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John Podhoretz blogs about a New Yorker piece from Ryan Lizza that will be getting a lot of attention. In it we learn about the White House strategy of “leading from behind.”
The most-discussed article of the week will surely be Ryan Lizza’s report on the development of the Obama foreign policy in the New Yorker, called “The Consequentialist.” The notable quote in the piece comes at the end:
“One of his advisers described the President’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. It’s a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world. Pursuing our interests and spreading our ideals thus requires stealth and modesty as well as military strength.”
The crystallizing phrase “leading from behind” may not be something you’ll see on a sign at the 2012 Democratic convention, but it will almost certainly be in the acceptance speech of the nominee of the Republican party at its 2012 convention, and will be thrown in Obama’s face during the presidential debates by his GOP rival, and will be the centerpiece of the critique of Obamaism going forward. It’s so revealing, in fact, that I wouldn’t be surprised if the White House goes on a hunt to find the person who said it in order to defenestrate him before he does more colossal damage to his boss’s chances of reelection.
More to come on this unexpectedly revealing article later today. Leading from behind. Hoo boy.
John Steele Gordon comments on the Podhoretz post.
When a presidential adviser is quoted in the New Yorker as using an allusion to a comic figure of fun in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta to describe Obama’s foreign policy approach, the White House must know it’s in trouble.
The first person to be described as “leading from behind,” at least as far as I know, was the Duke of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers, Gilbert and Sullivan’s last great success. The Duke explains that when he was in the army he occasionally led his regiment into action and “invariably led them out of it.”…
Michael Rubin starts out by having some fun, but then makes some excellent points about what should guide foreign policy.
John makes some astute comments regarding Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article on President Obama’s foreign policy doctrine. It’s just too easy to poke fun at the concept of “Leading from Behind,” so excuse me as my tongue goes fully into cheek. Just as Barack Obama’s election led to the renaming of a handful of elementary schools, perhaps in the spirit of “Leading from Behind,” it’s time to embrace the Obama enthusiasm and recast other concepts. …Don’t call Deepwater Horizon an oil spill: It was simply “greasing from below.” We miss a debt payment? That’s “Financing from Behind.” Back in 1992, I got a D in an organic chemistry test. At the time, I was concerned. Now, I realize I should not have been. I was simply learning “behind the curve.” I’d certainly love to play poker with President Obama one day, because while other players might seek a full house or, at least three-of-a-kind, our president might “gamble from behind” and instead settle for a pair of threes.
More seriously, while President Obama may believe that the U.S. is reviled in much of the world, a lesson I learned from years crisscrossing the Middle East and, more broadly, Africa and Asia, is that when it comes to American policy, other nations will criticize us no matter what we do. We are “damned if we do, damned if we don’t.” In such circumstances, the best thing to do is to worry less about what people might think, and simply do what we think is right. There is a State Department corollary to this which became apparent during the Cold War, in the run-up to the Operation Iraqi Freedom, and many times since. Perhaps instead of seeking to change American policies to win plaudits in their countries of residence, American diplomats would be better served arguing and defending American policies, leaving no criticism unanswered.
Rick Richman blogs about more instances of “leading from behind.”
In his article “The Consequentialist” in this week’s New Yorker, Ryan Lizza reported the White House reaction to State Department staffer Jared Cohen, who contacted Twitter during the peak of the Green Revolution in Iran and asked it to delay its planned upgrade. Protesters were using Twitter to provide information to the international media, and the upgrade would have temporarily shut down Twitter. Lizza reported that:
White House officials “were so mad that somebody had actually ‘interfered’ in Iranian politics, because they were doing their damnedest to not interfere,” the former Administration official said. “Now, to be fair to them, it was also the understanding that if we interfered it could look like the Green movement was Western-backed, but that really wasn’t the core of it. The core of it was we were still trying to engage the Iranian government and we did not want to do anything that made us side with the protesters. . . . The official said that Cohen “almost lost his job over it. If it had been up to the White House, they would have fired him.” …
Peter Wehner picks up on another quote from Ryan Lizza’s article.
Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article is every bit as devastating as John says. Among the more damning quotes is this one:
[Zbigniew] Brzezinski, too, has become disillusioned with the President. “I greatly admire his insights and understanding. I don’t think he really has a policy that’s implementing those insights and understandings. The rhetoric is always terribly imperative and categorical: ‘You must do this,’ ‘He must do that,’ ‘This is unacceptable.’ ” Brzezinski added, “He doesn’t strategize. He sermonizes.”
The same people who helped give us the four awful years of the Carter presidency now feel confident enough to stand in judgment of Mr. Obama (and for sermonizing instead of strategizing, no less!).
Things are quickly heading south for the president.
Jennifer Rubin comments on an article about Obama’s intelligence.
…I hate to be prosaic about this, but what is the evidence that Obama is a complex guy? ( None of the three gurus have met or actually diagnosed him, of course, and I’d bet, just a wild guess here, that they are liberal Democrats who just think he is swell.)
After all, Obama has not blazed new political or policy trails as Bill Clinton did. He’s written no scholarly books (sorry, memoirs don’t count). His understanding of the Middle East has been so slight and his strategy so misguided that there are no Israeli -Palestinian peace talks, and we have been spectacularly unsuccessful in stopping the hegemonic aspirations of Iran. I mean, isn’t it just as likely that Obama’s a garden-variety liberal with poor decision-making skills?
…In Obama’s case we’re told similar lines. He’s so darn smart. He’s such a detailed-oriented guy. He’s really too complex for his own good. Come to think of it, this is what they said about Jimmy Carter. Could it be that it wasn’t too much intellect but not enough smarts (street smarts, people smarts, executive smarts) that’s the problem?
Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph, UK, also has criticism.
…As the Libya campaign enters its seventh week, with Britain and France playing the leading roles, US leadership is dramatically absent. On Syria, where the Baathist regime is brutally suppressing democracy protestors, killing large numbers in the process, Washington remains largely paralysed while its dangerous strategy of engagement with the Assad regime continues. On the Middle East as a whole, the Obama administration barely has a coherent big picture strategy, hardly an advertisement for what it calls its “smart power” approach. In reality the Obama doctrine represents little more than the humbling of a superpower, and the stunning abdication of US leadership in an increasingly dangerous world. As I noted previously, America badly needs another Reagan-style revolution, not only to rebuild its economic might, but also to restore its standing in the world.
In the LA Times, Andrew Malcolm looks at the accumulating public relations stumbles from the White House.
…What the public sees, while it frets over stubborn unemployment and soaring gas prices, is a diffident Democrat who takes a 17-vehicle motorcade of SUVs and limos to be seen looking at clean-energy cars.
A pontificating president who suggests that one worried commuter buy a new car instead of complaining. …
…here’s a selection of other Obama activities scheduled this week: Wednesday he and wife Michelle fly to Chicago on Air Force One. They will be there for three hours. The sole purpose: to tape an Oprah show. Obama will then fly to New York City. The sole purpose: a political fundraiser.
Air Force One costs the government $181,000 an hour to operate. …
David Harsanyi comments that the green bureaucrats are winning, the price of gas is going to European levels.
…The left’s “energy” initiatives of the past decade — the entire purpose of energy policy, in fact — have been aimed at artificially driving fossil fuel prices up to incentivize the bitter clingers to embrace the government’s Utopian energy schemes. No secret has been made of it. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama was asked by CNBC’s John Harwood, “So could the (high) oil prices help us?” Obama: “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment.” Sudden spikes are bad (politically speaking), but gradual price spikes? Helpful. That same year, current U.S. “Energy” Secretary (then just a zany professor) Steven Chu clarified that “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
Who says this administration doesn’t get things done?
…Let’s not forget the Environmental Protection Agency, which, as we speak, is in the process of rolling out the “the most far-reaching environmental regulatory scheme in American history,” according to Time magazine. Using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases — so, all useful energy — the EPA is trying to initiate cap and trade by fiat. It has to because even a Democratic monopoly in Washington was unable to muster the courage to launch this kind of assault on prosperity. …
In Pajamas Media, Will Collier says the economics behind increasing gas prices are simple. It’s worth looking at the graph and reading Collier relate how Bush increased drilling and oil prices plummeted.
It must have looked so simple from Barack Obama’s rarely visited Senate office, or Steven Chu’s comfortable digs at Berkeley: if only we stopped taking advantage of all those nasty fossil fuels, everything would be better. Three years ago, when then-Senator Obama was dismissing high energy prices as just another good reason for more government handouts, and Chu was insisting that Americans ought to pay European prices for gasoline, all they heard in return was applause from their core constituencies — academics and the media.
Unfortunately for now-President Obama, the reality of $4-$5-a-gallon gasoline is a much tougher sell to the general public. He’s put himself to work spinning the line that “speculators” are at fault for high prices, but the actual explanation is far more prosaic. Limited supply plus growing demand equals higher prices. That’s a formula so simple, even a community organizer should be able to understand it.
Asian demand for energy continues to rise as nations in the far east region — oddly lacking in “stimulus” spending — continue to boom. Supply, meanwhile, has fallen off, not only as a consequence of the turmoil in Libya and other oil-producing countries, but also thanks to the Obama-ordered moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico — and the recently ordered moratorium on future drilling anywhere else off the American coastline. …
In the Beltway Confidential – Washington Examiner, Mark Tapscott picks up on Will Collier’s piece.
…Check out the chart that accompanies this post. Notice what happened on July 14, 2008? Oil prices suddenly plummeted from their historic high of $145 a barrel. Why?
Because that was the day President George W. Bush signed an executive order lifting the moratorium on off-shore drilling in the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico and off the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Overnight, the price per barrel of oil plunged, and that plunge was reflected at the pump soon thereafter.
In other words, Obama could with the stroke of a pen sign an executive order telling his appointees at EPA, the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy to stop throwing up obstacles to increased U.S. oil and natural gas production and instead work with the energy industry on a crash program to “drill here, drill now.” …
John Fund updates us on 2012.
…Mr. Daniels has told reporters that he is close to a decision and promises that if he does run he will boast an endorsement list and fund-raising contacts that “will blow people’s socks off.”
Mr. Barbour’s departure leaves the race without a clear Southern candidate… The rich treasure trove of Republican delegates in the South will no doubt prompt people to encourage Texas Gov. Rick Perry to enter the GOP race. Mr. Perry, the author of a new book detailing his state’s battles with the federal bureaucracy, has won statewide office six times and presides over a booming local economy. …
Jay Ambrose, in the Detroit News, comments on the travesty of justice facing Boeing.
…Boeing’s lawyers are outraged, one of them telling the New York Times this move is absolute nonsense, but absolute nonsense has been getting its way quite a bit in this country lately. If it does this time around, it’s thought it could be a bad sign for South Carolina and the other right-to-work states that think individual rights should supersede collectivist power plays.
Let’s all agree that there was a time when unions helped us get to justice in this land. But let’s understand, too, that the opposite can be more nearly true today. It’s not an accident that union membership has dropped to little more than 7 percent in the private sector. Federal and state laws prohibit the kinds of worker abuses that sometimes happened in the past.
The real strength of labor is now in the public sector where, in some states and cities, it has taken advantage of weak-kneed politicians. Rather tame attempts to tamp down on these threats have been greeted by angry protests and have been described in endless news stories as incursions on union “rights.” But there is no right of collective bargaining with the government. …
In the Corner, Robert Costa has South Carolina’s Governor Nikki Haley’s NLRB strategy.
Across the country, from Wisconsin to Ohio, Republican governors are battling Big Labor. Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, in an interview with National Review Online, says that her state is the next front. But Haley’s foes are not graybeard professors or drum-banging state workers; she is facing off against bureaucratic activists in Washington, D.C.
…Haley, for her part, is baffled by how the feds think that they can kick around a private company, picking and choosing where it operates. “There is no case; this is ridiculous,” she says. “It is an embarrassment for the NLRB. The unions are losing and this is nothing more than a desperate attempt to see if they can make their voices relevant again.”
But it is, Haley asserts, a “national fight,” with political implications for both parties. “I am going to fight this every step of the way,” she says. “We absolutely will not accept the bullying. This is a direct assault on right-to-work states.” In the coming days, the governor will urge the president — and the Republicans hoping to beat him in 2012 — to take sides.
Haley challenges President Obama to rally behind her. “I want to ask him why he is allowing unelected bureaucrats to come in and do the unions’ dirty work on the backs of our businesses,” she says. “It’s hurting the jobs in South Carolina and every other right-to-work state. He owes us an answer.” …
In the Corner, Katrina Trinko says Newt might be an ethanol flack.
Newt Gingrich, who said he was “not an ethanol lobbyist” in a letter to the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, worked as a consultant to an ethanol lobbying group in 2009. From the Center for Public Integrity:
Gingrich was a hired consultant to a major ethanol lobbying group—at more than $300,000 a year.
According to IRS records, the ethanol group Growth Energy paid Gingrich’s consulting firm $312,500 in 2009.The former House Speaker was the organization’s top-paid consultant, according to the records. His pay was one of the group’s largest single expenditures, as it took in and spent about $11 million to promote ethanol and to lobby for federal incentives for its use.
In a Growth Energy publication, Gingrich was listed as a consultant who offered advice on “strategy and communication issues” and who “will speak positively on ethanol related topics to media.”…