For Obama, it isn’t the man in the arena who counts. It’s
the speaker on the stage.
By BRET STEPHENS
Barack
Obama told the U.N.’s General Assembly on Monday he’s concerned that “dangerous
currents risk pulling us back into a darker, more disordered world.” It’s nice
of the president to notice, just don’t expect him to do much about it.
Recall that it wasn’t long ago that
Mr. Obama took a sunnier view of world affairs. The tide of war was receding.
Al Qaeda was on a path to defeat. ISIS was “a
jayvee team” in “Lakers uniforms.” Iraq was an Obama
administration success story. Bashar Assad’s days were numbered. The Arab
Spring was a rejoinder to, rather than an opportunity
for, Islamist violence. The intervention in Libya was vindication for the “lead from behind”
approach to intervention. The reset with Russia was a success,
a position he maintained as late as September 2013. In Latin America, the “trend lines are
good.”
“Overall,” as he told Tom
Friedman in
August 2014—shortly after ISIS had seized control of Mosul and as Vladimir
Putin was
muscling his way into eastern Ukraine—“I think there’s still cause for
optimism.”
It’s a remarkable record of
prediction. One hundred percent wrong. The professor president who loves to
talk about teachable moments is himself unteachable. Why is that?
Some of the explanations are ordinary
and almost forgivable. All politicians like to boast. The predictions seemed
reasonably well-founded at the time they were made. Mr. Obama wasn’t really
making predictions: He was choosing optimism, placing a bet on hope. His
successes were of his own making; the failures owed to forces beyond his
control. And so on.
But there’s a deeper logic to the president’s
thinking, starting with ideological necessity. The president had to declare our
foreign policy dilemmas solved so he could focus on his favorite task of
“nation-building at home.” A strategy of retreat and accommodation, a bias
against intervention, a preference for minimal responses—all this was about
getting America off the hook, doing away with the distraction of other people’s
tragedies.
When you’ve defined your political
task as “fundamentally transforming the United States of America”—as Mr. Obama
did on the eve of his election in 2008—then your hands are full. Let other
people sort out their own problems.
But that isn’t all. The president also
has an overarching moral theory about American power, expressed in his 2009 contention in Prague that “moral leadership
is more powerful than any weapon.”
At the time, Mr. Obama was speaking
about the end of the Cold War—which, he claimed, came about as a result of
“peaceful protest”—and of his desire to see a world without nuclear weapons. It
didn’t seem to occur to him that the possession of such weapons by the U.S.
also had a hand in winning the Cold War. Nor did he seem to contemplate the
idea that moral leadership can never safely be a substitute for weapons unless
those leaders are willing to throw themselves at the mercy of their enemies’
capacity for shame.
In late-era South Africa and the
Soviet Union, where men like F.W. de Klerk and Mikhail
Gorbachev had
a sense of shame, the Obama theory had a chance to work. In Iran in 2009, or in
Syria today, it doesn’t.
Then again, that distinction doesn’t
much matter to this president, since he seems to think that seizing the moral
high ground is victory enough. Under Mr. Obama, the U.S. is on “the right side
of history” when it comes to the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine, or the
killing fields in Syria, or the importance of keeping Afghan girls in school.
Having declared our good intentions,
why muck it up with the raw and compromising exercise of power? In Mr. Obama’s
view, it isn’t the man in the arena who counts. It’s the speaker on the stage.
Finally,
Mr. Obama believes history is going his way. “What? Me worry?” says the
immortal Alfred
E. Neuman, and
that seems to be the president’s attitude toward Mr. Putin’s interventions in
Syria (“doomed to fail”)
and Ukraine (“not so smart”),
to say nothing of his sang-froid when it comes to the rest of his
foreign-policy debacles.
In this cheapened Hegelian world view,
the U.S. can relax because History is on our side, and the arc of history bends
toward justice. Why waste your energies to fulfill a destiny that is already
inevitable? And why get in the way of your adversary’s certain doom?
It’s easy to accept this view of life
if you owe your accelerated good fortune to a superficial charm and
understanding of the way the world works. It’s also easier to lecture than to
learn, to preach than to act. History will remember Barack
Obama as
the president who conducted foreign policy less as a principled exercise in the
application of American power than as an extended attempt to justify the
evasion of it.
From Aleppo to Donetsk to Kunduz,
people are living with the consequences of that evasion.
Write
bstephens@wsj.com
