It turns out that the smart diplomats and strategery buffs in the White House have taken another look at the situation in Syria and reached a new conclusion: that Assad isn’t going anywhere after all. The Syrian civil war is going to drag murderously on into the indefinite future, jihadi groups will fester and multiply in the heart of the Middle East, and America is fine with that.
We note in passing that we are yet again glad for America’s sake that President Obama isn’t a Republican. If President Bush had let Detroit go bankrupt in the same week he handed Iran and Russia a major diplomatic victory, the press hysteria would be overwhelming. The cold hearted racist who was criminally indifferent to black suffering at home would also be branded as a failed Machiavelli abroad: someone whose policies were as evil and cold hearted as the most cynical of realists but also as inept and ineffective as the most feckless of idealists.
Fortunately, the President is a liberal Democrat of sorts, and so, even as the fashionable but inconsequential left turns vituperatively against him and the establishment whispers its increasing doubts behind closed doors, we are spared the national humiliation of an intellectual and journalistic establishment openly at war with our political leaders. That is fine by us; press firestorms don’t often contribute to good policy formation.
America’s Syria policy has been an embarrassment from the beginning; an unsteady administration has made itself look foolish and weak by a mix of intemperate rhetoric, empty threats and feckless dithering. The big winners are Russia, which with no cards in its weak hand has now re-inserted itself into Middle Eastern politics, and Iran. Secondary winners include Butcher Assad, Hezbollah, and the people around Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who tell him that Obama is too weak to protect Israel against Iran, and argue for a pre-emptive Israeli strike against the Iranian nuclear program. There is one unwelcome conclusion that everyone in the Middle East and beyond is drawing: don’t worry about what this President says. He shoots off his mouth a lot, but he’s in retreat and he will always choose the path of inaction—even if it weakens him.
Those who draw these conclusions are, we think, wrong. President Obama is not a conventional statesman. Like Woodrow Wilson, he is less interested in conventional ideas about the national interest than in issues of principle and world order. Wilson wasn’t willing to fight against Germany to preserve the balance of power in Europe, just as President Obama won’t intervene in Syria to knock Russia and Iran back on their heels. But Wilson was no pacifist, and once he saw the European war as a question of high principle, he was ruthlessly determined to win. Wilson often looked and sounded like a fool between 1914 and 1917, but underestimating him was Germany’s fatal mistake.
President Obama, we believe, genuinely sees the Iranian nuclear program as a serious threat to the survival of humanity and to the kind of international order that mankind must build. (Womankind, too, for that matter.) This is not because of any effects that an Iranian bomb would have on the regional balance of power or because he fears that the mullahs would do something rash with their new toys. It is because a successful Iranian drive to nuclear status would be the end of any real hope that nuclear proliferation could be stopped and that in turn would end any hope for nuclear disarmament. In President Obama’s worldview, these are fundamental issues of life and death and offer a much more compelling casus belli than concern, say, over shipping in the Persian Gulf or political stability in Bahrain.
Others may think that the President’s hopes are nonsensical and utopian, just as many thought that President Wilson’s hopes for a “war to end war” were absurd. Intelligent people disagree about these matters. But that isn’t the point. President Wilson believed in his historical mission and his duty, even if the cynics in the Wilhelmstrasse (as the old German foreign ministry was known) thought he was weak and naive.
There are three things that worry us about the apparently rudderless American policy in the Middle East today. The first is that America’s enemies and rivals in the region will so misread President Obama that they will take steps that make a US-Iranian war inevitable. Such a war is not to be feared because of dangers to the United States; it is the current Iranian regime and perhaps even the multi-ethnic, restless Iranian state of today that would have to worry about surviving a war. But nevertheless, a war of that kind would be brutal, tragic, expensive and unpredictable and there is nothing in such a prospect to appeal.
The second fear is that President Obama would in fact cave in the face of an Iranian dash for the bomb: that in spite of his brave words and solemn declarations at the end he would back down here too. The consequences, both for the cause of non-proliferation in an age when WMD are relentlessly becoming cheaper and easier to build and for more mundane but still vital American interests would be catastrophic and would effect our stance all over the world. We don’t think this is likely; we disagree with President Obama in some important respects about how the world works, but we have always thought him a serious person of principle when things come down to the bedrock.
The third fear is that regardless of what happens on the nuclear file, the international political consequences of our muddled Middle Eastern policy will so undermine our prestige and reputation that not only in the region but all around the world we will find that longstanding partners have lost their faith in our ability to formulate and carry out meaningful policy even when our vital interests and closest alliances are at stake. The Pax Americana is anything but perfect; it will, however, be viewed with great nostalgia if it fades.
In the short term, it appears that the ugly meltdown of America’s Middle Eastern policy is already having an impact on our world position. In Europe and in Asia, some key foreign policy makers have looked at the record of the last twelve years and concluded that Americans can no longer be trusted to elect presidents capable of managing our global portfolio. Americans tend to separate the shortcomings of the last administration and this one in their minds and see the Obama presidency for all its faults as at least offsetting some of the glaring faults of the Bush years. Foreigners are more likely to compound them, and see a polity that lurches unsteadily from too hot to too cold without ever striking a reasonable balance. As the view of America as a potentially powerful but politically incompetent country spreads, our enemies will press their advantages, fence sitters will think that the momentum lies with our opponents, and our friends will be timid and slow.
Fortunately, for most of our history, America’s key advantages have had little to do with the quality of our national leadership or the intellectual brilliance of our foreign policy. As foreign policy thinkers and managers, American politicians and mandarins have historically not often been better than their peers and rivals abroad, and more often we have been outgunned and outclassed by nimbler and smarter thinkers overseas. What saves America’s bacon time and again is the dynamism of our economy, the strength of our political union, and in the last analysis the sacrificial patriotism of the American people.
That President Obama, who came into office vowing to prioritize green jobs and push a climate change treaty, has presided over the shale gas and oil revolution is the latest example in American history of domestic dynamism overturning conventional thinking and ushering in a new period of American strength. American society is (or has been up until now) so strong that not even political incompetence and gridlock has been able to prevent the rise of a great world power. The energy revolution, the continuing development of IT and the unceasing rise of new companies, industries and services in American society are the ultimate sources of our global position. Combined with our geographic advantages and the vast, still-undepleted resources of this rich land, the dynamism of our society mends what our politicians inadvertently mar.