(Not) Our Possible Future
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Speaking of people who probably cannot understand Powell’s endorsement, Ralph Peters offers us this gem:
Pandering to his extreme base, Obama has projected an image of being soft on terror.
Projected it to whom? When was all this pandering? What has he actually done that would lead any observer–even one who wrongly defines opposition to illegal surveillance powers as evidence of “weakness”–to come to this conclusion? Peters continues:
The Pakistanis think Obama would lose Afghanistan – and they believe they can reap the subsequent whirlwind.
Suppose that the Pakistanis do think this. Maybe some of them do. Why would they think this, and more important why should Americans assume that this is the correct reading? There are two unstated assumptions in this claim: 1) that McCain or someone pursuing an alternative course of action would not lose Afghanistan, meaning that this would only happen on Obama’s watch, and 2) that Obama’s position on Afghanistan/Pakistan is somehow not as equally hawkish as the current administration’s. Arguably, this more hawkish position might very well lead to disaster in Pakistan or end up undermining the NATO mission in Afghanistan, but if that is the case our current policy is equally misguided and yet comes in for no criticism.
He goes on:
In the Middle East, Obama’s election would be read as the end of staunch US support for Israel.
Maybe, if everyone in the region is as clueless as Obama’s domestic critics (this would be difficult), but why exactly would that be the case? Again, what has Obama said or done that would give anyone this impression? This is the flip side of the equally implausible “Obama’s election will cause Muslims everywhere to love the U.S. government”–a view foolishly promoted by his own supporters–and it is no more likely to be proven correct. Both misreadings rely on the idea that Middle Eastern governments and publics base their hostility/lack of hostility to the United States on superficial, symbolic things rather than actual U.S. policies. If only we change the appearance or the name of the President, everyone will respond accordingly! This is completely and in all ways wrong.
Peters prophesies some more:
Backed by Syria and Iran, Hezbollah would provoke another, far-bloodier war with Israel.
Perhaps, perhaps not. If this happens, Obama will support Israel just as full-throatedly and unequivocally as he did in 2006 during the last war. Who knows–he could very well back Israeli actions with direct U.S. military support, depending on the circumstances. It is amazing to me that virtually no one in either party ever talks about Obama’s support for Israeli actions in the Second Lebanon War. He was not alone in this, of course, as this was the default, almost universal position for members of Congress, but there is no question that it was his position. I suppose it is more convenient for certain antiwar progressives and Obama’s Republican critics alike to ignore this evidence that their hopes/fears concerning Obama are false.
Peters keeps hallucinating:
Russia’s new czar, Vladimir Putin, intends to gobble Ukraine next year, assured that NATO will be divided and the US can be derided.
This is highly unlikely to happen. Unlike the short, swift incursion into Georgia, “gobbling up” Ukraine or even lending support to Crimean separatists would be a much larger, riskier and potentially more disastrous proposition for Russia. Give Peters propaganda points for denouncing Timoshenko, once the socialist beehive-bedooed hero of American interventionists everywhere when she was on the Orange Revolution bandwagon, for charting a moderately less anti-Moscow path. More to the point, were this to happen, there is every reason to think that Obama and Joe “Expand NATO to the Pacific” Biden would respond to it just as counterproductively than Mr. Bush would were he still in office. How’s that for a vote of confidence?
Peters continues:
Hugo Chavez will intensify the rape of his country’s hemorrhaging democracy and, despite any drop in oil revenue, he’ll do all he can to export his megalomaniacal version of gun-barrel socialism.
Well, I suppose he will, and he will keep failing as he has been failing for the last several years. Meanwhile, Chavez’s own weakness at home makes him increasingly irrelevant.
This one takes the cake for its silliness:
Chavez client President Evo Morales could order his military to seize control of his country’s dissident eastern provinces, whose citizens resist his repression, extortion and semi-literate Leninism. President Obama would do nothing as yet another democracy toppled and bled.
The Bolivian government is a democratic government in all its demagogic socialist glory. What Peters is accusing Obama of doing before the fact is failing to intervene against the democratically-elected government of Bolivia (to use the phrasing that pan-Kartvelian pundits prefer) in the domestic political affairs of an extremely poor, strategically insignificant country. In other words, he says that Obama will be a responsible President who won’t waste American resources on sideshow internal conflicts where U.S. interests are scarcely involved. Peters really has him on the ropes now!
Peters just keeps on making things up (why stop at this point?):
An Obama administration will abandon our only true allies [the Kurds] between Tel Aviv and Tokyo.
Abandon them to whom? What is he talking about? Incidentally, I wonder what the Indians think of being written off as less than a true ally of the United States. I guess that nuclear deal was all a figment of our collective imagination.
Peters again:
Around the world, regressive regimes will intensify their suppression – and outright murder – of dissidents who risk their lives for freedom and justice. An Obama administration will say all the right things, but do nothing.
And how that would be a change from how things are now exactly? On the contrary, if Obama is even remotely serious in what he was saying about Burma and Zimbabwe in his Berlin speech we should be more concerned that Obama will start doing all kinds of things in this area and adding to our already excessively long list of commitments.
Obviously, there is no substance to Peters’ criticisms of Obama, but what is worrisome is that Obama, already perfectly hawkish and interventionist on his own, will feel compelled to take even harder lines and be even more confrontational than he would otherwise be in order to demonstrate that he is not the weak, accommodating President that Peters et al. are making him out to be. Having learned nothing from the Bush years, these critics may box Obama in and lead him to take positions that are more aggressive even than those of Mr. Bush to secure his “credibility” on national security. If Obama simply ignores these critics and pulls back from more hard-line stances when appropriate, then he may still be wrong on many things but he will have earned some genuine credibility.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
nothing new in Peters’ nonsense! I’m just wondering why you waste your time with that! By now, anybody who is still listens to such kind of rhetoric and accepts it cannot be persuaded otherwise. most people believe in things, not because they thing they are true, but because they make them feel better.
Confronting this kind of nonsense, the best language to reply (and the only one which might be useful) is the language of humor, irony, or ridicule. Use logic when you talk to wise grown-ups!
All it is is an attempt to paint Obama as the stereotypical liberal – soft on crime and war, without evidence, just because of “not knowing who he IS.”
Yes, it’s all old and rehashed nonsense that’s being offered in that piece, and I agree that laughing at it can be very effective, but I think it is also useful to make a very thorough demonstration of how empty all these claims are. Certainly from my perspective the problem with Obama is that he is far too hawkish, so the last thing we need is to set up false oppositions between Obama’s alleged weakness and the truly “strong” position of the GOP.
I mostly agree, except for this one bit:
Maybe, if everyone in the region is as clueless as Obama’s domestic critics (this would be difficult), but why exactly would that be the case? Again, what has Obama said or done that would give anyone this impression? This is the flip side of the equally implausible “Obama’s election will cause Muslims everywhere to love the U.S. governmentâ€â€“a view foolishly promoted by his own supporters–and it is no more likely to be proven correct. Both misreadings rely on the idea that Middle Eastern governments and publics base their hostility/lack of hostility to the United States on superficial, symbolic things rather than actual U.S. policies. If only we change the appearance or the name of the President, everyone will respond accordingly! This is completely and in all ways wrong.
I’m not aware of any serious Obama supporters claiming that “Obama’s election will cause Muslims everywhere to love the US government”. This is a big country and Obama has tens of millions of supporters, so I’m sure at least a few actually believe this, but so what? A few Obama supporters probably believe he is living god; lots of Americans believe crazy things. If you want to claim that this idea is accepted by many Obama supporters or by serious writers who are Obama supporters, then I’d be curious to see who exactly you’re talking about.
Now, I think there is reason to believe in a much weaker version of this idea. Because the US is a democracy, and because Bush was reelected in 2004, many people around the world have concluded that Americans support the government’s foreign policies including the Bush doctrine in all its glory. Many people abroad believe that Americans hate brown people or Muslim people. They are convinced that we could never elect someone is the son of a Muslim man. Electing Obama might well convince some of them that Americans are not full of hatred for all things tangentially related to Islam. In addition, in many parts of the middle east, racism is strongly entrenched. The election of a black man might convince people that America is a very different society than they thought. There are already indications that Obama and his potential election have aroused serious interest in the middle east.
Now, none of that means that policy will change significantly. But it does mean that there will be increased political support for giving America the benefit of the doubt for a time. Lots of people will still be staunchly opposed to US policies no matter what, but to the extent that a President Obama proposes changes in how we deal with middle east, I think he’ll face somewhat less popular hostility than a President Bush or McCain would face if they made the exact same proposals. This sort of effect will probably be short lived and it only really amounts to a willingness to listen to American and consider the possibility that we’re not determined to destroy Muslims left and right. That’s not much, but right now, we’ve got precious little in terms of rapport with people in the middle east, and that opening may make the difference if Obama is willing and able to exploit it.
This is the sort of thinking I’ve encountered when discussing these issues with other Obama supporters. Like I said, if you can cite instances of serious Obama supporters repeating your extreme version, I’d appreciate it.
Okay, it’s a bit hyperbolic to have put it that way and I will grant that no one has said that all Muslims everywhere will respond this way, but there have certainly been arguments from serious Obama supporters (unless you’d like to disqualify Andrew out of hand) that Obama’s election would revolutionize American soft power particularly among Muslim populations and that his appearance and election by themselves would dramatically alter foreign perceptions of America. His Atlantic cover story on Obama is the locus classicus of this view, but it is not the only one I have seen. I see little reason why his election would have any effect at all once the brief euphoria of “thank goodness Bush is gone!” wore off, and I think the assumption that his background and appearance would garner favorable responses in most parts of the world gets things badly wrong. Roger Cohen’s columns over the past year are rich in examples of Obama supporters and sympathizers, including Cohen, making such interpretations. Those are the most prominent ones that leap to mind, but I expect that more can be found.
At bottom, both of these are arguments that foreign publics will respond to Obama as a symbol and will ignore what he proposes to do, while it is precisely because foreign publics in the Middle East are going to become aware of what he proposes to do that his election will not be seen as a dramatic change on Israel or anything else.
unless you’d like to disqualify Andrew out of hand
Well, I personally would because I think Andrew is a third rate analyst. I mean, this is the guy who supported the Iraq War while believing every bit of Bush administration propaganda, right? The guy who after 9/11 earnestly fretted about how everyone not desperate to start invading random countries was a fifth column, working in league with AQ? He is certainly an Obama supporter, but he’s also someone who describes himself as a conservative. Cohen is a joke, a laughingstock. Despite his pretensions, his outlook seems quite conservative: he certainly cheerleaded for a conservative President. I don’t think you were trying to claim that conservatives are prone to misjudge Obama in opposing ways on this one issue…
I see little reason why his election would have any effect at all once the brief euphoria of “thank goodness Bush is gone!†wore off, and I think the assumption that his background and appearance would garner favorable responses in most parts of the world gets things badly wrong.
Then perhaps we’re largely in agreement. I too think any effect will be short lived, especially if Obama continues current policies as you expect he will. I have relatives that live in the middle east and they’re very interested in Obama; he genuinely fascinates them in a way that, say Clinton, never did.
I think there would be an extended honeymoon in Europe, not in the middle east or south asia. Pakistan would be particularly miffed.
OK – I had to look up ‘pan-kartvelian’. Probably more effort than Mr. Peters justifies.
Sen. Obama has shown himself in his campaign quite resistant to the imprecations of his allies and supporters to take various courses of action that they propose. We can at least hope that he will take the same course in his impending presidency….
Daniel – I fail to understand why you spend your intellectual muscles on debunking simplistic and obvious fallacies in articles like Peters’. You educate your readership so well in so many other aspects that coming across a post like this really breaks the flow.
What I think would be more useful is a speculative post from you that debates whether Obama truly subscribes to the hawkish foreign policy persona he presents during the election campaign. IMHO I think he wants to pull out of Iraq so as to stop bleeding $$ and channel those resources back home but also understands that politically any administration must, at the minimum appear to, continue to militarily counter Al Qaeda (and by association, Taliban). Other than those clear stands, I suspect he has a post-cold war mentality on US role and involvement in international affairs; a much more nuanced view that has as an underlying principle the US regaining a higher moral ground. This may involve the US taking action in genocidal and other obviously tyrannical activities by states; but never outside the framework of majority global consensus. (Of course I also expect him to be honest about any evidence). I also thinks he will be alot more resistant to using force.