by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n The 2012 election will hinge on the economy, not on US foreign policy, unless there is a major overseas crisis \u2014 an Israeli attack on Iran, an Iranian detonation of a nuclear weapon, a Middle East war, a North Korean attack, or something of that sort. That said, there is much to lament in the current administration\u2019s foreign policy. But Mitt Romney should be careful in critiquing the status quo, given that it is full of paradoxes and contradictions.<\/p>\n The war on terror? Forget the absurd euphemisms like \u201coverseas contingency operations\u201d and \u201cman-caused disasters,\u201d the hypocrisy of railing against waterboarding three known terrorists while blowing up over 2,000 suspected terrorists (and anyone near them), and the half-hearted efforts of both using and trying to close Guantanamo and envisioning Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court. What Obama said he wanted to do and what he actually did do are quite different things. In truth, he embraced or expanded almost all the Bush-Cheney protocols that he demagogued against as a state legislator, a senator, and a presidential candidate. That he gave George W. Bush absolutely no credit for surging in and saving Iraq, or setting up the procedures for operations like those that killed bin Laden, is again a matter of ingratitude, not foreign policy, given that the war on terror is now a successful eleven-year continuum.<\/p>\n But there is one caveat. Words ultimately have consequences. The constant na\u00efvet\u00e9 from the administration \u2014 the characterization of the Muslim Brotherhood as largely \u201csecular,\u201d the mythography of the Cairo speech, the taboo against using the phrase \u201cradical Islam\u201d \u2014 may have been designed to offer a politically correct mask for Obama\u2019s continuance of the Bush-Cheney protocols, but it may also have had the effect of suggesting to our enemies that the US is ambiguous about radical Islam and does not necessarily connect it with anti-American terrorism.<\/p>\n In general, given American exhaustion over Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with the economic crisis, the Obama administration correctly gauged the public desire for no more interventions, but it finessed that isolationist impulse into its own sense of a multipolar world where America was merely one among many nations.<\/p>\n Aside from the war on terror, then, what are the ten legitimate areas of criticism?<\/p>\n 1. Securitygate. The Obama administration has leaked the most intimate secrets about US covert operations \u2014 the cyber war against Iran, the Predator-drone assassination program, the Yemeni double agent, the bin Laden raid \u2014 in a transparent attempt to chest-thump over the once covert anti-terrorism efforts. This was a shameful thing, and we have not yet felt the full consequences of this disaster.<\/p>\n 2. The administration initially did not care much about the Arab Spring, but was dragged into it by the looming fall of Hosni Mubarak. Leading from behind in Libya was incoherent, and what followed Qaddafi was more incoherent. Not going into Syria was wise, even if the reasons for not going in were again muddled. Obama remains ashamed of Iraq and ostracizes it (even as it so far remains the most stable of the new Arab consensual governments), and he makes no distinction between the Muslim Brotherhood and secular democratic movements. In other words, rather than encouraging those who thought the Arab Spring might offer a pluralistic society, Obama stood back as Islamists, Khomeini-style, took control, and he then\u00a0ex post facto<\/em>\u00a0labeled them democrats, even though, as in the case of Hamas and the Iranian theocrats, they favor one free election, just one time.<\/p>\n 3. Russian reset is mostly a failure. Embarrassing the Czechs and the Poles over missile defense got us little. Putin has been no help with Iran. An occasional peep about Russian human rights was unceremoniously swatted down. Putin now assumes Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics fall under his own Russian Monroe Doctrine. A new loose axis of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea threatens to create a nuclear buffer to US interests.<\/p>\n 4. Obama has snubbed our closest allies, so much so that should the US ever find itself again in need of a coalition, it is hard to imagine who would join it. Canada got mostly ingratitude for its presence in Afghanistan, and it is still furious over the Keystone Pipeline debacle. Our once closest ally, Great Britain, recognizes that the United States is now neutral on the Falklands (a.k.a. the Maldives), and that if Argentina were to invade again, the US would probably withhold help. Israel knows that the US, at best neutral, votes present on the Middle East and does not much worry that Israel may soon be surrounded by Islamist frontline states. Whether we would fully supply Israel in its next war is legitimately in doubt. In contrast, Turkey, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood, for the first time in history, believe that America is more sympathetic to their causes than to Israel\u2019s. Anti-democratic Venezuela and Cuba, and their Latin American kindred Communist states, also sense that the US is a friend of such totalitarian movements \u2014 a suspicion shared by the vanishing number of regional democrats.<\/p>\n 5. President Obama was quiet when nearly 1 million Iranian protesters hit the streets in the spring of 2009, almost as if he felt his own multicultural\u00a0bona fides<\/em>\u00a0should be given a chance to finesse the Khomeinist theocracy \u2014 or as if the pro-democracy protesters were some sort of inauthentic neocons. It was a shameful decision at a rare time when the Iranian people were looking for pro-democracy affirmation \u2014 offering the last chance to stop the Iranian bomb without some sort of military intervention.<\/p>\n 6. The new emphasis on Asia is so far in utter confusion. Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are less, not more, assured that a diffident US would come to their defense in case of an existential crisis. Are they still under the US nuclear umbrella, or is the umbrella itself shrinking fast? Simultaneously borrowing from and lecturing China leads to the image of US impotence. The timing of looking eastward was terrible, as NATO sinks into irrelevance at precisely the moment when an insolvent southern Europe is waging a propaganda war against an ascendant Germany. As the euro zone unravels, a strong US presence in Europe is needed more than ever.<\/p>\n 7. Despite the growing anti-democratic tendencies of the Erdogan government in Turkey, Obama has structured his Middle East policy around that government, unconcerned that its policy of insidious Islamization is a model for slowly subverting what follows from elections.<\/p>\n 8. The apologies, contextualizations, and bowing were trivial gestures, but in aggregate they added to the sense of US diffidence and decline. As they became right-wing talking points, they also became rarer \u2014 a reflection that Obama\u2019s own advisers understood that the optics of his one-worldism were becoming harmful to US interests.<\/p>\n 9. The addition of $5 trillion in national debt was disastrous in terms of US foreign policy. It lost us what leverage we had over China. It destroyed any credibility in advising the European Union about its own financial meltdown. It curtailed options in the Middle East. Massive defense cuts loom. In this regard, the associated decisions not to open federal lands to new oil and gas leasing, and to cancel Keystone, were also strategically dense, given that an additional 2 to 3 million barrels of North American production would have given us greater leeway in the Persian Gulf and lessened our exposure to foreign creditors.<\/p>\n 10. With a little deft diplomacy, Obama could have salvaged a vestigial American presence to monitor the security of Iraqi democracy and blunt Iranian subversion. The failure to attempt this was an especially ironic lapse, given that the administration now wants to radically increase US troop levels in nearby monarchical Kuwait.<\/p>\n The key for the Romney campaign is not, in the manner of the anti-Bush unthinking Left, to offer blanket condemnations, given that on many aspects of the war on terror, Obama, to his credit, continued the successful policies that he inherited. In contrast, there are plenty of policies that are Obama\u2019s own \u2014 and therefore quite dangerous.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a92012 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The 2012 election will hinge on the economy, not on US foreign policy, unless there is a major overseas crisis \u2014 an Israeli attack on Iran, an Iranian detonation of a nuclear weapon, a Middle East war, a North Korean attack, or something of that sort.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[96,271],"tags":[233,12,1063,1026,1015,202,1055,1017,276,1027,32,1047,213,1022,1016],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-av","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":378,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/what-the-debates-taught-us\/","url_meta":{"origin":651,"position":0},"title":"What the Debates Taught Us","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 31, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The president of the United States in the last debate chose to go on the attack against his challenger, Mitt Romney \u2014 and once again largely failed to convince the American people that he was the more presidential alternative. But how did the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":467,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-the-hare-romney-the-tortoise\/","url_meta":{"origin":651,"position":1},"title":"Obama the Hare, Romney the Tortoise","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 10, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The 2012 race has turned into one of Aesop's classic fables. 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Napoleon went from\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":687,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-they-did-it-campaign\/","url_meta":{"origin":651,"position":5},"title":"Obama’s ‘They’-Did-It Campaign","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 24, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The next five months should be interesting \u2014 given that Barack Obama is now experiencing something entirely unique in his heretofore stellar career: widespread criticism of his performance and increasing weariness with his boilerplate and his teleprompted eloquence. 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