Offering a helping hand to America’s enemies in Iran,
Russia and Cuba will ruin lives and many more will die.
By GARRY KASPAROV
A quick glance at the latest headlines suggests a jarring
disconnect from the stream of foreign-policy successes touted by the Obama White
House and its allies. President Obama has been hailed by many as a peacemaker
for eschewing the use of military force and for signing accords with several of
America’s worst enemies. The idea that things will work out better if the U.S.
declines to act in the world also obeys Mr. Obama’s keen political instincts. A
perpetual campaigner in office, he realizes that it is much harder to criticize
an act not taken.
But what
is good for Mr. Obama’s media coverage is not necessarily good for America or
the world. From the unceasing violence in eastern Ukraine to the thousands of
Syrian refugees streaming into Europe, it is clear that inaction can also have
terrible consequences. The nuclear agreement with Iran is also likely to have
disastrous and far-reaching effects. But in every case of Mr. Obama’s timidity
and procrastination, the response to criticism amounts to this: It could have been worse.
Looking
at the wreckage of the Middle East, including the flourishing of Islamic State,
it takes great imagination to see how things would be worse today if the U.S.
had acted on Mr. Obama’s “red line” threat in 2013 and moved against Syria’s Bashar
Assad after
he defied the U.S. president and used chemical weapons.
Or
farther east, one would need to have believed Moscow’s overheated nuclear
threats to think that Ukraine would be worse off now if NATO had moved
immediately to secure the Ukrainian border with Russia as soon as Vladimir
Putin invaded
Crimea in 2014.
Over the
past year, especially in the past few months, Mr. Obama’s belief that American
force in the world should be constrained and reduced has reached its ultimate
manifestation in U.S. relations with Iran, Russia and Cuba. Each of these
American adversaries has been on the receiving end of the president’s helping
hand: normalization with Cuba, releasing Iran from sanctions, treating the
Putin Ukraine-invasion force as a partner for peace in the futile Minsk
cease-fire agreements.
In
exchange for giving up precisely nothing, these countries have been rewarded
with the international legitimacy and domestic credibility dictatorships
crave—along with more-concrete economic benefits.
When
dealing with a regime that won’t negotiate in good faith, the best approach is
to use a position of strength to pry concessions from the other side. But
instead the White House keeps offering concessions—while
helping its enemies off the mat. That such naïveté will result in positive
behavior from the likes of Ayatollah Khamenei, Vladimir Putin and the Castro
brothers should be beyond even Mr. Obama’s belief in hope and change.
Dictatorships,
especially the one-man variety like Russia’s, are unpredictable, but they do
operate on logical underlying principles. They often come to power with popular
support and a mandate to solve a crisis. Once a firm grip on power is achieved,
the junta or supreme leader blames his predecessors for any problems, and he
cracks down on rights. With democracy dead and civil society hunted to
extinction, the only way left to make a legitimate claim on power is
confrontation and conflict. Propaganda is ratcheted up against mythical fifth
columnists and the usual scapegoats, like immigrants and minorities.
The next
and usually final phase arrives when other tricks have become stale. Domestic
enemies are never threatening enough—and eventually there is no one left to
persecute, as in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin—so the dictator looks
abroad, inevitably finding a “national interest” to defend across a convenient
border.
This
external-conflict phase is especially dangerous because there are very few
examples of aggressor nations moving away from it peacefully. War and
revolution are the more frequent ways it burns itself out. The Soviet Union
altered its confrontational course after Stalin’s death, but it was a unique
and gigantic superpower with enough resources for its leadership to believe
that it could compete with the Free World instead of declaring war on it.
As it
turned out, the Soviets were wrong, something that more-recent autocrats,
including Mr. Putin, no doubt understand. They have watched and learned that their
people will eventually begin to compare living standards and see the truth if
left unmolested by war and strife. This window on the Free World is even larger
in the Internet age, so the conflicts and propaganda have to be even more
extreme.
Iran has been
operating in the confrontational phase for years, with America and Israel as
the main targets, in addition to Tehran’s regional Sunni rivals. Mr. Putin
moved into confrontation mode with the invasion of Ukraine and he cannot afford
to back down.
The dictatorship
that Nicolás
Maduro inherited from Hugo
Chávezin Venezuela is approaching the final stage as well, as seen
from the country’s recent launch of a border and immigrant conflict with
Colombia. The emptier the shelves in Venezuelan supermarkets, the more
threatening the Colombians must be made to seem. China has relied on tremendous
growth to forestall internal unrest for human rights, but if its economy
falters substantially, last week’s giant military parade in Beijing will be
seen as prelude, not posturing. Taiwan, always in China’s sights, has good
reason to be troubled by the West’s feeble responses in Syria and Ukraine.
Power
abhors a vacuum, and as the U.S. retreats the space is being filled. After
years of the White House leading from behind, Secretary of State John Kerry’s
timid warning to the Kremlin this week to stay out of Syria will be as
effective as Mr. Obama’s “red line.” Soon Iran—flush with billions of dollars
liberated by the nuclear deal—will add even more heft to its support for Mr.
Assad.
Dead
refugee children are on the shores of Europe, bringing home the Syrian crisis
that has been in full bloom for years. There could be no more tragic symbol
that it is time to stop being paralyzed by the Obama-era mantra that things
could be worse—and to start acting instead to make things better.
Mr. Kasparov, chairman of the New York-based Human Rights
Foundation, is the author of “Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the
Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped,” out next month from PublicAffairs.
