Foreign Policy – VDH's Blade of Perseus

The Cost of American Indifference

July 31, 2014July 31, 2014 victorhanson

By continually taking the path of least short-term trouble, the U.S. ensures long-term hardship.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

The Obama administration often either denies any responsibility for the current global chaos or claims that it erupted spontaneously. Yet most of the mess was caused by, or made worse by, growing U.S. indifference and paralysis.

Over the last five and a half years, America has had lots of clear choices, but the administration usually took the path of least short-term trouble, which has ensured long-term hardship.

There was no need to “reset” the relatively mild punishments that the George W. Bush administration had accorded Vladimir Putin’s Russia for invading Georgia in 2008. By unilaterally normalizing relations with Russia and trashing Bush, Barack Obama and then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton only green-lighted further Russian aggression, which has since spread to Crimea and Ukraine.

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Our Russia Experts

July 30, 2014 victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online – The Corner

One of the more depressing things in watching Vladimir Putin is the manner in which Russian “experts” at home have for years now all but cheered him on. In the latest Nation magazine, Stephen Cohen has written one of the most embarrassing apologies of Putin’s imperialistic misadventures imaginable. A Russian state public-relations official could not have offered a shakier contextualization of Russian expansionism.

In the last few years someone named Mark Adomanis (who identifies himself as “I specialize in Russian economics and demographics”) has perhaps offered the most unfortunate apologies for Putin’s Russia and the serially excused reset as proof of a strong Obama foreign policy (“Perhaps I am a deeply unserious person, but I think it is not only possible to ‘seriously’ argue that 2012 Russia is more reasonable towards the United States but that it is quite easy to do so”.) He routinely chastised skeptics (me in particular in often ad hominem style) for suggesting that reset with Russia would only empower Putin’s authoritarianism, weaken our Eastern European allies, and project a dangerous sense of U.S. indecision and vulnerability. At the time (2012) Adomanis ridiculed any suggestion that reset was counterproductive. In a 2012 piece that unfortunately bragged “One does not need to be a proselytizer for “the reset” to note that American-Russian relations are better now than they were when Obama first took office,” he argued,

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The Moral Crisis on Our Southern Border

July 10, 2014July 10, 2014 victorhanson

A perfect storm of special interests have hijacked U.S. immigration law.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Detainees sleep in a holding cell at a U.S. Customs facility in Brownsville, Texas. Photo via Getty Images

No one knows just how many tens of thousands of Central American nationals — most of them desperate, unescorted children and teens — are streaming across America’s southern border. Yet this phenomenon offers us a proverbial teachable moment about the paradoxes and hypocrisies of Latin American immigration to the U.S.

For all the pop romance in Latin America associated with Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, few Latinos prefer to immigrate to such communist utopias or to socialist spin-offs like Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, or Peru.

Instead, hundreds of thousands of poor people continue to risk danger to enter democratic, free-market America, which they have often been taught back home is the source of their misery. They either believe that America’s supposedly inadequate social safety net is far better than the one back home, or that its purportedly cruel free market gives them more opportunities than anywhere in Latin America — or both.

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Obama’s World Disorder

June 25, 2014 victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas

Amid all the talk of the isolationism that supposedly characterizes the Obama administration’s foreign policy, we forget that since World War II, the global order has largely been determined by U.S. engagement. The historically rare state of prosperity and peace that defined the postwar world were due to past U.S. vigilance and sacrifice.

Germany in the last 150 years has been at the center of three European wars, winning one, losing another, and destroying much of Europe and itself in the third. Yet present-day Germany has the largest economy in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. It is a global leader in high technology and industrial craftsmanship. For seventy years Germany, even after its second historic unification in 1989, has not translated such economic preeminence into military power, much less aggression. In fact, the strategic status quo of postwar Europe—with Britain and France, and their relatively smaller and weaker economies, as the continent’s two sole nuclear powers—remains mostly unquestioned.

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Melancholy Lessons from Iraq

June 25, 2014 victorhanson

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

The unfolding collapse of Iraq’s government before the legions of al Qaeda jihadists is the capstone of Barack Obama’s incompetent and politicized foreign policy. The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), armed with plundered American weapons and flush with stolen money, is consolidating a Sunni terrorist state in eastern Syria and northern Iraq, replete with mass executions, sharia law, and the beheading of violators. With revered Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani calling the Shia faithful to arms, a vicious civil war between Shia and Sunnis will likely intensify in the coming days. But whoever wins, the fallout for our security will be disastrous – a Shiite “crescent” from Aleppo to Mosul allied with Iran, which looks ever more likely to be nuclear armed, and a safe haven for terrorist training camps to prepare “martyrs” for attacks against the West. And our allies Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel all will to various degrees find their own security and interests impacted by this administration’s criminal foreign policy negligence.

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America’s Middle East Dilemma

June 19, 2014 victorhanson

Toppling tyrants is ineffective in the long term without years of unpopular occupation.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

A Tenth Mountain Division soldier in Kirkuk Province, Iraq, 2008. (Photo: Staff Sgt. Samuel Bendet, Via NRO)

Two and a half years ago, the U.S. pulled every soldier out of a mostly quiet Iraq. In the void thus created, formerly al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists calling themselves “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” are now tearing apart the country, leaving medieval savagery in their wake.

Obama partisans are blaming the Bush administration for going into Iraq in the first place. But critics counter that Obama wanted out of Iraq before the 2012 election at all costs. The result of that reckless skedaddle is that we have thrown away the hard work of the 2007–08 surge that finally broke the back of both al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed Shiite terrorists.

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War Was Interested in Obama

June 16, 2014 victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia

obama_trotsky_6-15-14-1 — Photo by EdDriscoll.com via PJMedia

Leon Trotsky probably did not quite write the legendary aphorism that “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” But whoever did, you get the point that no nation can always pick and choose when it wishes to be left alone.

Barack Obama, however, never quite realized that truth, and so just declared ^[1] that “the world is less violent than it has ever been.” He must have meant less violent in the sense that the bad guys are winning and as they do, the violence wanes — sort of like Europe around March 1941, when all was relatively quiet under the new continental Reich.

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Partisan Politics, Bad Ideas & the Bergdahl Swap

June 5, 2014 victorhanson

The Tailban 5 and Obama Photo via tpnn.com

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

President Obama’s exchange of 5 high-ranking Taliban murderers for a soldier who possibly was a deserter and collaborator encapsulates everything that is wrong with this administration’s foreign policy. The serial failures of the past 5 years reflect a toxic brew of partisan politics and naïve ideology.

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Our Future Is 1979

June 4, 2014June 3, 2014 victorhanson

Obama’s foreign-policy weakness encourages our enemies and disheartens our allies.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Photo of Jimmy Carter holding cabinet meeting 1977 photo by US National Archives

The final acts of the Obama foreign policy will play out in the next two years. Unfortunately, bad things happen when the world concludes that the American president has become weakened, distracted, or diffident about foreign policy.

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The Bergdahl Release Is Just the Beginning

June 3, 2014 victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // The Corner (National Review Online)

In the latter category falls the mysterious prisoner swap of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five top Taliban inmates, given that even at this early juncture there are lots of disturbing questions: Why not as the law demanded consult Congress on the releases from Guantanamo, or at least the congressional leadership? Why swap some of the most dangerous and important members of the Taliban hierarchy? What exactly were the circumstances of the original departure of Bergdahl (in 2009 two military officials told the AP that Bergdahl “had just walked off” with three other Afghans), and why were other soldiers requested not to disclose what they knew about the nature of his departure or the costly efforts to find Bergdahl? What exactly is the present U.S. position on trading captives for prisoners/hostages? Do we really believe that the released terrorists will be kept another year in the Middle East?

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Tag: Foreign Policy

The Cost of American Indifference

By continually taking the path of least short-term trouble, the U.S. ensures long-term hardship.

Like this:

Our Russia Experts

Like this:

The Moral Crisis on Our Southern Border

A perfect storm of special interests have hijacked U.S. immigration law.

Like this:

Obama’s World Disorder

Like this:

Melancholy Lessons from Iraq

Like this:

America’s Middle East Dilemma

Toppling tyrants is ineffective in the long term without years of unpopular occupation.

Like this:

War Was Interested in Obama

Like this:

Partisan Politics, Bad Ideas & the Bergdahl Swap

Like this:

Our Future Is 1979

Obama’s foreign-policy weakness encourages our enemies and disheartens our allies.

Like this:

The Bergdahl Release Is Just the Beginning

Like this:

By continually taking the path of least short-term trouble, the U.S. ensures long-term hardship.

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Like this:

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Like this:

A perfect storm of special interests have hijacked U.S. immigration law.

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Like this:

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Like this:

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Like this:

Toppling tyrants is ineffective in the long term without years of unpopular occupation.

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Like this:

Obama’s foreign-policy weakness encourages our enemies and disheartens our allies.

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