{"id":7839,"date":"2014-09-10T07:55:55","date_gmt":"2014-09-10T14:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=7839"},"modified":"2014-09-10T07:55:55","modified_gmt":"2014-09-10T14:55:55","slug":"obamas-foreign-policy-of-empty-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-foreign-policy-of-empty-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama\u2019s Foreign Policy of Empty Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhen force threatens, talk is no good.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/h3>\n

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Photo
Photo via FrontPage Magazine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That line from John Ford\u2019s classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance contains wisdom everyone from peasant to king knew before our modern age and its smug\u00a0illusions. Go back 2,400 years, and you can hear it from the Athenian orator Demosthenes as he chastises his fellow citizens for responding to Macedonian aggression by \u201cforever debating the question and never making any progress\u201d and issuing \u201cempty decrees.\u201d \u201cAll words, apart from action,\u201d Demosthenes warned, \u201cseem vain and idle, especially from Athenian lips: for the greater our reputation for a ready tongue, the greater the distrust it inspires in all men.\u201d We\u2019ve had several years now of watching Obama and his foreign policy team prove this eternal truth as they have feebly and fecklessly responded to crisis after crisis in Ukraine, Syria, and a dozen other venues.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Just in the last few weeks we have heard a lot of bluster about Islamic State, the rampaging jihadists in northern Iraq who have left in their wake a trail of traditional Muslim mayhem\u2013-\u00a0sectarian cleansing, forced conversion, slaving, rape, torture, slaughter, and Koran-inspired beheadings, including two American journalists. In response to these decisive deeds, Obama has thundered that he will \u201cdegrade and destroy\u201d the \u201ccancer.\u201d In an op-ed co-written with British Prime Minister David Cameron, he has vowed that the allies \u201cwill not be cowed by barbaric killers.\u201d His vice president Joe Biden, with his usual trite hyperbole, has threatened, \u201cWe will follow them to the gate of hell until they are brought to justice.\u201d And Secretary of State John Kerry, after the beheading of journalist James Foley, has warned, \u201cThe world must know that the United States of America will never back down in the face of such evil. ISIL and the wickedness it represents must be destroyed, and those responsible for this heinous, vicious atrocity will be held accountable.\u201d\u00a0\u201cBy whom\u201d\u00a0is the question the passive voice artfully leaves unanswered.<\/p>\n

To paraphrase Demosthenes, the greater this administration\u2019s ready tongue, the greater distrust it inspires in our allies, and the greater boldness it creates in\u00a0our enemies. Or to put it in my old man\u2019s more earthy terms when I smarted off, \u201cDon\u2019t let your mouth write checks your ass can\u2019t cash.\u201d Obama has been bouncing foreign policy checks from Ukraine to the South China Sea, and most points in between.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the deeds necessary to back these loud boasts have been few. That should not surprise us, since Obama has said and done much to tell the world that we will not act decisively, relying instead on verbal processes and gestures of force like bombing some trucks to create a telegenic illusion of action. He started his presidency with the \u201capology tour,\u201d on which he called the U.S. \u201carrogant, dismissive, derisive,\u201d confessed that we are\u00a0\u201cstill working through some of our own darker periods in our history,\u201d\u00a0proclaimed that we\u00a0\u201cwill be willing to acknowledge past errors where those errors have been made,\u201d confessed that\u00a0\u201ctoo often we set [our] principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford\u201d and so \u201cwe went off course,\u201d and promised that we\u00a0\u201care working to improve our democracy.\u201d\u00a0How could such a tainted and flawed state have the moral authority to act with the confidence and decisiveness that his recent rhetoric implies?<\/p>\n

Likewise his domestic deeds have undercut the capacity to enforce his tough\u00a0foreign policy words. Because of cuts to the military budget\u2013\u2013inspired in part by his desire to reduce the U.S. to merely one unexceptional member of an international coalition that supposedly can maintain global order and create collective security\u2013\u2013our military capacity is destined \u201cto be an increasingly hollow force,\u201d as Bret Stephens writes, \u201cwith the Army as small as it was in 1940, before conscription; a Navy the size it was in 1917, before our entry into World War I; an Air Force flying the oldest\u2014and smallest\u2014fleet of planes in its history; and a nuclear arsenal no larger than it was during the Truman administration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Commensurate with this undercutting of America\u2019s armed forces have been Obama\u2019s empty bluster and careless language, something dangerous coming from the Commander-in-Chief of the greatest military power in history. \u201cLeading from behind\u201d in Libya, the vanishing \u201cred line\u201d in Syria, the juvenile scolding of Putin \u201cthat in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters,\u201d the \u201cno strategy\u201d gaffe about the \u201cjayvee\u201d jihadists of the Islamic State\u2013\u2013 all were instantly refuted and discredited by facts on the ground created by hard men of brutal action. Libya is not a democracy, but the jihadist version of Road Warrior. Syria\u2019s Bashar al Assad is winning in Syria by slaughtering close to 200,000 men, women, and children. The Islamic State still controls northern Iraq and Syria, and still sits at the gates of Baghdad. And Putin has snatched Crimea and is closing in on eastern Ukraine. Throw in Obama\u2019s penchant for berating allies like Israel, ignoring the interests of others like Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, undercutting vulnerable states like Poland and the Czech Republic, and appeasing genocidal mullahs in Iran, and is it any surprise that his words \u201cinspire greater distrust\u201d in everyone except our enemies?<\/p>\n

Of course, Obama\u2019s habit of using words to substitute for politically risky deeds is universal in the West. We just saw a NATO confab in which a lot of big talk for the reporters end up so much smoke when the details are parsed. NATO leaders have agreed \u201cto establish a so-called spearhead force of several thousand troops designed to move into trouble spots at short notice,\u201d as The Wall Street Journal\u00a0reported. Talk about closing the barn door after the Russian bear has got loose. I\u2019m sure Putin is trembling over the thought of \u201cseveral thousand\u201d NATO troops that someday might materialize to stop his adventurism. If NATO isn\u2019t acting now, what makes anyone think this special \u201cspearhead force\u201d will act in the future, even if NATO members do create it? As Charles Krauthammer writes, the force \u201cis a feeble half-measure. Not only will troops have to be assembled, dispatched, transported and armed as the fire bell is ringing, but the very sending will require some affirmative and immediate decision by NATO. Try getting that done. The alliance is famous for its reluctant, slow and fractured decision-making.\u201d<\/p>\n

And haven\u2019t we heard this sort of braggadocio before from Europe? Remember the 60,000-man \u201crapid reaction force\u201d the EU was going to create so that they could avoid any further embarrassment of having \u201ccowboy\u201d Americans pull their foreign policy irons out of the fire, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo? Given that only three European NATO members honor the 2% of GDP minimum for military spending, it\u2019s unlikely that the money for creating this alleged \u201cdeterrent\u201d will ever be budgeted, not with EU economies in the doldrums, and widespread grumbling over \u201causterity\u201d budgets. No wonder that, as the Journal reports, \u201cmost details of the force . . . remained to be settled.\u201d But don\u2019t worry, NATO leaders have \u201ccommitted\u201d to spending the 2% on defense they \u201ccommitted\u201d to in 2002 and subsequently ignored. Better read the fine print: the commitment is non-binding and will be implemented over a 10-year period. Who knows how much more of the old Soviet Empire Vladimir will have taken back by then.<\/p>\n

\u201cWord, words, words,\u201d as Hamlet says. But words useful for politicians who want to avoid the risk and uncertainty of action, and don\u2019t want to face disgruntled voters at the polls. And when this perennial calculus is joined to the progressive belief that an exploitative, racist, neo-imperialist America is disqualified by its sins from being the guarantor of global order and stability, you get the world we are rapidly becoming\u2013\u2013a Darwinian jungle of feral violence, illiberal hegemons, thug-nations, and nuclear-armed terrorist states.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2014 FrontPage Magazine. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhen force threatens, talk is no good.\u201d\u00a0 by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine That line from John Ford\u2019s classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance contains wisdom everyone from peasant to king knew before our modern age and its smug\u00a0illusions. Go back 2,400 years, and you can hear it from the Athenian orator Demosthenes […]<\/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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[842,22,167,154,46],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-22r","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5571,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/delium-the-battle-only-one-man-wanted-part-i\/","url_meta":{"origin":7839,"position":0},"title":"Delium: The Battle Only One Man Wanted–Part I","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 6, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Military History Quarterly [Delium will appear this week in a five part series: 1)The Battle, 2) The Aftermath, 3) Armor and Ranks, 4) Innovation and the Battlefield, 5) Coalition Warfare] Part I: The Battle By 424 B.C., the Peloponnesian War was at a stalemate. 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(Encounter Books, 2011 pp. 283) Winston Churchill famously said, \"An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last.\" In\u00a0The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":907,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/iran-senses-western-weakness\/","url_meta":{"origin":7839,"position":2},"title":"Iran Senses Western Weakness","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 15, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine As the clock ticks closer to a nuclear-armed Iran, the Western powers are girding their loins for \u2014 more talks. Actually, they\u2019re getting ready to talk to Iran about the\u00a0conditions\u00a0for talking some more. EU foreign policy head Catherine Ashton announced that the \u201cP5 +\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Iran"","block_context":{"text":"Iran","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/iran\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":346,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/messengers-messages-and-voters-part-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":7839,"position":3},"title":"Messengers, Messages, and Voters: Part 2","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton FrontPage \u00a0 At their retreat in Williamsburg a few weeks ago House Republicans continued the post-mortem of November\u2019s debacle. A big topic was how to better market the Republican brand. A Domino\u2019s Pizza executive gave \u201ca well-received talk about selling a damaged brand to a modern audience,\u201d\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. 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