Bret Stephens’ stellar column in the Wall Street Journal today succinctly summarizes President Obama’s record of foreign failures:
His failed personal effort to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. His failed personal effort to negotiate a climate-change deal at Copenhagen in 2009. His failed efforts to strike a nuclear deal with Iran that year and this year. His failed effort to improve America’s public standing in the Muslim world with the now-forgotten Cairo speech. His failed reset with Russia. His failed effort to strong-arm Israel into a permanent settlement freeze. His failed (if half-hearted) effort to maintain a residual U.S. military force in Iraq. His failed efforts to cut deals with the Taliban and reach out to North Korea. His failed effort to win over China and Russia for even a symbolic U.N. condemnation of Syria’s Bashar Assad. His failed efforts to intercede in Europe’s economic crisis.
Stephens credits Obama with success in Libya (although the kinetic military operation was conducted in “a reluctant, last-minute, half-embarrassed fashion”), eliminating Osama bin Laden and expanding drone strikes (although the “tawdry efforts to publicize them for political gain will forever diminish the achievement”).
In between Obama’s long list of failures and short list of successes, however, is a third category — what might be called successes that were really failures. I would summarize them as follows:
His successful personal effort to insult the head of state and prime minister of America’s closest ally (as well as removing the bust of its wartime prime minister from the Oval Office); his successful personal effort to put daylight between the U.S. and Israel; his successful effort to ostracize Honduras for enforcing its constitution against a Hugo Chavez wannabe; his successful effort to become the first U.S. president to chair a UN meeting; his successful effort to ignore the efforts of Iranian citizens protesting the stolen 2009 presidential election and then ignore seriatim deadlines for Iran to accept his outstretched hand; his successful efforts to oppose Congressional attempts to strengthen Iran sanctions, while touting each round of non-crippling sanctions as the “toughest ever”; his successful effort to ward off pressure to visit Israel from liberal Israeli columnists, Jewish Democrats in Congress, and friendly rabbis; his successful effort to jettison a U.S. ally in Egypt and reportedly invite the new Pharaoh to the U.S.; his successful effort to set a Guinness Record for golf games by a wartime commander-in-chief; his successful effort to delay executing an already-negotiated free trade agreement with the closest U.S. ally in Latin America; his successful effort to improve relations with Mexico by suing Arizona on its behalf; his successful effort to build a knee-slapping relationship with Dmitri Medvedev to deliver a deferred flexibility message to Vladimir; and his winning a Nobel Peace Prize for not being Bush.
With respect to Iran and Syria, he currently assures allies and adversaries that all options are on the table, but has not convinced them they will ever actually be used. He sets “red lines” that effectively signal that no action will be taken: as long as we do not find out Iran has assembled a nuclear weapon, it can keep the centrifuges whirring, finish its illegal underground facility, and maintain its uninspected installations; as long as Syria does not use chemical weapons, it can keep killing its citizens by conventional means. All this does not even rise to the level of leading from behind.
I can not afford the WSJ paywall, and really hate missing Bret Stephens, so thanks for the excerpts. Did he include the kerfluffles with Canada, e.g., SecClinton's debacle over the Arctoic forum and, more recently, Keystone Pipeline? n n
K2K — No, neither was included
Nor was the Saudi bow.
He did not cover those stellar moments of diplomacy, but the last paragraph was brilliant:
I tend to think that the buzz about American decline mistakes the mediocrity of the president for the destiny of a nation. But we have an election on, the outcome will decide whether one man’s mediocrity becomes a whole nation’s destiny. Mr. Obama is now the world’s leading has-been, trying to revive a career on the strength of a talent that was greatly exaggerated to begin with. But a country that’s willing to reward mediocrity with a second chance risks becoming a has-been itself.
Sorry you don’t get the WSJ!
And he's succeeded with the faculty lounge neo-Marxists who mentored him and produced what he and they yearned for in their misguided hearts:an America that is reduced in power and centrality;an America that is no threat to tyrants;anAmerica that can no longer be taken seriously or at its word as long as he's the leader.An America run by an overgrown student radical is just what radical professors ordered in order to prove their theories about relativism.Or as Obama put it in his uninformed attempt to debunk American exceptionalism"and I'm sure that the Greeks and the Italians and everyone else thinks that they're exceptional too"
well, this is a guy who shopped around book deals based (with precious little life experience to book) on imaginary premises and consummated by composite, partially ghost-written autobiographies crafted to polish the apple of his own eye. The Presidency so far, is about what you'd expect…
So I take it you want the U.S. to launch war on Iran and on Syria?
Marcrus, it is clear to you that anyone who does not recognize the brilliance of Obama's policies is either a fool or unfit for his position.
Britain's prime minister is not, head of state. That position belongs to the monarch. n nA far more serious error, is giving the president's disastrous Afghanistan policy a pass. n nAll our fatalities across the preceding ten years were doubled by Obama's two year surge, at $100 billion per year. And for what? The enemy is staging periodic attacks in Kabul itself, our Afghan allies are turning their guns on us at an increasing rate, and the Taliban are poised to walk in even as our troops are being withdrawn and will be gone by 2014. We are if anything worse off than before Obama blew the embers of Bush's side show into a blazing war. n nThat amounts to not just an administration failure, but to an American defeat and a Republican scandal. It is the responsibility of the opposition party to brandish the govt's errors, not to cover them up. This unnecessary war, fought in the absence of vital US interests, is extravagantly reckless. It is as close to "a high crime" as a US president has come, since the Marine Corps was engaged on behalf of United Fruit in Central America.