by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cLeading From Behind\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n A recent report in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0suggested that the Obama\u2019s administration\u2019s weird sort of\/sort of not foreign policy is now gleefully self-described as \u201cleading from behind.\u201d Not exercising leadership is a reflection, the article suggests, of Obama\u2019s view that the US is both disliked and in decline. Decline?<\/p>\n Here are some tidbits from the Ryan Lizza adulatory piece. The following I think is meant as a compliment:<\/p>\n The one consistent thread running through most of Obama\u2019s decisions has been that America must act humbly in the world. Unlike his immediate predecessors, Obama came of age politically during the post-Cold War era, a time when America\u2019s unmatched power created widespread resentment. Obama believes that highly visible American leadership can taint a foreign-policy goal just as easily as it can bolster it.<\/p>\n I supposed eliminating \u201cunmatched power\u201d would also eliminate \u201cwidespread resentment\u201d \u2014 in that few are envious of the failed. Here is another assessment also offered as a tribute:<\/p>\n One of his advisers described the President\u2019s actions in Libya as \u201cleading from behind.\u201d That\u2019s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. It\u2019s a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the US is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the US is reviled in many parts of the world. Pursuing our interests and spreading our ideals thus requires stealth and modesty as well as military strength. \u201cIt\u2019s so at odds with the John Wayne expectation for what America is in the world,\u201d the adviser said. \u201cBut it\u2019s necessary for shepherding us through this phase.\u201d<\/p>\n What the hell is \u201cthis phase\u201d? Where are we \u201creviled\u201d and by whom? Syria? Russia? Yemen? Somalia? Cuba?<\/p>\n Decline or Ascend?<\/strong><\/p>\n Does \u201cdecline\u201d mean inevitable collapse, like an aging person whose mind and body have become enfeebled? That was certainly the view of the ancients, who felt civilizations had finite life-spans (see Jacqueline de Romilly\u2019s\u00a0The Rise and Fall of States<\/em>\u00a0According to Greek Authors<\/em>.) Do environmental catastrophes, resource depletion, or foreign armies end societies? They can, as the complex pyramidal societies from the Minoans and Mycenaeans to the Mayans and Aztecs learned.<\/p>\n All that said, decline is far more often a choice, not a preordained destiny. There was no reason that Athens at 338 B.C. needed to lose to Philip at Chaironeia or even that the loss there meant the end of Greek freedom. Macedonian forces were a fraction of the size of a far larger Persian force that had swept from the north into a far weaker Athens in 480 BC. No law said that drama of the quality of the\u00a0Orestia<\/em>,\u00a0Oedipus<\/em>,\u00a0Ajax<\/em>,\u00a0Bacchae<\/em>, and\u00a0Medea<\/em>\u00a0had to give way to the sitcoms of Middle and New comedy of the fourth century BC. By September 1945, England had far more of its industrial base intact than had Germany or Japan, and had suffered far fewer losses, both material and human, since 1939 than either of the defeated Axis powers whose entire national ideologies had been rendered bankrupt and their people reduced to global pariahs. Why, then, did a country that produced the sort of four-engine bomberen masse<\/em>\u00a0that its wartime adversaries could not, or a Spitfire fighter better than any produced by Japan or Germany until the advent of the jet, end up decades later with unsold Jaguars while Mercedes and Lexus swept world markets? And why did a bombed out Frankfurt and Tokyo (200,000 incinerated in March 1945 alone) rather quickly out-produce a less damaged Liverpool (e.g., 4,000 killed in the blitz) or Manchester? Clearly the UK chose a path in 1945-9 that a once flattened Germany and Japan did not.<\/p>\n If Rome was supposedly \u201cdoomed\u201d by the 5th century AD, why did the Eastern Empire last another 1,000 years? Why was 1978 America a very different place than either 1955 or 1985 or 1996? How did gas lines, stagflation, and malaise lead to the boom of the Reagan and Clinton years?<\/p>\n Our Choice, Not Others\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n President Obama, listen carefully. By every benchmark, this should be an American century. Our known fossil fuel reserves are soaring, as new finds of coal, natural gas, oil, tar sands, and oil shale keep growing, not shrinking. Demographically, we are expanding; Europe, Japan, and China are shrinking.<\/p>\n We do not have the strikes of Europe, the violence of the Middle East, the state oppression of China. India has religious, social, and caste tensions unknown in the US American farmland is the most productive in the world, its farmers the most gifted and innovative. We inherited a vast, developed infrastructure; out duty is to improve and expand it, not, as our ancestors had to, start from scratch building a Hoover Dam, intercontinental railroad, or port facilities in Oakland.<\/p>\n I remember growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the sheer amount of wealth creation since then staggers the imagination. I recall my parents taking me in 1962 to a dinner at a judge\u2019s \u201cmansion\u201d: it was a 2000 sq. ft. ranch house in north Fresno \u2014 with three, repeat three, bathrooms \u2014 an unheard of thing at that time \u2014 and a 15-foot kidney shaped swimming pool to boot! The sort of elite home that is solidly now middle class.<\/p>\n iPhones, Facebook, and Microsoft are culturally US to the core; construction, computers, oil drilling, and refining are still American premier sciences. For all the talk of China, it would take the Chinese thirty years to acquire the expertise to launch and employ 10 effective carrier groups. To the degree an India or China is successful, it is because of emulation of the West, and the United States in particular. When I have my solo lunches in the new courtyard at the Stanford Business School, I stare at the number of foreigners networking in this global training station, where the world\u2019s elites flock to shell out tens of thousands for the expertise and signature degree.<\/p>\n We see in the misadventure in Libya what the Europeans do without the U.S. military. Japan\u2019s dense population and centralized mode of transportation, housing, and industry make it serially vulnerable to natural disasters in a way a dispersed, decentralized, and huge America is not. Our poor suffer far more from obesity than malnutrition; diabetes and clogged arteries, not scurvy and rickets, are the plagues of the underclass. Is driving a Kia that much less comfortable than a Mercedes, is hot water in Trump Towers hotter than a mile from my house in federally subsidized apartments? Does a middle seat on a 737 mean you are tortured and exploited while the \u201crich\u201d zoom by in a Gulfstream? My local Wal-Mart parking lot yesterday in Selma \u2014 poorest section of one of the poorest counties in the most bankrupt state in America \u2014 had 3 BMWs, 3 Mercedes, 1 Jaguar, 2 Metros, 16 Camrys, 13 Accords, 21 newer double-cab pickups, and lots of late-model Civics, Nissans, and Kias among 82 cars. I counted them for this article; my statistically \u201cpoor\u201d town did not look like Dickensian London. Wealth has been distributed to millions in a way once thought impossible. When did driving a Civic make you poor because someone else was driving a BMW, or why was living in a downtown Fresno condo unfair if someone else had one about the same size and with the same accoutrements in Santa Monica with a view of the ocean?<\/p>\n I could go on, so why does Mr. Obama see us in decline? Is it a wish rather than a descriptive assessment?<\/p>\n 1) Debt. In 1999 we worried about the specter of paying off the debt and transmogrifying to creditor status. There are trillions of dollars produced annually in this country; it is a matter of redirecting the economy from consumption to savings, and to wealth creation from redistribution. The years 2004-5 seemed to me pretty fat when the federal budget was $2.3 trillion. Go back to those spending levels and we would more or less balance the budget. California is in extremis with a $25 billion annual budget shortage; read the state\u2019s newspapers and they are full of stories about notable state employees accused of retirement spiking, hefty profits at Google, record water levels in our reservoirs, and tiny houses in Santa Monica or Mountain View selling for over $1 million. There is money in the country, and money in California. If we had a leader that was willing to cut and ignore the furor, we could pile up surpluses rather quickly. The present fiscal policy is a choice to embrace redistribution and decline.<\/p>\n 2) Energy. Known reserves of natural gas just keep getting larger. The amount of oil in the Dakotas, in Alaska, and offshore climbs too, even as cars are getting more efficient and new hybrids are getting better. There is enough natural gas and its derivatives to power quite easily a quarter of our fleet. Should we have a president who wished to drill, press natural gas as a transportation fuel, and shut up about \u201cmillions of green jobs\u201d that so far means a subsidized 1-2% of energy production, we could do wonders on the energy front. Each barrel produced here rather than imported from Saudi Arabia means more money, more jobs, and enhanced national security. By asking other governments to pump more oil, as we insist that drilling and supply have no effect on prices, we want to become more indebted and dependent. Again, a choice, not a fate.<\/p>\n 3) National security. For all the talk of al Qaeda, the Bush anti-terrorism protocols \u2014 derided and then embraced and expanded by Obama \u2014 coupled with the terrible toll we took on Islamists in Anbar, and in Afghanistan, have meant that radical Islam is far weaker than it was in 2001, we far stronger. We are still spending less than 5% of GDP on defense. If we were to develop a strategic, consistent policy of bestowing our alliances and friendship on those who shared either our values or our notion of security, we could easily regain our strategic preeminence. \u201cLeading from behind\u201d? Does the president think Japan will rush to stop the North Koreans when they cross the 38th parallel; does he believe France is going to air-lift spare parts to Tel Aviv when the Arabs again attack Israel? Leading from behind is like a person choosing to stay home from work \u2014 occasionally calling in to do a bit of business and usually being ignored. That too is a decision, not destiny.<\/p>\n 4) Immigration. Close the border, institutionalize employer fines, finish the fence \u2014 and predicate legal entry into the US not on race, nearness to the border, or the number of relatives in America, but on skills and capital. We would experience a renaissance. If we\u2019re to end 500,000 illegal entries and replace them with 250,000 legal entries based on education and expertise, not national origin, proximity, or family connection, immigration would be one of our greatest strengths, rather than a continual effort to bolster political constituencies. Apparently, self-supporting, highly educated, confident immigrants from all regions of the globe are not one\u2019s constituents, and therefore of no value politically. What would we do without \u201cgetting in their face\u201d to \u201cpunish\u201d the proper \u201cenemies\u201d?<\/p>\n 5) Entitlements. Whether we adopt the Simpson-Bowles commission\u2019s analyses, or just raise the retirement age, or follow Paul Ryan\u2019s recommendations, there is a little discussed truth: we can make Social Security solvent and still support retired citizens in finer fashion than was true ten years ago. Borrowing to spend is a mood, a state of mind, not a death sentence. It can be reversed almost instantaneously \u2014 if it is recognized as a pathology, a sort of degeneration of the spirit.<\/p>\n We may well decline, and pass on a weaker, more divided, more insolvent and at-risk America to our children. But that is again, entirely a choice, not a fate. It is a decision that many prosperous, but tired and squabbling societies \u2014 4th-century Athens, 5th-century AD Rome, 1950s Britain, 1970s America \u2014 chose willingly when they redistributed rather than created wealth, embraced envy rather than emulation as their collective creed, whined about not being liked rather than unapologetically assumed unpopularity is always the price of leadership and jealousy its constant twin, and talked of rationing, lectured on what they could not, rather than could, do, and made bickering between the generations, the sexes, the races, the classes, and tribes a national sport, rather than collectively and confidently looked forward to expanding, creating, and uniting in national purpose.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media \u201cLeading From Behind\u201d A recent report in\u00a0The New Yorker\u00a0suggested that the Obama\u2019s administration\u2019s weird sort of\/sort of not foreign policy is now gleefully self-described as \u201cleading from behind.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[247],"tags":[72,1025,176,12,1063,42,1033,1057,1055,1028,1031,442,88,1016,1068],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Ov","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6631,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-failure-of-american-leadership\/","url_meta":{"origin":3131,"position":0},"title":"The Failure of American Leadership","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 16, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Obama's foreign policy of appeasement has created a dangerous void in the international order. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0Defining Ideas\u00a0 The standard critique of President Obama\u2019s foreign policy is now generally well-known\u2014mercurial, paradoxical, and passive. \u201cLeading from behind\u201d seems at odds with the traditional American commitment to ensure\u2014preferably with allies\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Foreign Policy"","block_context":{"text":"Foreign Policy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/foreign-policy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/6517253983_7f75b1906b-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3459,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/decline-is-in-the-mind-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":3131,"position":1},"title":"Decline Is in the Mind","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 3, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media It\u2019s Over? 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