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It’s “smart diplomacy day.” First with Daniel Henninger on the president’s disappearing credibility.
The collapse of ObamaCare is the tip of the iceberg for the magical Obama presidency.
From the moment he emerged in the public eye with his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention and through his astonishing defeat of the Clintons in 2008, Barack Obama’s calling card has been credibility. He speaks, and enough of the world believes to keep his presidency afloat. Or used to.
All of a sudden, from Washington to Riyadh, Barack Obama’s credibility is melting.
Amid the predictable collapse the past week of HealthCare.gov’s too-complex technology, not enough notice was given to Sen. Marco Rubio‘s statement that the chances for success on immigration reform are about dead. Why? Because, said Sen. Rubio, there is “a lack of trust” in the president’s commitments. …
… Bluntly, Mr. Obama’s partners are concluding that they cannot do business with him. They don’t trust him. Whether it’s the Saudis, the Syrian rebels, the French, the Iraqis, the unpivoted Asians or the congressional Republicans, they’ve all had their fill of coming up on the short end with so mercurial a U.S. president. And when that happens, the world’s important business doesn’t get done. It sits in a dangerous and volatile vacuum.
The next major political event in Washington is the negotiation over spending, entitlements and taxes between House budget chairman Paul Ryan and his Senate partner, Patty Murray. The bad air over this effort is the same as that Marco Rubio says is choking immigration reform: the fear that Mr. Obama will urge the process forward in public and then blow up any Ryan-Murray agreement at the 11th hour with deal-killing demands for greater tax revenue. …
OK, so Henninger is from the Journal. How does David Ignatius from WaPo look at the US/Saudi crackup?
… What should worry the Obama administration is that Saudi concern about U.S. policy in the Middle East is shared by the four other traditional U.S. allies in the region: Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. They argue (mostly privately) that Obama has shredded U.S. influence by dumping President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, opposing the coup that toppled Morsi, vacillating in its Syria policy, and now embarking on negotiations with Iran — all without consulting close Arab allies.
Saudi King Abdullah privately voiced his frustration with U.S. policy in a lunch in Riyadh Monday with King Abdullah of Jordan and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the U.A.E., according to a knowledgeable Arab official. The Saudi monarch “is convinced the U.S. is unreliable,” this official said. “I don’t see a genuine desire to fix it” on either side, he added.
The Saudis’ pique, in turn, has reinforced the White House’s frustration that Riyadh is an ungrateful and sometimes petulant ally. When Secretary of State John Kerry was in the region a few weeks ago, he asked to visit Bandar. The Saudi prince is said to have responded that he was on his way out of the kingdom, but that Kerry could meet him at the airport. This response struck U.S. officials as high-handed.
Saudi Arabia obviously wants attention, but what’s surprising is the White House’s inability to convey the desired reassurances over the past two years. The problem was clear in the fall of 2011, when I was told by Saudi officials in Riyadh that they increasingly regarded the U.S. as unreliable and would look elsewhere for their security. Obama’s reaction to these reports was to be peeved that the Saudis didn’t recognize all that the U.S. was doing to help their security, behind the scenes. …
Karen Elliot House former publisher of the WSJ was moved to come out of retirement for a comment on our feckless foreign policy.
… To understand the U.S.-Saudi rift, it is essential to realize that from the capital in Riyadh the world looks more threatening than at any time since the founding of modern Saudi Arabia in 1932. There have been other menacing times. Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s sought to destabilize the Al Saud by fomenting trouble in neighboring Yemen. In 1979, religious fanatics took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca and had to be ousted by military action. The Saudis feared, in 1990, that their kingdom was next after Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. In all those troubled moments, the U.S. was either a trusted if silent supporter of the Saudis or an active defender, as in the 1990 Gulf War.
Today, the Saudis find themselves alone regarding Syria, trapped in a proxy war with Iran, their religious (Sunni Saudi Arabia vs. Shiite Iran) and political enemy. The Saudis had sought and expected U.S. help in arming the rebels against Syrian ruler Bashar Assad, but the military aid never materialized. Instead, last month at the United Nations General Assembly gathering, President Obama eagerly sought a private meeting with Iran’s new president, Hasan Rouhani, to discuss its nuclear program. Mr. Obama seemed desperately grateful merely to get him on the phone.
A few days later, the Saudi foreign minister abruptly canceled his own speech to the General Assembly. Then last week, Saudi Arabia took the extraordinary step of turning down a Security Council seat it had long sought. According to a Reuters report this week, Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, head of the kingdom’s intelligence and national security operations, told European diplomats that both moves at the U.N. were intended as a blunt message to the Obama administration.
Only a year ago, Saudi officials expressed great confidence that Assad would be ousted from Syria by this fall. Instead, the Saudis now find themselves trapped with their foot on the snake Assad: They can’t step away, lest the snake strike, but lacking American help, they don’t have the means to kill the snake either. …
John Hinderaker of Power Line posts on the Saudi king’s opinion of the president.
… Heh. Welcome to the club, Your Highness. Anyone looking for honesty, consistency, loyalty or even common sense will have to seek out someone other than Barack Obama.
Still, the administration’s falling out with the Saudis is shocking. My opinion of the administration’s foreign policy is very low, but I never imagined they could destroy our relationship with our most important Gulf Arab ally.
And how are things in Europe you ask? Michael Rubin has answers.
… The situation with Europe is no better. Obama bent over backwards to insult Great Britain, presumably acting upon a grudge based on its treatment of his Kenyan grandfather. Yesterday, the White House sought to assuage German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but its carefully parsed words did not deny that the US government had previously tapped the phone of a woman who grew up under the Stasi.
What Obama—and so many of his realist mentors—never understood is that calculating interests is not a sterile endeavor. His advisors counseled him to view the world through the filter of short-term interests, and he obliged. When it came to understanding alleged allied anger, he took his echo chamber seriously, and conflated polemic and truth.
Cultivating allies is like paying a mortgage: The reward comes years later, and it would be silly to walk away 29 years into a 30 year mortgage just because it’s hard to balance that last payment with the reboot image and buy a new car. In effect, Obama ignored the value of alliance and friendship paved over decades by predecessors.
Alliances have value, and so do reputations. The two Bush’s, Clinton, and Reagan each understood the importance of standing with friends, and prioritizing long-term interests over short-term gain. By embracing stark realism, however, Obama has demonstrated so many realists’ failures to calculate the value of friendship, and to understand how investment in allies pays dividends over time. Alas, Obama did not. Now, far from being the president who would repair America’s image, Obama has become its soiler-in-chief, and it will take years if not decades to restore the trust of those which Obama has treated so cavalierly.
More on our European disaster from The NY Times’ Roger Cohen.
Germany, of course, has already concocted a compound word for it: Handyüberwachung. That would be spying on cellphone calls.
The U.S. surveillance in question targeted the phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Or at least she was convinced enough of this to call President Obama, express outrage at a “serious breach of trust” and declare such conduct between allies “completely unacceptable.”
The White House’s assurance to her that the United States “is not” and “will not” monitor her communications was tantamount to confirmation through omission that in the past it has.
Merkel is measured. For her to lift the phone and go public with her criticism leaves no doubt she is livid. As she said last July, “Not everything which is technically doable should be done.” This, on the now ample evidence provided by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, is not the view of the N.S.A., whose dragnet eavesdropping has prompted fury from Paris to Brasília.
Obama, in his cool detachment, is not big on diplomacy through personal relations, but Merkel is as close to a trusted friend as he has in Europe. To infuriate her, and touch the most sensitive nerve of Stasi-marked Germans, amounts to sloppy bungling that hurts American soft power in lasting ways. Pivot to Asia was not supposed to mean leave all Europe peeved.
But all Europe is. …