Thursday, October 29, 2009

Obama is a foreign policy naif. Will he learn in time or at all?

http://tinyurl.com/ylc7lw6
Truman and the Principles of U.S. Foreign Policy
Jimmy Carter rejected the postwar consensus. President Obama appears to be following a similar path. By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Upon entering office, Barack Obama knew little about foreign policy....President Obama often invokes the supposed mess abroad—especially in Iraq and Afghanistan—left to him by George W. Bush. But Mr. Obama's inheritance is mild compared to the myriad crises that nearly overwhelmed the rookie President Truman....Truman constantly learned from his mistakes. Gradually, the president shed his Wilsonian trust that there would be a postwar global consensus under the aegis of the new United Nations. Instead, he came to believe that too many trans-Atlantic diplomatic elites had been terribly naïve about Stalin's murderous agenda...Truman...established the parameters of the next half-century of bipartisan American foreign policy. ...Secretary of State Dean Acheson summed up the president's doctrines: "Released from the acceptance of a dogma that builders and wreckers of a new world order could and should work happily and successfully together, he was free to combine our power and coordinate our action with those who did have a common purpose."...Truman's "common purpose." That means containing rival anti-Western ideologies, establishing alliances of similarly-minded democratic allies, and periodically standing up to regional thugs.
Jimmy Carter's presidency was a departure from this strategy...cutting defense... questioned the U.S. commitment to South Korea and offered homilies about the inordinate fear of communism....short-sighted decision to arm radical Islamists in Pakistan, the abrupt abandonment of the previously allied Shah of Iran, and initial courting of the exiled radical Ruhollah Khomeini...stunned into inaction by the subsequent Iranian hostage crisis and the rise of militant Islam...Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Communist inroads into Central America, and the alienation of European governments...Mr. Obama exhibits both the initial inexperience—and some of the naïveté—...He has framed the challenge of radical Islam largely in terms of what a contrite America must do to apologize to the Muslim world, instead of addressing endemic religious intolerance, autocracy, statist economies, tribalism and gender apartheid that help fuel extremism....reaches out to enemies such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al Assad, the Castro brothers and Hugo Chávez. It pays far less attention to British, Colombian, French, Israeli and Japanese allies....the centrifuges keep spinning while we appear unreliable to friends, compliant to rivals, and weak to enemies....greater support to the U.N., seemingly unworried that the organization's illiberal majority has often appeased or abetted autocratic governments.Will an inexperienced Barack Obama...learn quickly that the world is chaotic and unstable—best dealt with through strength and unabashed confidence...? Or will a sermonizing Mr. Obama follow the aberrant Democratic path of the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter: finger-wagging at allies, appeasing enemies, publicly faulting his less than perfect predecessors, and hectoring the American people to evolve beyond their supposed prejudices? America awaits the president's choice. The world's safety hinges upon it.

No comments:

Post a Comment