Every president gets
things wrong. What sets Obama apart is his ideological rigidity and fathomless
ignorance.
By
Serious people feel an obligation to listen
whenever Barack Obama speaks. They furrow their
brow and hold their chin and parse every word. They assume that most everything
a president says is significant, which is true. They assume that what's
significant must also be well-informed. Not necessarily.
I've
been thinking about this as it becomes clear that, even at an elementary level,
Mr. Obama often doesn't know what he's talking about. It isn't so much his
analysis of global events that's wrong, though it is. The deeper problem is the
foundation of knowledge on which that analysis is built.
Here, for instance, is Mr. Obama answering
a question posed in August by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who wanted the
president's thoughts on the new global disorder.
"You
can't generalize across the globe," the president replied. "Because
there are a bunch of places where good news keeps on coming. Asia continues to
grow . . . and not only is it growing but you're starting to see democracies in
places like Indonesia solidifying."
"The
trend lines in Latin America are good," he added. "Overall, there's
still cause for optimism."
Here, now, is reality: In Japan, the
economy is contracting. China's real-estate market is a bubble waiting to
burst. Indonesia's democracy may be solidifying, but so is Islamism and the
persecution of religious minorities. Democracy has been overthrown in Thailand.
The march toward freedom in Burma—supposedly one of Mr. Obama's (and Hillary Clinton's ) signature diplomatic victories—has
stalled. India may do better than before under its new prime minister, Narendra
Modi, but gone are the days when serious people think of India as a future
superpower. The government of Pakistan is, as ever, on the verge of collapse.
As
for Latin America, Argentina just defaulted for the second time in 13 years.
Brazil is in recession. Venezuela is a brutal dictatorship. Ecuador is well on
its way to becoming one.
I
begin with these examples not because there aren't bright spots in Asia (South
Korea is one) or Latin America (Colombia is another) but because it's so
typically Obama. Warn against generalization—and then generalize. Cite an
example—but one that isn't representative. Talk about a trend line—but get the
direction of the trend wrong.
Next
example: Turkey. In 2009 Mr. Obama decided to elevate Turkey and its prime
minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as his core partner in the Middle East.
"On issue after issue we share common goals," he told the Turkish
parliament in April 2009. In 2012 he said that he and Mr. Erdogan had developed
"bonds of trust."
Yet
in 2009 it was already clear that Mr. Erdogan was orchestrating huge show
trials against his political opponents based on outlandish charges. By 2010 it
was clear that he was an avowed supporter of Hamas, not to mention a vocal
anti-Semite. In 2012 the Committee to Protect Journalists noted that Turkey had
more journalists in prison than China and Iran put together.
Now
turn to Yemen. In 2012, after the Arab Spring, the president singled out Yemen
as a model for a prospective political transition in Syria. Mr. Obama was at it
again just two weeks ago, citing the fight against al Qaeda in Yemen as the
model for the war he intends to wage against the Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria.
Whoops.
"Over the weekend," noted McClatchy's Adam Baron on Monday, "the
growing gap between administration rhetoric and reality came to a head, as the
acerbically anti-American Houthi rebels—who American diplomats allege have
close financial and military ties with Iran—took control of many areas of the
capital, Sanaa, with minimal resistance from the U.S.-supplied Yemeni armed
forces."
Keep
going around the world. He declared victory over al Qaeda and dismissed groups
such as ISIS as "the jayvee team" at the very moment that al Qaeda
was roaring back. He mocked the notion of Russia being our enemy—remember the
line about the 1980s wanting "its foreign policy back"?—just as
Russia was again becoming our enemy.
He
predicted in 2012 that "Assad's days are numbered" just as the Syrian
dictator was turning the tide of war in his favor. He defended last November's
nuclear deal with Tehran, saying "it's not going to be hard for us to turn
the dials back or strengthen sanctions even further" in the event that
diplomacy failed. In reality, as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
notes, "burgeoning trade ties with Turkey, increased oil sales to China,
and reports of multibillion-dollar Russian-Iranian trade deals, not yet
consummated but in the offing, are giving [Iran] a 'Plan B' escape hatch."
Every
administration tries to spin events its way; every president gets things wrong.
Mr. Obama is not exceptional in those respects. Where he stands apart is in his
combination of ideological rigidity and fathomless ignorance. What does the
president know? The simple answer, and maybe the truest, is: not a lot.
Write
to bstephens@wsj.com
So now
what? We have a US president who is fathomlessly ignorant. It took six years
for Americans to realize this. How long will it take them to understand the
dire consequences of this fathomless ignorance? Obama's appeasement of Iran -
Iran with nuclear weapons!?
