For a time, reset, concessions, and appeasement work to delay wars. But finally, nations wake up, grasp their blunders, rearm, and face down enemies.
That gets dangerous. The shocked aggressors cannot quite believe that their targets are suddenly serious and willing to punch back. Usually, the bullies foolishly press aggression, and war breaks out.
It was insane of Nazi Germany and its Axis partners to even imagine that they could defeat the Allied trio of Imperial Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
But why not try?
Hitler figured that for a decade America had been unarmed and isolationist. Britain repeatedly had appeased the Third Reich. The Soviets initially collaborated with Hitler.
Hitler met no opposition after militarizing the Rhineland. He annexed Austria with impunity. He gobbled up Czechoslovakia without opposition.
Why shouldn’t Hitler have been stunned in 1939 when exasperated Britain and France finally declared war over his invasion of distant Poland?
Six years of war and some 60 million dead followed, re-establishing what should have been the obvious fact that democracies would not quite commit suicide.
By 1979, the Jimmy Carter administration had drastically cut the defense budget. Carter promised that he would make human rights govern American foreign policy. It sounded great to Americans after Vietnam — and even greater to America’s enemies.
Then Iran imploded. The American embassy in Tehran was stormed. Diplomats were taken hostage. Radical Islamic terrorism spread throughout the Middle East. Communist insurrection followed throughout Central America. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. China went into Vietnam.
Dictators such as the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini assumed that Carter no longer was willing to protect the U.S. postwar order. Or perhaps they figured that the inexperienced American president was too weak to respond even had he wished to do so.
Then, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in 1980 on the promise of restoring U.S. power. At first, both America’s friends and enemies were aghast at Reagan’s simplistic worldview that free markets were better than Communism, that democracy was superior to dictatorship, and that in the ensuring struggle, the West would win and the rest would lose.
Foreign media damned Reagan as a warmonger for beefing up the U.S. defense budget, reassuring America’s allies and going after terrorists with military force.
From 1981 to 1983, Reagan was caricatured even at home as a cowboy — not the statesman later to be known for restoring U.S. prestige and global stability, and for helping to bring down Soviet imperial Communism.
Barack Obama, like Carter, came into office promising a sharp break from past U.S foreign policy. The public was receptive after the costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the recent financial meltdown on Wall Street.
Troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan on pre-announced deadlines. The post-surge quiet in Iraq fooled Obama into eagerly yanking out all U.S. peacekeepers.
A new outreach to radical Islam went to ridiculous lengths. The Muslim Brotherhood was invited to Obama’s speech in Cairo that claimed the West owed cultural debts to Islam for everything from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
Terms like radical Islam, jihad, and Islamic terror were excised from the official American vocabulary and replaced by a host of silly euphemisms.
In symbolic tours, Obama offered apologies for past American behavior in the Middle East and Asia. He bowed to both theocratic sheiks and the Asian monarchs.
The defense budget was cut. Reset with Vladimir Putin’s Russia assumed that the Bush administration, not Putin’s prior aggression in Georgia and threats to Crimea, had caused the estrangement between Moscow and Washington.
Predictable chaos followed as the U.S. became an observer abroad. The Islamic State appeared to fill the vacuum in Iraq. Syria imploded. So did most of North Africa. Iran sent agents, surrogates, and special forces into Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, even as it pressed on to get a bomb.
The Obama foreign policy cannot continue much longer without provoking even more chaos or a large war.
China stepped up its violations of the waters and airspace of America’s traditional Asian allies. Putin did the same in Eastern and Northern Europe.
By 2015, America’s enemies had created chaos and defined it as the new normal.
The next president will face a terrible dilemma. To restore order, he or she will have to convince our allies that we are recommitted to their security.
Any red lines issued will have to be enforced. Aggressors such as Russia, China, Iran, and the Islamic State will have to be warned to cease and desist or face pushback from far stronger U.S.-led coalitions. Just as Reagan’s return to normal U.S. foreign policy was considered radical after the Carter years, so too the next administration will be smeared as dangerously provocative after Obama’s recession from the world stage.
The Obama foreign policy cannot continue much longer without provoking even more chaos or a large war. Yet correcting it will be nearly as dangerous.
Jumping off the global tiger is dangerous, but climbing back on will seem riskier.
It’s an old trick of Third World Control-Everything Dictators and Tyrants. Get into power by criticizing the previous administration, who attempted to restructure and pay down debt and reduce bloated government.
Second, jam all ameliorating policies into full reverse. Once the Titanic is far enough away, full speed into big icebergs. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Third, as the ship of state is sinking, leave office, sell books, accept huge bribes in the form of speeches attendees can only endure with earbuds loud with any other speech-canceling noise.
Fourth, mock the efforts of following administration trying to clean up the mess. Just be sure journalists are onboard the craziness thru drugs and indoctrination and newspeak. What could go wrong?
Only the elites, blinded by the glare of their own sophistry, believe they can lead us to a ‘new world, until they discover that they’re marching on the continuous belt of ‘history’s treadmill’ and that only the machinery has changed while human nature remains the same.!
The declining British Empire had the luxury of a constitutionally – minded United States to pick up the pieces after the two World Wars. The U.S. does not have a powerful, up-and-coming like-minded nation to hand over our own world-wide power. The Obama administration wants to withdraw from global leadership, but has no convictions about who picks up the pieces.
To Obama’s way of thinking no globe-spanning superpower is needed. The cause of death and misery on the globe *is* the US, so removing the US from the equation is all that’s needed to spread peace and love through the world.
To Obama’s university-progressivism, remove US dominance and everything will be rainbows, butterflies and cute pink puppies.
You know I’d suggest the insightful piece argues that today’s democracies need to be exceptionally vigilant to ‘troublemakers’ who perceive weakness and do all they can with their constant, repetitive and insistent probing to change national borders or how the global stage is ordered in the sense of relationships with states.
These new guys now who want to change things unilaterally act rather than wring their hands and deliberate endlessly. Then they arrogantly say ‘don’t try anything buddies or you’re asking for trouble!’ Brilliant strategy that. Sort of like throwing dust in the eyes to completely confuse, confound and plant doubt.
We appear to be in a real bad dust storm now. I hope for the future they democracies can construct initiatives where they aren’t perceived say as pushovers or say taken advantage of. I’d think they have to be very good weathermen now. It is important to know about dust storms and hurricanes. But it is perhaps even more important on how they react to it. Are we up to the challenge?
2VictorDavisHanson 4PostObamaParadigm
It is not just the next President after Pres. Obama has the problem. As I pointed out earlier elsewhere, “Digging out of the quagmire of malaise into the sunshine of liberty requires sufficient extra free energy to inspire the soul. Absent such inspiration, the slouching out should prove to be toilsome, indeed. When your soul belongs to Cesar in its entirety you can only render onto Cesar the entirety of your being. . . .”* {c.f., p. 223 at http://www.friesenpress.com/bookstore/title/119734000001612306/Constancio-Sulapas-Asumen-Flirting-with-Misadventures }
The policies of the Obama administration have made it more likely that we will not have peace in the foreseeable future. We have alienated our allies and encouraged our adversaries to the extent that when trouble does erupt in any part of the world, we may be standing alone.
A rather large segment of the American public doesn’t seem to believe in ‘do here’. What the new Soviets do in Russia and its borders, they would do here. What the Chinese dictators do to their people in China, they would do here. What IS or ISIL or any other radical Muslims do in the Middle East, Africa, or Asia, they would do here. Imagine any small town in America occupied by IS and having the events that are happening in Irag or Syria or Afghanistan repeated in that town for everyone to see in photos, in videos, ……….or in person.
America is occupied already, in body and mind, from the White House on down to state, city, and small-town governments, from universities to kindergartens and pre-school, and in every form of news and social media.
I get a kick out of all the experts since eisenhowers domino theory and cias overthrow of democracy
in iran.they were all wrong then and all wrong now.
us cant control world,it cant even guess right on what is a good policy.
America thinks what we want is what everybody wants.
While war does offer the possibility of vanquishing one’s political/religious/racial foes, and gains of territory and spoils, its primary motive, unstated or even unconscious, is to control the energy and ambitions of ones’ own young male population.
No, I haven’t post anything yet.
Why does this site think I did?
Political Correctness, leftist ideology with a spineless opposition have given us our current state of affairs.
As far as human slaughter goes, the 20th century set records, I suspect that the 21st century will be much, much worse.
Once again, the only thing that history has taught us is that we’ve learned nothing from it…