Posted on 03/03/2014 3:58:37 PM PST by SJackson
At the beginning of February, Fred Kaplan, the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, headlined a Slate article, “Obama Isn’t Disengaged From the World: He just has a better understanding of how power works in the modern world.”
Power, as it turned out, worked much the same way in the modern world as it did back in the horses and bayonets era as Putin demonstrated when he did what no one in the West believed he would do by sending men and armor into Crimea.
Since one doesn’t get to be an Edward R. Murrow fellow by sitting on one’s hands, Kaplan dashed off to pen a follow-up article headlined: “There’s Nothing Obama Could Have Done to Stop Putin.” Kaplan’s advice to Obama was to avoid threatening Putin with “consequences.”
“Obama should be looking for common interests. One such interest is ending the bloodshed,” Kaplan suggested.
If the Russian dictator is known for anything it’s his tender heart and opposition to bloodshed.
“Even Putin couldn’t want to send troops to the Ukrainian heartland,” Kaplan wrote. Unless of course Putin, whom foreign policy experts assured us couldn’t possibly want to send troops into Crimea, turns out to be ignorant of “how power works in the modern world” and does it anyway.
If that happens then the same experts who told us he wouldn’t do it, will tell us that we can’t do anything about it. It’s not in the nature of “power in the modern world.”
“You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” a baffled Secretary of State John Kerry said, as if Putin had decided to bring back monocles and pork pie hats.
But nevertheless Putin dug through his closet, stuck in his monocle and decided that you actually can invade other countries even though it’s 2014.
Lieutenant John Kerry, still baffled by the concept of one country invading another, also called it “an incredible act of aggression” and “a stunning, willful choice by President Putin.”
“Russia is in violation of its international obligations,” he bleated. Despite presenting a ceremonial potato to the Russian Foreign Minister, Kerry didn’t seem to understand that Russia cares about its international obligations almost as much as his boss cares about the United States Constitution.
This strange claim that invading other countries went out of style in the 19th century is belied by two world wars, countless smaller conflicts, including the Korean War and the Gulf War, and a few wars in the 21st century, but those facts don’t penetrate the progressive worldview.
At the debates, Obama had mocked Romney’s criticism of his drastic military cuts by accusing him of living in a 19th century “horses and bayonets” world and sneered at Romney’s statement that Russia was our leading geopolitical foe by asserting, “You don’t call Russia our No. 1 enemy… unless you’re still stuck in a Cold War mind warp.”
When Sarah Palin predicted back in 2008 that the invasion of Georgia would lead to the invasion of Ukraine, Saturday Night Live brought in Tina Fey to put on a little skit about seeing Russia from her house and everyone had a good laugh at the bumpkin who didn’t realize that the Cold War was over.
Last summer, Obama told Jay Leno, “There have been times where they slip back into Cold War thinking and a Cold War mentality. What I continually say to them and to President Putin, ‘That’s the past. We’ve got to think about the future.’”
Leno is gone and Putin is in the Ukraine and Obama is baffled to realize that when your enemies are stuck in the Cold War mentality, you either get your Cold War mind warp on or give up and go home.
Putin is thinking about the future. It’s Obama and Kerry who are clinging to discredited ideas about international law and diplomacy. These ideas are much more 19th century than anything Putin did.
The progressive spin is that Putin’s invasion, as the Center for American Progress put it, is “an act of weakness, not strength — an act, as Kerry aptly characterized it, anachronistic in both moral and strategic terms… fundamentally mismatched to 21st century realities.”
In the upside down world of progressive soft power, invading another country is an act of weakness while being unable to do anything about it is an act of strength. Weakness is the new strength and strength is the new weakness.
Obama’s impotence makes him a world leader, while Putin’s potency makes him a 19th century relic.
The more Putin does, the more he shows that he’s another Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney, a déclassé bumpkin unfit for the modern 21st century realities of discussing foreign policy on Jay Leno and cracking wise about horses and bayonets.
True strength means recognizing your own weakness and not doing anything about it except making snarky remarks about how backward those rough 19th century barbarians with their old-fashioned invasions are.
“In a world of free trade and highly globalized markets, territorial conquest simply isn’t a good way to make your country stronger,” the Center for American Progress insists.
But what if it is?
What if we haven’t entered some land after time where armies don’t matter and everything works because Tom Friedman wrote a book about the flattening earth?
What if all those old strategies that made today’s powers what they are, still work? What if steel and lead, the old verities of the world of horses and bayonets that Obama cheerfully dismissed while cutting the military to the bone, still make all the difference in the world?
“He has the G8 summit in Sochi coming up, no one really saw this kind of thing coming,” a Senate aide protested. In the world of Senate aides, G8 summits matter more than territory. That attitude reflects more on the unreal world of modern politics than on what it actually takes to be a great power.
Meetings, committees and conferences, international organizations, multilateral initiatives and all the other dross with which the great powers occupy themselves are nothing more than the elite rituals of an exclusive club whose members have forgotten that it was their wealth and armies that made them powers, not their committee meetings.
The progressive delusion of a modern world with no room for armies and invasions falls apart the moment that a barbarian rides in on a horse brandishing a rifle with a bayonet and shows that it can be done despite all the free trade agreements and G8 summits in the world.
Obama and Kerry find themselves, like time travelers thrown back in time to the 19th century or the 1950s, stuck in a world that plays by Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and Vladimir Putin rules, where no one knows that invading other countries is passé and that power is achieved at summits and not at the point of a gun.
Like the nerds at the back of the cafeteria they pretend that the jocks who invade other countries will flunk out and have to work in a Moscow shoe store and eventually everyone will recognize that real power is being able to denounce the uncivilized ruffians as backward cretins in the school paper.
And if that doesn’t happen, due to the nature of power in the modern world, they won’t be able to do anything about it anyway.
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Democrats' 'Smart Power' Lies in Ruins; Suddenly
Realizing What They Miscalculated About the World:
National Review | Sept 3, 2013 | Jim Geraghty / FR Posted by kristinn
....... Democrats are suddenly realizing that their foreign policy brain-trust completely misjudged the world.
Being nicer to countries like Russia will not make them nicer to you. The United Nations is not an effective tool for resolving crises. Some foreign leaders are beyond persuasion and diplomacy. There is no “international community” ready to work together to solve problems, and there probably never will be.
You can pin this on Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Susan Rice, but most of all, the buck stops with the president. Those of us who scoffed a bit at a state senator ascending to the presidency within four years on a wave of media hype and adoration are not quite so shocked by this current mess.
We never bought into this notion that getting greater cooperation from our allies, and less hostility from our enemies, was just a matter of giving this crew the wheel and letting them practice, as Hillary Clinton arrogantly declared it, “smart power” (and fronted Time magazine cover).
(These people can’t even label a foreign policy approach without reminding us of how highly they think of themselves.)
They looked out at the world at the end of the Bush years, and didn’t see tough decisions, unsolvable problems, unstable institutions, restless populations, technology enabling the impulse to destabilize existing institutions, evil men hungry for more power, and difficult trade-offs.
No, our problems and challengers were just a matter of the previous hands running U.S. foreign policy not being smart enough. (Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
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OH, BTW, AT THE SAME TIME Smartpowertics, O and HILL, staged military raids in Libya, they gained access to the National Bank of Libya. (No, no paper money there---just solid gold bars. Solid Gold. Not the Chinese tungsten filled bars that flooded the gold market).
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LET'S STROLL DOWN MEMORY LANE In 2009, Obama made a "Smart Power" suck-up speech in Cairo----"apologizing" for America's historical role in the Middle East. By snubbing Mubarak, Obama set the stage for the Egyptian president's overthrow by the Islamic mob.
When the worst-case scenario happened, when Obama's personal choice---Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi, was elected president----Obama sap-happily sent his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to Cairo to personally kiss-up to Morsi....perhaps at that time hatching their plans to destroy Westen civiliation in compliance w/ Muslim dictates.
Obama's treacherous ill-advised component of US foreign policy----sucking up to the very people who want to kill us and destroy our churches. He portrayed teeming Muslim majorities there as "victims of Western colonialism and Cold War policies," stupidly promoting American-style democracy for these conflicting cultures w/ thousands of years of religious and territorial factionalism.
OBOBO'S SUCKUP "The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars," Obama said in the June 2009 speech in Cairo. "More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies, without regard to their own aspirations."
Fast forward to 2013: the savage Muslim Brotherhood torched some 63 Egyptian churches and many Christian businesses. Obama ignored the bloodbath and spent the crisis dining out, golfing, power-partying, and vacationing in exclusive Martha’s Vineyard on the taxpayers' dime.
Wrong on points no one in the west thought Putin would emply armor to occupy the Crimea. Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney knew.
This is all “noise”. Basics: The USA does not want to see a single power dominate the Eurasian landmass. This interest does not change.
Right now China is on-the-make — the up & coming power both economically and militarily. So the US needs Russia & India as counterbalances. SOOOO when Russia moves against Ukraine, the US will do -—— nothing.
40 years ago the situation was reversed and the US was letting things slide with China because it created discomfort for the then Soviet Union.
Talk about being observant. I didn't think about that. Boy,doesn't Putin have Obama over a barrel. All Putin has to do is call a press conference and say,"If Obama doesn't shut up about our foreign policy decisions I'll cut the US off our Space Program."
You might ask Lou Foxwell to put you on his ping-list.
Happy to include you on the Greenfield ping list. You need only ask.
I’m on Louis’ list!
I just caught the article before checking my pings.
Greenfield is one of the very very best.
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