Hanson's blog: G-20 Outtakes http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/g-20-outtakes/
and NRO's Europe Got Obama — Now What? Obama is moving to the left of Europe.
G-20 Outtakes http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/g-20-outtakes/
Poodle Redux. Blair was denigrated as Bush’s poodle, although his eloquence and influence over Bush were clear to all. In contrast, Gordon Brown is embarrassingly obsequious to Obama, in a way Blair never was around Bush. And in further contrast, Obama shows an airy, polite disdain at being courted in such grubby fashion—while Bush was downright magnanimous in taking advice from Blair. Didn’t Brown get the message with the unviewable DVDs, the return of the Churchill bust, the ‘UK size of Oregon’ analogies? And will the press do a Brit “poodle” story?
Rich Rioters. Odd to see anarchists trying to burn and loot while some are text messaging and cell-phoning in the news clips—as if such ignoramuses can’t grasp that nihilism and anti-capitalist angst lose their authenticity when they depend on the trademarks of the global corporate world. Spoiled Westerners tried to riot on TV before texting each other to meet for latte (no doubt at Starbucks); those in Peru or Chad or happy enough to have access to Amoxicillin via globalization.
Europe Out-europed. There is a certain sort of irony in London. Bush was so easily caricatured as the right-wing Texas-slanging cowboy that Euros found it easy to pose as progressive utopian antitheses. (Never mind that Bush in his second term was good to Europe, or that his positions on immigration, spending, new federal programs, etc. were hardly conservative.) Now Obama is trumping them all as a far more genuine leftist than any in Berlin or Paris. The President wants far bigger deficits than they do, wants more trade protectionism to protect domestic unions, wants to embrace cap and trade whole hog, is more eager to engage radical regimes abroad, and will pay for his socialism with big cuts in defense that will make it harder to protect socialist unarmed Europe.
All sorts of ironies arise: is all this sort of a ‘be careful what you wish for’ nemesis that Europe deserves? (I wrote about this for this week’s TMS column). A sort of Obama doing a Nixon to China that everyone can take an odd delight in? (no liberal will dare suggest he is being rude to the Brits or having trouble connecting with our allies). Or is Obama reflecting new realities that the US is now a revolutionary society whose immigration the last 50 years has come from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, that in turn better warrant our attention? Hussein is not the middle name of most European ministers (nor are many of African heritages), and Obama reminds Europe that we too were a colony without much of a colonialist history. All so strange.
Debt, debt, debt everywhere. The backdrop behind the entire scene is that Obama is borrowing $1.7 trillion, and with future projected budgets that require perhaps another ca. $10 trillion over the next possible eight years. The message seems to be that we Americans need new entitlements that we cannot pay for, nor have we earned them with goods and services, but we want all of you abroad to lend us the cash nonetheless. Odd, as was pointed out a few posts ago, that we will have cradle-to-grave health care due to borrowed Chinese dollars that didn’t go to basic cancer treatment to millions of Chinese who toil at factories.
Re: the new relations with Russia. I hope all the happy talk leads to less tensions. But it is easy to sort of promise to be nice, to push the “reset” button, or to talk grandly of new protocols; but the fact is that all this rhetoric means nothing.
What Obama must answer is to what degree is he going to turn Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet republics back over to Russian influence, to what degree is he going to ignore Russian gas/oil blackmail over energy-hungry Western Europe, to what degree is he going to tsk tsk Russian complicity in Iran’s nuclear program, to what degree is he going to drop talk of protecting eastern Europe (and Western) with an anti-ballistic system aimed at Iranian missiles, etc. If those really are issues, then we will have problems with an authoritarian and dictatorial Russia bent on restoring former grandeur.
Hope and Change. In every case, a democratic Russia, integrated within the West, could solve such tensions fairly easily. But I fear now that all of them are challenges that Putin, Inc. will see as means to an end, such as restoring domestic pride, restoring Russian hegemony in areas encroaching upon Eastern Europe, and creating more problems for the US that will check our power.
I fear that the Russians will leave praising Obama to the skies, while delighted that Iran’s new bomb will cause us problems untold, that those in the East cannot trust us in a crisis, that Europe will learn to respect Russia if their flats are to stay warm—and that a rogue’s gallery of global fascists will begin to look to Russia, in Cold War fashion, to deal with us to further their aims.
Bottom line: this is the first global summit that I can remember in which the United States is occupying a position to the left of all our allies, and, in our fiscal promiscuity, to the left of our left-wing rivals as well.
NRO's Europe Got Obama — Now What? Obama is moving to the left of Europe
"Yes, we can!" Germans shouted in unison with candidate Barack Obama at their Victory Column in Berlin this past summer.
To judge by the crowds and European media, most Europeans were as ecstatic about the coming of the Obama presidency as they were over the departure of George W. Bush. At last, an American president who praised multilateralism and the United Nations, and seemed sympathetic to Europe’s socialist culture.
Obama’s multiracial, nontraditional heritage seemed sophisticated and cosmopolitan in a European way that Bush’s Texas accent and Christian fundamentalism most definitely were not.
Despite Bush’s efforts in his second term to work closely with the Europeans, and the emergence of conservative governments in France, Germany, and Italy, Old Europe for the most part was all too happy to see him go.
But will Europe always be happy with the Obama it wished for?
Mirek Topolánek, prime minister of the Czech Republic (which currently holds the European Union presidency), just blasted the Obama administration’s stimulus plans as “a way to hell.”
German chancellor Angela Merkel sniffed: “We must look at the causes of this crisis. It happened because we were living beyond our means. . . . We cannot repeat this mistake.”
And just when President Obama announced the dispatch of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, many European leaders confirmed they will withdraw their own contingents over the next two years.
America, meanwhile, may backtrack on missile defense for Eastern Europe in the face of Russian threats. And there is talk of more trade protectionism in the Democratic-controlled Congress. Europeans wouldn’t be happy if either of these things came to pass.
What, then, is going on?
In some sense, the Obama administration will bring a new honesty to European-American relations. For the last eight years, Europeans have had it both ways. Bush took out Saddam Hussein, removed the Taliban from power, hunted terrorists, offered firm security guarantees to the Europeans in their squabbles with the Russians, tried to box in Iran, and ran trade deficits with his free-trade policies. For his efforts, he was caricatured as a cowboy buffoon by European sophisticates.
But now after welcoming Obama, the Europeans are beginning to discover that they must contend with a new administration to the left of themselves. And as we saw with Obama’s recent cavalier treatment of visiting British prime minister Gordon Brown — he was given a packet of DVDs, unviewable in Europe, as a going-away gift — Obama doesn’t seem convinced of any special relationship with Europe. His interests and priorities lie more in Asia, Latin America, and Africa — places that have also been the great sources of immigration to America the last half-century.
So, it will be harder for Europeans to pull off the old two-step of quietly wanting the U.S. to deter threats while loudly deploring our Neanderthal reliance on brute force.
As Afghanistan turns from a joint NATO project into an American war, the Obama administration may well conclude that if we don’t have European allies against the Taliban, we won’t elsewhere. Perhaps NATO will be seen as a Cold War relic, with no place in Obama’s brave new multipolar world.
Given Obama’s plans to emulate Europe’s expensive socialist entitlement system, there may be less money for defense. Ironically, that would mean less American protection abroad of a disarmed socialist Europe — a continent sandwiched between North Africa, the Middle East, and Russia, with millions of unassimilated Muslim immigrants at home.
In matters of foreign policy, Obama likewise has outflanked the Europeans. His calls for talks without restriction with the Iranians; his offer to pour hundreds of millions into Gaza; his outreach to the Syrians; and his popular resonance in South America, the Middle East, and Africa suggest that a leftist America now has more in common with some of these former European colonies than do the centrist Europeans.
It was once easy to slur Bush’s War on Terror as typical American overkill. But now Europeans had better worry that someone in the Obama administration will notice that the renditions, preventative detentions, wiretapping, and summary deportations practiced in parts of Europe were often as authoritarian as anything Bush embraced.
On a number of other issues — expensive legislation to combat global warming, multilateral foreign policy, massive government borrowing, relations with unsavory foreign dictators — Obama is moving to the left of Europe.
The transatlantic alliance we’ve taken for granted for so many years, of course, won’t come to an end overnight. But how ironic will it be if its eventual downfall is someday traced not to a loud George Bush bang, but to a Barack Obama whimper
