“Assessing Strength And Weakness”: When The Only Card You Have To Play Is Fear
On a couple of occasions, President Obama has challenged the media’s assumption that Russian President Putin was acting from a position of strength. The first was in response to a question from Jonathan Karl at a news conference in The Hague not long after Russia’s incursion into Crimea.
Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors not out of strength, but out of weakness. Ukraine has been a country in which Russia had enormous influence for decades, since the breakup of the Soviet Union. And we have considerable influence on our neighbors. We generally don’t need to invade them in order to have a strong, cooperative relationship with them. The fact that Russia felt compelled to go in militarily and lay bare these violations of international law indicates less influence, not more.
The President basically made the same point when Steve Kroft tried to insinuate that Putin’s involvement in Syria was a challenge to his leadership.
When I came into office, Ukraine was governed by a corrupt ruler who was a stooge of Mr. Putin. Syria was Russia’s only ally in the region. And today, rather than being able to count on their support and maintain the base they had in Syria, which they’ve had for a long time, Mr. Putin now is devoting his own troops, his own military, just to barely hold together by a thread his sole ally…
Well Steve, I got to tell you, if you think that running your economy into the ground and having to send troops in in order to prop up your only ally is leadership, then we’ve got a different definition of leadership.
With those examples in mind, I think that Peter Beinart has done a good job of describing the difference between how Republican presidential candidates and President Obama assess the threat from ISIS.
Because the GOP candidates see violent jihadism as a powerful, seductive ideology, they think that many American Muslims are at risk of becoming terrorists, and thus that the United States must monitor them more aggressively. Because Obama sees violent jihadism as ideologically weak and unattractive, he thinks that few American Muslims will embrace it unless the United States makes them feel like enemies in their own country—which is exactly what Donald Trump risks doing.
Obama…believes that powerful, structural forces will lead liberal democracies to triumph over their foes—so long as these democracies don’t do stupid things like persecuting Muslims at home or invading Muslim lands abroad. His Republican opponents, by contrast, believe that powerful and sinister enemies are overwhelming America, either overseas (the Rubio version) or domestically (the Trump version).
All the chest-thumping coming from Republicans is based on an elevated assumption of the real threat posed by ISIS. But that’s what happens when the only card you have to play is fear. Behind all the bravado, their message makes America look weak and easily intimidated. President Obama isn’t buying into that for a minute.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, December 7, 2015
“The Learning Curve For Bush Remains Steep”: The Problem With Jeb Bush’s Saber-Rattling
As promised, Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush delivered remarks in Berlin yesterday, and the former governor did exactly what he intended to do: he shook hands with Chancellor Angela Merkel, he avoided any obvious mistakes, and he lambasted Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But in his remarks, Bush also chided President Obama’s foreign policy in a way that’s worth considering in more detail:
“Ukraine, a sovereign European nation, must be permitted to choose its own path. Russia must respect the sovereignty of all of its neighbors. And who can doubt that Russia will do what it pleases if aggression goes unanswered?”
This is a standard argument in Republican circles. Putin’s aggression went “unanswered,” which only emboldened him and other bad actors around the world. It’s up to the White House to step up in situations like these, and Obama didn’t.
The problem, of course, is that the exact opposite is true. Obama didn’t allow Putin’s aggression to go unanswered; Obama acted quite quickly to impose tough economic sanctions on Russia, which have taken a real toll. Indeed, it was the U.S. president who rallied international allies to isolate Putin diplomatically and economically.
Bush may believe these actions weren’t enough, and he would have preferred to see more. Fine. But he then has a responsibility to tell U.S. voters now, before the election, what kind of additional steps he has in mind when confronting a rival like Russia. If economic and diplomatic pressure are insufficient, is Bush on board with a military confrontation?
(Incidentally, if Bush is looking for actual examples of the United States allowing Russian aggression to go unanswered, he might look at his brother’s inaction after conflict erupted between Russia and Georgia in 2008. He could also look at Reagan’s reaction to Russia killing 269 people, including an American congressman, by shooting down a civilian airliner.)
That’s what ultimately made Jeb Bush’s saber-rattling yesterday so underwhelming: it was largely hollow.
At one point yesterday, Jeb said U.S. training exercises in the region wasn’t “mean” enough. Really? What would a “mean” Bush foreign policy look like, exactly?
He added, “To deal with Putin, you need to deal from strength. He’s a bully, and bullies don’t – you enable bad behavior when you’re nuanced with a guy like that. I think just being clear – I’m not talking about being bellicose, but just saying, ‘These are the consequences of your actions.’”
So Bush envisions a “mean” policy lacking in “nuance” that delivers “consequences.” But he hasn’t explained in detail what such a policy might look like.
The Florida Republican’s first foray into foreign policy was in February, and at the time, it went quite poorly. Four months later, it seems the learning curve for Bush remains steep.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 10, 2015
“Mitt Romney, The Charles Atlas Of International Relations”: It’s A Wonder This Guy Didn’t Get Elected President
In today’s Washington Post, one Willard Mitt Romney — you remember him — has penned an op-ed lamenting the fact that the United States military has grown so itty-bitty that it’s left us unable to accomplish anything on the world stage. In an epic feat of straw-man construction, Romney boldly takes on those who want to leave America defended by nothing more than a few pea shooters and sling shots, demanding that we vastly increase our defense budget. Let’s take a look at some of what he has to say:
Russia invades, China bullies, Iran spins centrifuges, the Islamic State (a terrorist threat “beyond anything that we’ve seen,” according to the defense secretary ) threatens — and Washington slashes the military. Reason stares.
“Reason stares”? I’ll have to confess my ignorance of whatever literary reference Mitt is tossing in here (the Google machine is unhelpful on this score, so I can’t be the only one who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about), but is Washington really “slashing” the military? According to the most recent budget documents, the total defense budget for 2014 is $620 billion; the Pentagon wants just over $600 billion for 2015. That’s a bit less than we spent in the last few years (the budget peaked in 2011 at over $700 billion), but that’s in large part because we’re no longer fighting in Iraq and we’re winding down our war in Afghanistan; budget sequestration also imposed some cuts. We still account for over a third of the entire world’s military spending. It hardly seems like we’re “jettison[ing] our reliance on U.S. strength,” as Romney asserts. Let’s move on…
Some argue that the United States should simply withdraw its military strength from the world — get out of the Middle East, accept nuclear weapons in Iran and elsewhere, let China and Russia have their way with their neighbors and watch from the sidelines as jihadists storm on two or three continents. Do this, they contend, and the United States would be left alone.
“Some argue”? Who are these “some”? He won’t say, because no one is actually arguing those things. Some also claim that Mitt Romney employs a team of commandos who kidnap small children and bring them before their master so he can feast on their sweet flesh, but I emphatically reject that charge, no matter what “some” would have you believe.
Mitt then argues that the fact that we have a huge military budget only conceals our true weakness:
More relevant is the fact that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is significantly greater than our own and that, within six years, China will have more ships in its navy than we do. China already has more service members. Further, our military is tasked with many more missions than those of other nations: preserving the freedom of the seas, the air and space; combating radical jihadists; and preserving order and stability around the world as well as defending the United States.
I’ll agree that we deploy our military to the four corners of the globe more than any other nation. But look at what Mitt is concerned about. Russia has more nuclear bombs than we do! When we launch an all-out nuclear exchange with them and every human being on the planet has either been vaporized or is dying of radiation poisoning, they may be able to continue to drop bombs on the scarred moonscape that once was America! My question is this: why has Romney not addressed the mineshaft gap? And how can we possibly feel safe when the day comes that China has more ships than we do? After all, a lengthy sea war with the Reds is all but inevitable.
Romney doesn’t mention a single conflict — past, present, or future — that would turn out differently if our military was bigger. For instance, he’s very concerned about Ukraine. And if we had an even larger military, then…what? We’d be happy to start a war with Russia? Or if we boosted our military spending then it would change the calculation of some other adversary?
The fact is that we face plenty of challenging foreign policy situations around the world. Romney ticks off many of them. But in not a single one, or in all of them combined, is the problem that we don’t have enough guns and bombs to do the job. We don’t want Iran to become a nuclear power, but we also really don’t want to invade Iran to stop it from happening. It’s not that we can’t reduce the whole nation to an endless field of rubble, because we can. But it would be a terrible idea. ISIS presents a conundrum, but that’s not because we don’t have a sizeable enough force to take them on; the problem is that launching a re-invasion of Iraq and a new invasion of Syria would create more problems for us than it would solve. Russia’s actions in Ukraine are deeply troubling, but the outcome of events there won’t be determined by whether we have sufficient stockpiles to defeat Russia in a land war. We do, but that’s not the issue.
Like most conservatives, Romney fetishizes “strength” as the sole determining factor in any international conflict and the essence of leadership. And this is what so infuriates them about the current president: Barack Obama understands, and isn’t afraid to say, that strength may be important, but it’s not enough, and sometimes it’s utterly beside the point.
Now wipe away a tear as Mitt closes:
Washington politicians are poised to make a historic decision, for us, for our descendants and for the world. Freedom and peace are in the balance. They will choose whether to succumb to the easy path of continued military hollowing or to honor their constitutional pledge to protect the United States.
Yes, freedom and peace are in the balance. Increase military spending, and all international challenges will melt before us like the frost on spring’s first morning; cut that spending by a few billion, and freedom will die a quick death. With informed, sophisticated thinking like that, it’s a wonder this guy didn’t get elected president.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 5, 2014
“The Follies Of Overreach”: The Limits Of American Power; Judging Obama’s Foreign Policy
When I was young, a mantra among progressives was that America had to stop operating as global policeman. Vietnam was the signal episode of arrogant and ultimately self-defeating American overreach. But there were plenty of other cases of the U.S. government doing the bidding of oil companies and banana barons, and blithely overthrowing left-democratic governments as well as outright communists (or driving nationalist reformers into the arms of communists.)
As the late Phil Ochs tauntingly sang, “We’re the cops of the world.” Or as Randy Newman mordantly put it, “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens.”
At the same time, I viewed myself as sensible left. I was the guy at the Moratorium demonstrations of the late 1960s and early 1970s (actually covering them for Pacifica) hoping to make prudent withdrawal from Vietnam a majority cause, not the guy chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh.”) I liked Norman Thomas’s line: Don’t burn the flag, wash it.
Overthrowing elected leaders like Chile’s Allende, staging coups against Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala, blocking the elected presidency of Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic—those were outrages. Yet the basic containment of Soviet expansionism seemed necessary and smart policy to me.
As a lapsed political scientist, I agreed with the received wisdom that global anarchy and American isolationism led to 20th century war and chaos. I thought people who preached world government were naïve. I was, if you will, on the left wing of the realist camp. Yes to benign use of American power, no to marginal Cold War adventures and corporate-led foreign policy. Pick your battles and don’t assume unlimited power; give colonies their liberty but with very limited forays into “nation building.”
I understood that much of the pent-up rage in the global South was a delayed reaction to earlier Western imperialism, both political and economic. But I did not romanticize every Third World uprising.
Later, I thought Bill Clinton got it about right with his intervention in the former Yugoslavia, warm embrace of Mandela, diplomacy in Northern Ireland, realistic anti-terrorism policies, and relative restraint generally. I applauded Clinton’s Mid-East peace efforts, but thought both parties were far too indulgent of Israeli settlement-building on the West Bank.
Today, the legacy of the Cheney-Bush regime has underscored the folly of overreach. Every place where America intervened under the Cheney doctrine, we’ve left a worse mess than the one we attempted to fix.
In a sense, the Left has gotten its wish. Events have made crystal clear that America can’t intervene everywhere. It’s not even apparent that we can constructively intervene anywhere.
Challenges to global peace and stability are hydra-headed and localized, not the work of a central conspiracy. Not even Henry Kissinger could cut a deal with non-state militias, and there’s not much to negotiate with the ISIS caliphate.
Despite the partial culpability of Western excesses during the last century, it’s hard to argue that Jihadists are therefore the good guys and Yankee imperialists the bad guys. On the contrary, radical Islam is at war against the Enlightenment, not to mention the rights of religious others, women, and basic political democracy. (So, for that matter, are ultra-orthodox Zionism and ultra-fundamentalist Christianity.)
Despite its omissions, limitations, and the central role of dead white Europeans, I’m rather fond of the Enlightenment. Its basic ideals are worth defending.
Many Jihadists would surely use nuclear weapons if they could get them, making the events of 9/11 look like a mere prologue, and requiring U.S. global vigilance.
So, Left friends, be careful what you wish for. America’s power today is humbled—and the world is more of a cauldron than ever. Even for lefties inclined to “blame America first,” as the Right likes to put it, U.S. intervention is often a lesser evil.
So if you were Czar, as the old saying went, exactly what foreign policy would you venture?
Given the limited options, is Obama getting it mostly right? Or is he pursuing the correct policies but somehow projecting weakness (as he surely does with Republicans at home)?
Where does it make sense to exit the game, even if the vacuum is filled by true crazies and sectarian wars, as in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Where must we conclude that we have little constructive role to play despite humanitarian outrages, because of limited resources and leverage, as in Syria?
Where are truly vital interests at stake (Ukraine, and China?) and what’s the possible policy? Where is robust diplomacy a substitute for brute force?
How do we deal with the true menace of nuclear proliferation, when it’s no longer feasible to police the world?
I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Warren. I hope she runs for president. However, several progressive Democrats, not unreasonably, have lately said to me: But she has no foreign policy experience. Do we have any idea of her views, or whom she’d appoint? With the world in crisis, would people vote for someone like Warren solely on pocketbook issues?
Well, Cheney and Rumsfeld had plenty of foreign policy experience, and look what it got us. Obama had none whatever, but Kerry and Biden seem to be doing about as well as anyone could, given the terrible hand that history has dealt them. Clinton, if memory serves, had been governor of Arkansas, a state without a foreign policy.
Here is one more story from my youth. At my Oberlin graduation, in 1965, the Commencement speaker was Martin Luther King, Jr. The College trustees, perhaps to balance Dr. King, were also giving an honorary degree to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, architect of the Vietnam escalation.
One faction of students wanted to boycott or picket Commencement, but that would have insulted Dr. King. Moderate lefties like me proposed a compromise. If Rusk would meet with us and listen to our proposal, we would not stage a demonstration. The meeting was duly brokered. The few far lefties groused that the student leaders had sold them out.
At the meeting, we pitched the following proposition. Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a nationalist. His real enemy was China. South Vietnam was corrupt, non-democratic, and in any case not viable as a state. Why not allow Ho’s National Liberation Front to take power, as America should have done when Ho won his anti-colonial war with France in 1954, and guarantee Vietnam’s neutrality in exchange for Vietnam’s non-intervention elsewhere?
Rusk smiled indulgently. What did we know? We were a bunch of kids.
As events turned out, we were better realists than Rusk. Today, half a century later, the communist government in Hanoi prizes trade deals with America, practices semi-capitalism, does not threaten its neighbors, and relies on the U.S. as a counterweight to China. We might have had roughly the same outcome in 1965, with 50,000 fewer American combat deaths.
But I digress. Here are two concluding thoughts.
First, despite far-left fantasies, American can’t simply exit the world stage. There are too many menaces that require our constructive engagement. But America’s room to operate is very limited.
Secondly, better to have a thoughtful and well-read progressive leader with limited foreign policy experience than an experienced right-wing zealot like Cheney, or even a misguided experienced moderate like Rusk.
By: Robert Kuttner, Co-Founder and Co-Editor, The American Prospect; The Huffington Post Blog, July 27, 2014
“More Unhinged Than Usual”: Ted Cruz Sees An Imaginary ‘Economic Boycott Of Israel’
Just last week, a civilian airliner was shot down over a war zone, killing all 298 people on board. On Tuesday, just five days after the tragedy in Ukraine, a rocket landed Tuesday within a mile of Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel.
In the interest of public safety and fearing a “potentially hazardous security situation,” the Federal Aviation Administration announced a temporary halt to U.S. flights into the Israeli capital. “Safety is the very first priority for DOT, for FAA,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said yesterday. The announcement coincided with suspended flights from Air France and Lufthansa, along with a warning from the European Aviation Safety Agency, which “strongly” recommended against flights into Tel Aviv.
Here in the U.S., many on the right responded to the news with the kind of maturity and restraint we’ve come to expect: “FAA Trutherism” was born. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in a move that was brazen even for him, accused the Obama administration of launching an “economic boycott on Israel.”
“When Secretary Kerry arrived in Cairo this week his first act was to announce $47 million in additional aid to Gaza, which is in effect $47 million for Hamas. In short order, this travel ban was announced by the FAA. Aiding Hamas while simultaneously isolating Israel does two things. One, it helps our enemy. Two, it hurts our ally.
“Until these serious questions are answered, the facts suggest that President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands. If so, Congress should demand answers.”
By any fair measure, Cruz’s response was more unhinged than his usual condemnations. The FAA’s security concerns, the far-right Texan said, are “punitive” and a possible attempt at “economic blackmail.” The senator raised the prospect of a presidential conspiracy, demanding information on “specific communications … between the FAA and the White House.”
Keep in mind, the Obama administration also asked Congress this week to “fast-track Israel’s request for an additional $225 million for the Iron Dome anti-missile system.” As Steve M. noted, the Obama administration and other Democrats “are seeking additional funding for Israel’s defense shield while Ted Cruz is alleging an economic boycott of Israel on Obama’s part.”
Cruz either hasn’t kept up on current events or he’s choosing not to see details that contradict his wild-eyed nonsense.
And the senator isn’t alone. Last night, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly told viewers the FAA was prohibiting domestic flights to Tel Aviv, but the FAA hadn’t imposed a similar policy over Ukraine. What Kelly claimed was wrong – the FAA has banned commercial travel over Ukraine since April.
This is what happens when the right gets a little too excited about bashing Obama – they lose sight of reality. The instinct to see presidential conspiracies lurking in every corner has passed the tipping point.
Let’s not brush past just how bizarre this whining really is. At its core, the complaint from Cruz and his allies is that the Obama administration is trying too hard to protect Americans traveling near war zones. If there were a deadly incident at the Tel Aviv airport involving a civilian U.S. passenger plane, it’s easy to imagine conservatives demanding to know why the FAA didn’t do more. This week, Republicans are instead complaining the FAA did too much.
This morning, however, Cruz received the news he wanted to hear: the FAA is now satisfied there are security measures in place and the travel ban is now over. The right can now move safely about the political landscape, looking for new “scandals” in need of conspiracy theories.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 24, 2014
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