Nine months into the Obama presidency Charles Krauthammer wrote an article called Decline is a Choice. Being at the start of the Obama presidency he didn't have a lot of time to measure the consequences of the new foreign policy of the Left Liberal Ascendancy. After seven years I think there's been enough time to fairly examine its effects. Below is my assessment.
American Decline: Success or Failure?
Foreign policy: many Americans' eyes glaze over when you bring it up, the Democrats in their 1st debate didn’t even get asked about it. Yet as a democracy that chooses every four years the leader of the free world, and sole super power, it matters. Yet why should we be burdened with the thankless job of being a Super Power? Why not recoil from the conflicts of the world?
Simply put, under Obama, the United States would cease to act as a Super Power, taking a retracted, light footprint approach where necessary, retire the divisive rhetoric of Bush's War on Terror, Axis of Evil or Reagan's Evil Empire declarations, and finding some sort of accommodation and accord with adversaries would be the chief priority of American foreign policy.
Obama is no isolationist, he’s a committed multilateralist who’s foreign policy has been characterized by several key elements based largely on the European model of foreign policy: work multilaterally with the blessing of the United Nations and other international organizations, lead from behind relying heavily on supporting local forces, attempt to normalize relations with hostile powers through economic, strategic and diplomatic incentives and the negotiation of treaties, re-brand America as a humbled nation seeking redemption for a history of sins and unilateral warlike overreaction and striving to end all of its wars.
Well, we have tried all that to some extent in the last seven years so we can measure the results. The initial reaction was positive in some quarters. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize almost as soon as he was elected. Therefore, taking the Obama foreign policy region by region, strategy by strategy, is it a success or a failure?
Remember the famous “Russian Reset” Hillary Clinton tried to orchestrate under Obama? In Europe Obama abrogated the missile defense agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic. Putin got the message loud and clear, as did the rest of the world when Obama spoke into a hot mic while whispering quiet reassurances to Dmitry Medvedev, who didn’t even have to pass the message on to Putin as he promised because it was all over the news. Putin responded by seizing Crimea and invading the Eastern Ukraine, in the process causing us to abrogate our treaty with that Western friendly nation we had agreed to protect in exchange for allowing themselves to be defanged when we took their nuclear deterrent away. We failed to even provide the Ukraine with basic offensive weapons and intelligence. They asked, we said no. All we have done is to slap on some dubious and highly targeted sanctions and provide the Ukrainians with MREs, or as I like to call them, Meals Responsible for Emigration. Perhaps if the Ukrainians fed them to the Russians they could get them to leave.
The situation in Eastern Europe has gotten so bad that there are real fears that Russia will move against one of our new NATO allies in the East forcing NATO to flex its diminished muscles in a recent training exercise, as a way to discourage Putin from calling our Article 5 bluff. Meanwhile the Pols and the Baltic Nations tremble with fear and turn to the West to see an uncertain and disinterested America. All this while the Russians also hack us blind and are currently playing permanent host to the traitor, Edward Snowden and also get to charge us for ferrying our astronauts to the International Space Station because the first and only country to put men on the Moon now cannot even achieve near Earth orbit. The Russians also, against our wishes, stepped into the Syrian conflict and violated NATO ally Turkey’s airspace repeatedly until the Turks shot one of their planes down, risking war with the only nation on the planet capable of destroying us. True, cooler heads seemed to have prevailed, for now but we’re playing Russian Roulette with nukes.
Fail.
Fail.
With Cuba Obama has attempted to end the chilly relationship by normalizing relations with the island of tyranny. The result was we got no concessions from the Castros and they responded to our generosity by demanding Guantanamo Bay and reparations before sending troops to fight with their friends the Russians and Iranians in Syria.
Fail
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Look for Part 2 next week. We will explore Obama's foreign policy in the Middle East and more.
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