said in your post is undeniable fact.
I'm just trying to gauge your feelings toward defending Israel, or for that matter any other ally. What about Japan, what about S. Korea, what if the Russians become aggressive in E. Europe?
Most of our actions in the ME have nothing to do with oil. The cynical lefties like to claim such, but it’s BS. There’s nothing that anyone is doing to interrupt the flow of oil out of the middle east - including Iran.
The Iraq situation clearly was a bust. There will be no huge dividend of cheap oil out of that country to “pay” for our efforts there.
The other dabblings in the ME (Libya, Egypt, Syria, etc) are all looking like a clear step backwards. All that is happening is that the salafists are gaining ground. Whoopie... that’s a brilliant “own goal.”
Deal with Iran? OK, how? They’re far larger than Iraq, they’re in a geography we can’t easily invade, and if we try to pull something off, they have enough covert forces that they could visit some real problems here in the US.
If Israel is attacked? I don’t know. Depends on “by whom?” Why should we respond? They have their own weapons, up to an including nukes. They would respond first, and probably without consulting us now.
My point is thus: It is clear now, from the last 30 years of meddling in the region, that we are only making a bad situation even worse. From the Carter years until now, we’re just making a hash of the entire region as we put our own people and interest at risk. If our goal was to improve stability in the region, we’re accomplishing the exact opposite. If our goal is to reduce the number of terrorists... I can argue that we’re doing the opposite. If our goal was to improve our standing in the region, there’s no doubt were utterly failing at that.
As to the Russians and western Europe (much less eastern Europe): We have no more bargaining chip there. Force won’t remedy the fact that western Europe has decided to tie themselves to Russa economically for fuel. The natural gas pipelines running into western Europe mean that if the Russians want something, they don’t need to bother picking up a gun. All they need to do is wait for a really cold winter, close a valve on a pipeline and ask “Now how much would you pay?”
South Korea is playing footsie under the table with the Nork’s. They have been for years. While we’ve been trying to impose economic sanctions on the Norks, the South has been making private deals on the side, undercutting our efforts. I see no reason why we should put our butts on the line there unless the South is going to help us provide a unified strategy and front. Since we’re now indebted to the tune of over a trillion bucks to the ChiComs, if the Norks attacked, the PRC can restrain us from responding decisively with mere economic threats. Everyone knows this, so it’s pointless to pretend otherwise.
The reality of the situation is now this: We’re out of money. We’ve squandered our resources on frivolous things, and anyone who doesn’t have their head in their posterior knows this.
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