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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Dumb and
dumber By John Feffer
US President Barack Obama is a smart guy.
So why has he spent the past four years executing
such a dumb foreign policy? True, his reliance on
"smart power" - a euphemism for giving the
Pentagon a stake in all things global - has been a
smart move politically at home. It has largely
prevented the Republicans from playing the
national-security card in this election year. But
"smart power" has been a disaster for the world at
large and, ultimately, for the United States
itself.
Power was not always Obama's
strong suit. When he ran for president in 2008, he
appeared to friend and foe alike as Mr Softy. He
wanted out of the war in Iraq. He was no fan of nuclear
weapons. He favored
carrots over sticks when approaching America's
adversaries.
His opponent in the
Democratic primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton,
tried to turn this hesitation to use hard power
into a sign of a man too inexperienced to be
entrusted with the presidency. In 2007, when Obama
offered to meet without preconditions with the
leaders of Cuba, North Korea and Iran, Clinton
fired back that such a policy was "irresponsible
and frankly naive". In February 2008, she went
further with a TV ad that asked voters who should
answer the White House phone at 3am. Obama, she
implied, lacked the requisite body parts - muscle,
backbone, cojones - to make the hard presidential
decisions in a crisis.
Obama didn't take
the bait. "When that call gets answered, shouldn't
the president be the one - the only one - who had
judgment and courage to oppose the Iraq war from
the start?" his response ad intoned. "Who
understood the real threat to America was
al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Who led the
effort to secure loose nuclear weapons around the
globe."
Like most successful politicians,
Barack Obama could be all things to all people.
His opposition to the Iraq war made him the
darling of the peace movement. But he was no peace
candidate, for he always promised, as in his
response to that phone-call ad, to shift US
military power toward the "right war" in
Afghanistan. As president, he quickly and
effectively drove a stake through the heart of Mr
Softy with his pro-military, pro-war speech at, of
all places, the ceremony awarding him the Nobel
Peace Prize.
Obama's protean abilities
have come to the fore in his approach to what once
was called "soft power", a term Harvard professor
Joseph Nye coined in his 1990 book Bound to
Lead. For more than 20 years, Nye has been
urging US policymakers to find different ways of
leading the world, exercising what he termed
"power with others as much as power over others".
After September 11, 2001, when "soft"
became an increasingly suspect word, Washington
policymakers began to use "smart power" to denote
a menu of expanded options that were to combine
the capabilities of both the State Department and
the Pentagon. "We must use what has been called
'smart power', the full range of tools at our
disposal - diplomatic, economic, military,
political, legal, and cultural - picking the right
tool, or combination of tools, for each
situation," Clinton said at her confirmation
hearing for her new role as secretary of state.
"With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard
of foreign policy."
But diplomacy has not
been at the vanguard of Obama's foreign policy.
From drone attacks in Pakistan and cyber-warfare
against Iran to the vaunted "Pacific pivot" and
the expansion of US military intervention in
Africa, the Obama administration has let the
Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
call the shots. The president's foreign policy has
certainly been "smart" from a domestic political
point of view. With the ordering of the SEAL Team
6 raid into Pakistan that led to the assassination
of Osama bin Laden and "leading from behind" in
the Libya intervention, the president has
effectively removed foreign policy as a Republican
talking point. He has left the hawks of the other
party with very little room for maneuver.
But in its actual effects overseas, his
version of "smart power" has been anything but
smart. It has maintained imperial overstretch at
self-destructive expense, infuriated strategic
competitors such as China, hardened the position
of adversaries like Iran and North Korea, and
tried the patience of even longtime allies in
Europe and Asia.
Only one thing makes
Obama's policy look geopolitically smart - and
that's Mitt Romney's prospective foreign policy.
On global issues, then, the November elections
will offer voters a particularly unpalatable
choice: between a Democratic militarist and an
even more over-the-top militaristic Republican,
between Bush Lite all over again and Bush heavy,
between dumb and dumber.
Mr Softy goes
to Washington Mr Softy went to Washington
in 2008 and discovered a backbone. That, at least,
is how many foreign-policy analysts described the
"maturation" process of the new president. "Barack
Obama is a soft-power president," wrote the
Financial Times' Gideon Rachman in 2009. "But the
world keeps asking him hard-power questions."
According to this scenario, Obama made
quiet overtures to North Korea, and Pyongyang
responded by testing a nuclear weapon. The
president went to Cairo and made an impressive
speech in which he said, among other things, "We
also know that military power alone is not going
to solve the problems in Afghanistan and
Pakistan." But individuals and movements in the
Muslim world - al-Qaeda, the Taliban - continued
to challenge US power. The president made a bold
move to throw his support behind nuclear
abolition, but the nuclear lobby in the United
States forced him to commit huge sums to
modernizing the very nuclear complex he promised
to negotiate out of existence.
According
to this scenario, Obama came to Washington with a
fistful of carrots to coax the world,
non-violently, in the direction of peace and
justice. The world was not cooperative, and so, in
practice, those carrots began to function more
like orange-colored sticks.
This view of
Obama is fundamentally mistaken. Mr Softy was a
straw man created from the dreams of his dovish
supporters and the nightmares of his hawkish
opponents. That Obama avatar was useful during the
primary and the general-election campaign to
appeal to a nation weary of eight years of cowboy
globalism. Like a campaign adviser ill-suited to
the bruising policy world of Washington, Mr Softy
didn't survive the transition.
Consider,
for example, Obama's speech in Cairo in June 2009.
This inspiring speech should have signaled a
profound shift in US policy toward the Muslim
world. But what Obama didn't mention in his speech
was his earlier conversation with outgoing
president George W Bush in which he'd secretly
agreed to continue two major Bush initiatives: the
CIA's unmanned-drone air war in Pakistan's tribal
borderlands and the covert program to disrupt
Iran's nuclear program with computer viruses.
Obama didn't just continue these programs;
he amplified them. The result has been an
unprecedented expansion of US military power
through drones in Pakistan and neighboring
Afghanistan as well as Somalia and Yemen. The use
of drones, and the civilian casualties they've
caused, has in turn enflamed public opinion around
the world, with the favorability rating of the
United States under Obama in majority-Muslim
countries falling to a new low of 15% in 2012,
lower, that is, than the rock-bottom standard set
by the Bush administration.
The drone
campaign has undermined other smart-power
approaches, including that old standby diplomacy,
not only by antagonizing potential interlocutors
but also by killing a good number of them. Along
with the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, often
cited as one of Obama's signal accomplishments,
the drone war has by now provoked a slow-motion
rupture in relations between Washington and
Islamabad.
The covert cyber-war initiative
against Iran's nuclear program, conducted with
Israeli cooperation, produced both the Stuxnet
worm, which wreaked havoc on Iranian centrifuges,
and the Flame virus, which monitored its computer
network. Instead of vigorously pursuing diplomatic
solutions - such as the nuclear compromise that
Brazil and Turkey cobbled together in 2010 that
might have defused the situation and guaranteed a
world without an Iranian bomb - the Obama
administration acted secretly and aggressively. If
the United States had been the target of such a
cyberattack, Washington would have considered it
an act of war.
Meanwhile, the United
States has set a dangerous precedent for future
attacks in this newest theater of operations and
unleashed a weapon that could even be
reverse-engineered and sent back in its own
direction.
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