Writing this morning in Asia Times Online, I draw out the implications of the power vacuum left by the collapse of American foreign policy with the Iranian elections. The editors’ summary is:
President Barack Obama has not betrayed the interests of the United States to any foreign power, but he has done the next worst thing, namely, to create a void by withdrawing American power. By removing America as a referee, he will provoke more violence than the United States ever did. A very, very dangerous period is about to begin, and it could start with Iran.
I wrote:
There’s a joke about a man who tells a psychiatrist, “Everybody hates me,” to which the psychiatrist responds, “That’s ridiculous – everyone doesn’t know you, yet.” Which brings me to Barack Obama: one of the best-informed people in the American security establishment told me the other day that the president is a “Manchurian Candidate”.
Follow the link above for the rest.
That can’t be true – Manchuria isn’t in the business of brainwashing prospective presidential candidates any more. There’s no one left to betray America to. Obama is creating a strategic void in which no major power will dominate, and every minor power must fend for itself. The outcome is incalculably hard to analyze and terrifying to consider.
Obama doesn’t want to betray the United States; he only wants to empower America’s enemies. Forcing Israel to abandon its strategic buffer (the so-called settlements) was supposed to placate Iran, so that Iran would help America stabilize Iraq, where its influence looms large over the Shi’ite majority.
America also sought Iran’s help in suppressing the Taliban in Afghanistan. In Obama’s imagination, a Sunni Arab coalition – empowered by Washington’s turn against Israel – would encircle Iran and dissuade it from acquiring nuclear weapons, while an entirely separate Shi’ite coalition with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would suppress the radical Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was the worst-designed scheme concocted by a Western strategist since Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery attacked the bridges at Arnhem in 1944, and it has blown up in Obama’s face.
Iran already has made clear that casting America’s enemies in the leading role of an American operation has a defect, namely that America’s enemies rather would lose on their own terms than win on America’s terms.
June 29th, 2009 |
Obama needs to understand that with Iran America is faced with at best a major adversary and most probably a serious enemy. With such the best policy is to maintain a credible deterrent through vigorous diplomacy and to find overt and covert ways to strengthen the dissidents.
What we need is a Churchill or an Eisenhower; what we have is a naive Chamberlain or Carter. The fellow is trying to extend his silver tongued campaign ways onto the world stage; he needs to start governing by engaging hard realities with tough choices. Frost advised Kennedy to be more Irish than Harvard. I should advise Obama to be more Chicago than Cambridge.
June 29th, 2009 |
A quick note on your latest ‘Spengler’ article – a prescient piece that wisely argues that the erosion of US power makes the world more dangerous for small countries:
The coup against Mossadegh is among the most poorly understood but most often quoted episodes in the history of the contemporary Middle East. Total CIA expenditures were small (under $200,000 if memory serves); total CIA presence in Iran was minimal (10 people or fewer, again going from memory); in effect, CIA activity at best aided a coup already underway.
To better understand the subject, I suggest that you read Kermit Roosevelts autobiography, in which he aggrandizes his role in the coup. I believe that any balanced observer would conclude that CIA station head Roosevelt, contrary to his own claim, did not overthrough Dr. Mossadegh; the good Dr. was immensly unstable at the time, refusing to wear clothing other than pajamas as a sign of political protest.
By endorsing the Roosevelt account of the Mossadegh episode, one which is standard fare in Iran and in the Arab world, Obama did worse than merely ‘apologize’; he apologized for something that did not happen. It was the latest episode of his bizarre ‘empathy,’ his effort to understand events from the perspective of ‘the other,’ in this case, the hysterical and conspiratorial Persian other. It showed the extent to which by attempting to understand the other, one becomes him.
June 29th, 2009 |
Alas, PL, our juvenile leader will be neither. He is captive to “the narrative” and cannot deviate from its structure on pain of losing his “base”. That those stalwarts have no good intentions towards the US means nothing. In his mind all will turn out well. Jimmuh Cahtuh thought the same way. Hold on, it’s going to get bumpier.
June 30th, 2009 |
Early in my appointment as Chief Engineer of a large environmental engineering consultant, I was charged with the requirement to hire a relatively large number of engineers in a short period of time. I could consider very bright but inexperienced engineers or I could consider engineers with lesser lights but with some applicable experience. If I committed to a fairly intense training schedule with the inexperienced group using my existing personnel resources, the former experience turned out to be very rewarding. But this was true only in tyhe case of those who could swallow their pride and admit they could learn something from the effort. The ones who could not do this were found to be unproductive and I eventually had to let them go. (With much less angst my experiences with the latter group were successful, gernerally). What’s the point?
I think Obama falls into the category of being bright but ignorant and, because of his ego, unwilling or incapable of seeking the best solution to problems besetting our country. This frame of mind is lethal in the leader of our country. I hope and pray that the “hope/change” he promised us during the campaign applies to himself for the sake of our collective survival.
June 30th, 2009 |
It’s true that all Obama is capable of is trite pap as taught today in academia. He is worse even than Carter because at least Carter has some experience of the world. Obama has none.
June 30th, 2009 |
I think the last thing the USA needs at this time is a Democrat president -particularly this one-getting us in a war in Iran. The Republicans play at war the Democrats are expert at it.
June 30th, 2009 |
I see no foreign policy. I only see a disparate collection of long-standing left-wing talking-points.
July 1st, 2009 |
I only disagree with the notion that Obama [or any President for that matter?] is sufficiently in control of all that goes on under his watch to himself, consciously “want to empower America’s enemies” and do so with the consent of his top advisors and the foreign policy establishment without having a reason for this flirtation with disaster. Who crafted and engineers the overall strategic policy. An accident, unintended consequences of wishful thinking? No one? I doubt it. Obama – by himself? Come now. And we are the only ones smart enough to see it? If we recognize the great unravelling in play, then surely, those in positions to oversee and craft long-term foreign policy are even more aware of it. Mr. Change is obviously so fake that it begs the question as to what his high powered advisors and financial backers really intended to accomplish with this insincere fraud.
An aside, if you step back and look deeply into his emotional posture as he speaks and see the inherent dullness, seminar speak, and refusal to let it all rip, then you may gleam a man who, despite his show of cool, barely holds himself together, and hardly contains his seething animosity and resentment. For now he is still in thrall, excited by his pop star status, driven by compensatory self adulation at how well he manages to tame and master this hostile beast America. All things to all people, maybe, but only for a time before the magic wears off, and he wishes that he too could flee for Neverland. It strains credulity to believe that, for instance, George Soros or Zbig Brzezinski would sponsor and continue to advise and support the President if all he was intended to do was create a “strategic void” and power vacuum — which he is clearly doing with his left wing posture of blame America first, international version of Alinskian group grope cum financial overextension and exhaustion. If we assume an intention to this rhetoric in light of reasonable suspicions about the Color Revolutions and economic policy stretching the dollar’s acceptance, then it looks like the Obama administration is part of a nebulous multi-front western strategy meant to draw our would be challengers and even enemies out into the open and invite them to strike at our apparent weakness and incompetence [i.e. the Green revolution was intended to fail & goad Iran into overreacting etc.]
July 1st, 2009 |
Some valid points in the “Spengler” article, but I wonder what exactly you would propose as a better course? The status quo was clearly a miserable (and expensive) failure. And despite how necessary-but-deplorable America’s misdeeds during the Cold War were, it is also a fact that much of the world hates us for them. So, how exactly should we proceed?
I personally believe America must finally quit talking the talk about its ideology and start walking the walk. If this entails some risk for our national interests, then so be it. I’m tired of being hated for being the citizen of a nation that has consistently taken the path of least resistance. We need to mean what we say for a change. Obama may be leading us down the wrong path, but it is a new path and it is certainly no more assured of failure than our old path was. I say give the man a chance.
July 2nd, 2009 |
I worked in Saudi Arabia for several years, and while I can never hope to understand the Middle-Eastern mindset, I learned an awful lot about it.
One particular lesson was that our penchant for playing nice doesn’t work very well over there. While we would strive to strike a deal that gives everybody something (a positive-sum game, if you will), all too many in the middle east are happy to play the negative-sum game. Their cultural upbringing leaves them perfectly content to lose massively at the game, as long as their enemy loses as much or more.
July 2nd, 2009 |
Stoopid American,
What would I do differently than Obama? First of all, I would use force and the threat of force against people who use force against us. The way to give the Iranian opposition the chance to topple Khameini is to humiliate him: take out the nuclear facilities. The US should do it, not leave it to the Israelis. Ally firmly with the Egyptians and Jordanians against the likes of Hamas and Hizbollah. Put pressure on Syria to break with Iran and throw Hamas out. I could go on at some length.
July 3rd, 2009 |
Mr. Goldman, you state precisely what the US is and will do once it has induced the intended targets to overreact to the color revolution provocations made – rather blatantly – under the cover of Obamaspeak.
The US will use force and the threat of force — but for a time, the grand strategy has Obama acting so as to feign weakness, test the limits of persuasion & the intelligence of our rivals, and give our enemies a chance to make our case for us. Vacillation, compromise, and diplomacy proffered, and yet, in some quarters, the overall intention to remake the entire Middle East remains. And as frightening as it still sounds, I expect that indeed, it will be remade. That is what is in play over the next decade. I doubt that anyone crafting Obama’s foreign policy is worried that Iran will not finally show its truer colors and act in a way that justifies to the world that it must be stopped from developing nuclear weapons. In the meantime, I would expect that this “void” allows assessments of Putin and Hu Jintao and how far they are willing to push back or even unveil their hostile intentions with real shows of force. When the time comes for the US to reassert itself & strike back, then President Obama’s advisors are not likely to allow another Carter-like paralysis. Iran’s revolutionaries are emboldened by the softer, gentler US stance, the mullahs are made to seem reactionary and ridiculous and in the end, they will play right into their worst fears of being overthrown with their heavyhandedness. When the airstrikes are finally made against Iran, Obama’s strategic void will make sense. For him to do otherwise and start with a heavyhand would undo his popularity and interfere with domestic agendas that require it.
July 3rd, 2009 |
“…I could go on at some length.”
—Spengler
Spengler:
Why not do a blog, or series of blogs, detailing your suggested approach for America to the Middle East?
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