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COMMENTARY
April 11, 2009
Innocents abroad
Hillary Clinton has apparently spent the last week in a state of deep concern.She was "deeply concerned" about North Korea's missile launch, in defiance of all agreements the psycho-dictatorship had made. She expressed "deep concern" about maritime conditions off Somalia, after the first American-flagged ship in about 200 years was boarded by pirates. She was moreover "deeply concerned" about the fate of an Iranian-American journalist, who was arrested for being a "spy" in Tehran, right after her boss's latest dialogue overture. Special envoys were meanwhile in Pakistan to evince deep concern about the trajectory of events there. They were told that Pakistan would not cooperate with the latest proposed U.S. anti-terror efforts, notwithstanding billions in fresh U.S. aid. Those who have noticed that the U.S. hold on superpower status is loosening before our eyes should know that Clinton feels our pain. Her president, Barack Obama, is back in Washington after an apology tour to Europe, Turkey, and Iraq. He received no European commitments whatever for his proposed surge-like strategy in Afghanistan. (The word "surge" is now banned in White House parlance, along with the phrase "war on terror" and several related terms. With the help of supinely obliging media, the very ability to describe a conflict may soon be, as it were, "withdrawn.") So far as I am able to discover, President Obama's most significant accomplishment abroad was getting President Sarkozy of France to accept exactly one of the 245 Guantanamo inmates currently on offer to anyone who wants them. The strategy behind the new Obama foreign policy, so far as any can be discerned, is to disavow everything the Bush administration did in eight years, and then harvest the resulting good will. And while the product of this strategy is zero, it has been charitably observed that his term in office has hardly begun. A much bigger apology to the Muslim world is in the offing; and further apologies could be tailored to specific U.S. enemies. While not technically an apology, Pentagon cuts to a wide range of advanced weapons systems -- including one of its two next-generation fighter planes, combat vehicles, air and land-based robotic systems, new naval vessels and, most alarmingly, anti-missile defences -- could be taken as at least an expression of regret, given the huge amounts already spent in developing these systems. Robert Gates, the defence secretary carried forward from the Bush administration to provide political cover in this area, argues that the money is needed to equip the military for the smaller, low-tech battlefield engagements he anticipates in coming years. But he had to play accounting games -- such as moving past supplementary appropriations into the regular military budget -- to conceal overall cuts in defence spending. This is the clearest indication that political calculations now trump national security. The reality is that the U.S. fleet, upon which global security depends, is shrinking (to less than 300 ships), and that overall manpower will remain far below the last Cold War levels, in a world where (as Iraq and Afghanistan showed) the demand for boots on the ground keeps growing. The two sovereign states now most conspicuously accelerating military spending are Russia and China. Perhaps Clinton could voice deep concern about this, and the presidential speechwriting team could nuance that into another apology. The newly formalized, cabinet-level, "G-2" relationship with China will offer a forum to discuss the withdrawal of the U.S. monitoring fleets off China's coasts, and the discontinuation of U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan: for the Beijing regime is especially eager for "progress" on these fronts. It would also like Obama to extend his Presidential Warranty on General Motors cars to the trillion-dollar sovereign debt the U.S. has piled up with China. All they've got so far is an end to expressions of deep concern about China's human rights record. I have a list beside my laptop here of other U.S. foreign policy bleats, retreats, and "amateur hour" performances, from just the last week. There is no space for the rest, and it would anyway be almost impossible to keep up with it all in live time. People, including the deadliest enemies of America and the West, may have hated Bush, but they knew where he and America stood. That in itself promoted peace and order. President Obama and his secretary of state may sincerely think what Neville Chamberlain sincerely thought, about the value of non-confrontation. But nature does not reward such fatuity. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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