I'm going to briefly compare and contrast Obama and Bush 43 foreign policy. I don't think Bush 43 is the standard of comparison by any means. That's not how I'd cast the issue, left to my druthers. But since this issue has come up, I'll address it on those terms:
i) The Iraq war obviously backfired.
ii) Keep in mind that many critics of the Iraq war preferred the containment policy of economic sanctions and the no-fly zone. However, that strategy had many critics too. The sanctions were hard to enforce. And they took a toll on the civilian populace. Eventually, the UN would have allowed the sanctions to lapse.
A problem with the no-fly zone is that Iraq kept firing anti-aircraft missiles at our fighter jets. What should we have done if they downed one of our fighter jets?
iii) I think the Afghanistan war was justified, but the nation-building component was a boondoggle.
iv) Obama's foreign policy is basically procrastination.
v) One traditional component of American foreign policy has been the balance of powers concept. The world is safer for America when some foreign powers form a check on the ambitions of other foreign powers. You play one off against the other. Kissinger is a famous exponent of this strategy.
It's been criticized for favoring global stability over human rights. An amoral foreign policy. There's some truth to that. However, it's not as if the Arab Winter or Putin on the march promotes human rights.
During the Cold War this involved a tradeoff between the greater evil of global communism and the lesser evil of, say, the Shah of Iran or Latin American dictatorships.
The lesser evil principle is not amoral. Moreover, global stability doesn't mean you can't ever challenge the status quo. But it's a cost/benefit analysis.
Because the future is unpredictable, good intentions sometimes have calamitous unforeseen consequences. Both retaining and changing the status quo has unintended consequences, for good or ill.
With the passage of time, the threats change. Islam is now a greater danger. So is the threat of pandemics.
vi) A basic problem with Obama's foreign (non-) policy is that no one knows what, if anything, the US is prepared to fight for. We don't present a credible threat. Under Obama, America's enemies don't fear America. Obama is an international laughingstock. A guppy in a sea of sharks.
In addition, he's undercut Israel, and he's strengthened Iran.
He's let Chinese cyberterrorism go unchecked.
We have an open border on the South, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
By killing rather than capturing bin Laden, we were unable to interrogate bin Laden. In addition, Obama has apparently failed to exploit the intel cache we did acquire:
And we still have two years to go before his second term expires.
Good food for thought Steve.
ReplyDeleteI am currently reading a book titled "The Gamble" which is about the Surge in Iraq.
It made me start thinking about the US relationship with "the Awakening." Do you think it might be possible we unintentionally helped advanced the Islamic State as a result of that?
Yes, I think that's possible.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm, we had the opportunity to talk to some Navy Seals who had infiltrated Iraq all the way to Baghdad. They had an optimal location and had Saddam Hussein in their sights. All they needed was the word from Bush 41. They got the word... to stand down. Sparing Hussein's life then, I think, was a bargaining chip for maintaining the stability of the region at that time. He didn't behave himself, but the region did stay relatively calm. On the other hand, he was Sunni and was likely providing for the first waves of the Arab Spring (The Arab Brotherhood has been Sunni) at that time. It's not clear to me if his political influence, were he to have remained in power, would have prevented ISIS, a more radical variety of Sunni, by channeling their energies into what would have been probably a more successful Arab Spring. Which one would have been better? I don't know the answer to that.
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