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Opening up today’s coverage of the Middle East, Caroline Glick says there is no doubt American foreign policy has been reset.
Aside from the carnage in Benghazi, the most enduring image from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as US secretary of state was the fake remote control she brought with her to Moscow in 2009 with the word “Reset” in misspelled Russian embossed on it.
Clinton’s gimmick was meant to show that under President Barack Obama, American foreign policy would be fundamentally transformed. Since Obama and Clinton blamed much of the world’s troubles on the misdeeds of their country, under their stewardship of US foreign policy, the US would reset everything.
Around the globe, all bets were off.
Five years later we realize that Clinton’s embarrassing gesture was not a gimmick, but a dead serious pledge. Throughout the world, the Obama administration has radically altered America’s policies.
And disaster has followed. Never since America’s establishment has the US appeared so untrustworthy, destructive, irrelevant and impotent. …
… Obama’s approach to world affairs was doubtlessly shaped during his long sojourn in America’s elite universities.
Using the same elitist sensibilities that cause him to blame American “arrogance” for the world’s troubles, and embrace radical Islam as a positive force, Obama has applied conflict resolution techniques developed by professors in ivory towers to real world conflicts that cannot be resolved peacefully.
Obama believed he could use the US’s close relationships with Israel and Turkey to bring about a rapprochement between the former allies. But he was wrong. The Turkish-Israeli alliance ended because Erdogan is a virulent Jew-hater who seeks Israel’s destruction, not because of a misunderstanding.
Obama forced Israel to apologize for defending itself against Turkish aggression, believing that Erdogan would then reinstate full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Instead, Erdogan continued his assault on Israel, most recently accusing it of organizing the military coup in Egypt and the anti- Erdogan street protests in Turkey.
As for Egypt, as with Syria, Obama’s foreign policy vision for the US has left Washington with no options for improving the situation on the ground or for securing its own strategic interests. To advance his goal of empowering the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama pushed the Egyptian military to overthrow the regime of US ally Hosni Mubarak and so paved the way for elections that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power.
Today he opposes the military coup that ousted the Muslim Brotherhood government. …
Walter Russell Mead was in the WSJ with additional critique of U. S. Mideast policy.
… With the advantages of hindsight, it appears that the White House made five big miscalculations about the Middle East. It misread the political maturity and capability of the Islamist groups it supported; it misread the political situation in Egypt; it misread the impact of its strategy on relations with America’s two most important regional allies (Israel and Saudi Arabia); it failed to grasp the new dynamics of terrorist movements in the region; and it underestimated the costs of inaction in Syria.
America’s Middle East policy in the past few years depended on the belief that relatively moderate Islamist political movements in the region had the political maturity and administrative capability to run governments wisely and well. That proved to be half-true in the case of Turkey’s AK Party: Until fairly recently Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whatever mistakes he might make, seemed to be governing Turkey in a reasonably effective and reasonably democratic way. But over time, the bloom is off that rose. Mr. Erdogan’s government has arrested journalists, supported dubious prosecutions against political enemies, threatened hostile media outlets and cracked down crudely on protesters. Prominent members of the party leadership look increasingly unhinged, blaming Jews, telekinesis and other mysterious forces for the growing troubles it faces.
Things have reached such a pass that the man President Obama once listed as one of his five best friends among world leaders and praised as “an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend on a wide range of issues” is now being condemned by the U.S. government for “offensive” anti-Semitic charges that Israel was behind the overthrow of Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi.
Compared with Mr. Morsi, however, Mr. Erdogan is a Bismarck of effective governance and smart policy. Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were quite simply not ready for prime time; they failed to understand the limits of their mandate, fumbled incompetently with a crumbling economy and governed so ineptly and erratically that tens of millions of Egyptians cheered on the bloody coup that threw them out.
Tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists and incompetent bumblers make a poor foundation for American grand strategy. We would have done business with the leaders of Turkey and Egypt under almost any circumstances, but to align ourselves with these movements hasn’t turned out to be wise.
The White House, along with much of the rest of the American foreign policy world, made another key error in the Middle East: It fundamentally misread the nature of the political upheaval in Egypt. Just as Thomas Jefferson mistook the French Revolution for a liberal democratic movement like the American Revolution, so Washington thought that what was happening in Egypt was a “transition to democracy.” That was never in the cards. …
So, what to do now in Egypt? American policy there, reasons Charles Krauthammer, should support the military over Morsi and the brotherhood.
… After all, we’ve been here. Through a half-century of cold war, we repeatedly faced precisely the same dilemma: choosing the lesser evil between totalitarian (in that case, communist) and authoritarian (usually military) rule.
We generally supported the various militaries in suppressing the communists. That was routinely pilloried as a hypocritical and immoral betrayal of our alleged allegiance to liberty. But in the end, it proved the prudent, if troubled, path to liberty.
The authoritarian regimes we supported — in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Chile, Brazil, even Spain and Portugal (ruled by fascists until the mid-1970s!) — in time yielded democratic outcomes. Gen. Augusto Pinochet, after 16 years of iron rule, yielded to U.S. pressure and allowed a free election — which he lost, ushering in Chile’s current era of democratic flourishing. How many times have communists or Islamists allowed that to happen?
Regarding Egypt, rather than emoting, we should be thinking: what’s best for Egypt, for us and for the possibility of some eventual democratic future.
Under the Brotherhood, such a possibility is zero. Under the generals, slim.
Slim trumps zero.
As for Syria, Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor says, given our tardiness, there are no longer any plausible options.
… A robust air campaign against Assad would seriously jeopardize his ability to survive. But then what?
That’s the real problem. Perhaps if the US had intervened in US and toppled Assad in 2011, a somewhat stable outcome could have been achieved. Stable by Mideastern standards, anyways. Maybe like Iraq, circa 2008-2009. You wouldn’t want to live there, but it could be worse.
That’s no longer an option: it now will be worse than Iraq post-Surge, and likely worse than Iraq pre-Surge. In the last two years, the Islamist fanatics, many of them foreigners, have come to dominate the opposition. Assad’s fall would result in a bloody civil war between the factions of the opposition, and the communities that support Assad (notably the Alawites). The place would become a horror show, a magnet for jihadists, and a sanctuary for terrorists.
The US Army and Marines have no stomach for getting involved in such a fight, the American people have no stomach for it, and it is hard to justify on the basis of our national interest. Some Europeans, notably the French and British, are currently all hot to intervene, but given their pathetic military capabilities, that’s a case of “let’s you and him fight.” Moreover, you know that as soon as things get tough, or at the first claim that the US military has committed an atrocity, the Europeans would be self-righteously criticizing us.
So I have little doubt that US airpower could make relatively short work of Assad’s military forces and government, and tip the balance to the opposition (who were on the verge of victory early this year without air support) but the aftermath would be a bloody mess, and we would be led by a CIC (Commander in Chief) who would have no stomach for the fight. So I can understand Dempsey’s reluctance completely.
I am seriously conflicted about how to proceed. ..