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Charles Krauthammer comments on ineffective policy and ineffective spin.
In announcing the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on Iran, President Obama stressed not once but twice Iran’s increasing “isolation” from the world. This claim is not surprising considering that after 16 months of an “extended hand” policy, in response to which Iran accelerated its nuclear program — more centrifuges, more enrichment sites, higher enrichment levels — Iranian “isolation” is about the only achievement to which the administration can even plausibly lay claim.
…Really? On Tuesday, one day before the president touted passage of a surpassingly weak U.N. resolution and declared Iran yet more isolated, the leaders of Russia, Turkey and Iran gathered at a security summit in Istanbul “in a display of regional power that appeared to be calculated to test the United States,” as the New York Times put it. I would add: And calculated to demonstrate the hollowness of U.S. claims of Iranian isolation, to flaunt Iran’s growing ties with Russia and quasi-alliance with Turkey, a NATO member no less. …
…Increasing isolation? In the past year alone, Ahmadinejad has been welcomed in Kabul, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Caracas, Brasilia, La Paz, Senegal, Gambia and Uganda. Today, he is in China. …
Peter Wehner adds excellent commentary to Krauthammer’s discussion by bringing up Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s thoughts on Carter’s foreign policy.
…In a wonderful essay in COMMENTARY in February 1981, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in reviewing the failures of the Carter presidency, wrote about the ideas that animated it, including:
The political hostility which the United States encountered around the world, and especially in the Third World, was, very simply, evidence of American aggression or at least of American wrongdoing… If the United States denied itself the means of aggression, it would cease to be aggressive. When it ceased to be aggressive, there would be peace – in the halls of the United Nations no less than in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia.
Moynihan went on to write about the Carter administration’s “fateful avoidance of reality” — “a denial that there is genuine hostility toward the United States in the world and true conflicts of interest between this nation and others – and illusion that a surface reasonableness and civility are the same as true cooperation.” He warned about the “psychological arrogance that lay behind the seeming humility of our new relations with the Third World – it was we who still determined how others behaved.” And Moynihan concluded his essay this way:
With the experience of the last four years, we should at least have learned that foreign policy cannot be conducted under the pretense that we have no enemies in the world – or at any rate none whose enmity we have not merited by our own conduct. For it was this idea more than anything else, perhaps, that led the Carter administration into disaster abroad and overwhelming defeat at home. …
Mark Steyn explains why the left doesn’t support Ayaan Hirsi Ali and rights for Muslim women.
…Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s great cause is women’s liberation. Unfortunately for her, the women she wants to liberate are Muslim, so she gets minimal support and indeed a ton of hostility from Western feminists who have reconciled themselves, consciously or otherwise, to the two-tier sisterhood: when it comes to clitoridectomies, forced marriages, honour killings, etc., multiculturalism trumps feminism. Liberal men are, if anything, even more opposed. She long ago got used to the hectoring TV interviewer, from Avi Lewis on the CBC a while back to Tavis Smiley on PBS just the other day, insisting that say what you like about Islam but everyone knows that Christians are just as backward and violent, if not more so. The media left spends endless hours and most of its interminable awards ceremonies congratulating itself on its courage, on “speaking truth to power,” the bravery of dissent and all the rest, but faced with a pro-gay secular black feminist who actually lives it they frost up in nothing flat. …
…At the age of five, Ayaan was forced to undergo “FGM” (female genital mutilation), or, in the new non-judgmental PC euphemism, “cutting.” When she had her first period, her mother beat her. When she was 22, her father arranged for her to marry a cousin in Canada. While in Germany awaiting the visa for her wedded bliss in Her Majesty’s multicultural utopia, she decided to skip out, and fled to the Netherlands. …
..In a way, the Western left’s hostility to Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes my point for me. In Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman wrote that suicide bombings “produced a philosophical crisis, among everyone around the world who wanted to believe that a rational logic governs the world.” In other words, it has to be about “poverty” or “social justice” because the alternative—that they want to kill us merely because we are the other—undermines the hyper-rationalist’s entire world view. Thus, every pro-gay, pro-feminist, pro-black Western liberal’s determination to blame Ayaan Hirsi Ali for the fact that a large number of benighted thuggish halfwits want to kill her. Deploring what he regards as her simplistic view of Islam, Nicholas Kristof rhapsodizes about its many fine qualities—“There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews.” …
In the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson introduces the rest of the country to the phenomenon in Indiana: Governor Mitch Daniels.
… When Daniels took office, in 2004, the state faced a $200 million deficit and hadn’t balanced its budget in seven years. Four years later, all outstanding debts had been paid off; after four balanced budgets, the state was running a surplus of $1.3 billion, which has cushioned the blows from a steady decline in revenues caused by the recession. “That’s what saved us when the recession hit,” one official said. “If we didn’t have the cash reserves and the debts paid off, we would have been toast.” The state today is spending roughly the same amount that it was when Daniels took office, largely because he resisted the budget increases other states were indulging in the past decade.
No other state in the Midwest—all of them, like Indiana, dependent on a declining manufacturing sector—can match this record. Venture capital investment in Indiana had lagged at $39 million annually in the first years of this decade. By 2009 it was averaging $94 million. Even now the state has continued to add jobs—7 percent of new U.S. employment has been in Indiana this year, a state with 2 percent of the country’s population. For the first time in 40 years more people are moving into the state than leaving it. Indiana earned its first triple-A bond rating from Standard and Poor’s in 2008; the other two major bond rating agencies concurred in April 2010, making it one of only nine states with this distinction, and one of only two in the Midwest. …
…As our dinner wound down—I insisted on paying the bill, he offered to split it—he said he was going to give a commencement address the coming weekend, at Franklin College, south of Indianapolis. It had been inspired partly by the theme of “public service” struck by Obama’s recent commencement addresses, in which the president discouraged the pursuit of mere material gain in favor of nonprofit and government work.
“That strikes me as exactly the wrong message to send to young people,” Daniels said. “He’s got it completely wrong. Government service—nonprofits—all that’s fine and necessary. But the host can only stand so many parasites.” …
In NRO’s Agenda, Reihan Salam recommends Ferguson’s article.
If you haven’t read Andrew Ferguson’s brilliant profile of Mitch Daniels, the highly effective governor of Indiana, you should, and not just for its not inconsiderable entertainment value. Daniels is one of a small handful of public officials who’ve pursued a consistent and coherent conservative program while in office, and he’s found a way to make it broadly appealing. When attacked for demanding that school officials restrain their spending, Daniels worked to raise awareness of the real choices facing school districts.
“In fact, the governor’s office has publicized a “Citizens’ Checklist” that people can take to their local school boards to see if school officials have made every possible economy. Citizens in Vincennes need to take that list and get answers, he said. The list is filled with questions. Have the administrators “eliminated memberships in professional associations and reduced travel expenses”? Have they “sold, leased, or closed underutilized buildings”? Have they “outsourced transportation and custodial services”?”
A debate that had once pitted those who were “for the children” against those who were “against the children” suddenly became a debate about how much should be spent on classroom instruction versus administrative overhead. …
John Lindsay, former New York Mayor in the late 60′s and early 70′s, is receiving renewed MSM interest. In the WSJ, Vincent Cannato presents the irony.
…Lindsay represented a new kind of liberal politics, a top-down coalition of affluent white liberals, young people and minorities that was less attentive to the needs of the working- and middle class. This has come to mark the modern Democratic Party (which Lindsay joined in 1971), but has too often proved to be a weak governing coalition.
Like Mr. Obama, John Lindsay had a messianic quality. He was the shining knight sent to slay the city’s “power brokers.” Sure of the rightness of his policies, Lindsay spoke in moralistic tones. But he could be prickly and thin-skinned and quick to impute base motives to political opponents. Well into his mayoralty, he continued to blame many of his problems on his predecessor.
Lindsay promised an activist government to meet the needs of New Yorkers. That meant more spending, and more taxes to pay the bills—Lindsay created the city income tax and commuter tax. In his second term, the economy slowed and New York lost 250,000 private-sector jobs, but spending continued and the number of city workers swelled. As revenues dried up, short-term borrowing increased. In 1975, the city nearly defaulted on its loans. The dreams of an activist government came crashing down in a mountain of debt. …