If you asked me to come up with an essay critical of Barack Obama’s foreign policy from a Republican point-of-view, I’d probably come up with something like this because it is so predictable. You begin with the penis.
I despair of this latest episode of gestural theater designed to make the U.S. look exquisitely reasonable (should we call it “Jimmy-Cartesian”?), but which in truth results in the U.S. looking flaccid, or worse, complacent. After all, who gains from a presidential posture that has, in effect, stigmatized our most potent deterrent?
In terms of foreign policy—or, better put, foreign clout—the U.S. is going through a startling period of auto-emasculation. Barack Obama has discarded his predecessor’s big stick—the wielding of which should have confirmed the flaws not of big sticks but of his predecessor—and replaced it with a mission of almost messianic outreach to our foes and most adamant competitors (while, at the same time, snubbing allies like Britain, Israel and India; Robert Kagan has a doughty essay on this in The Washington Post.)
You see, a nuclear weapon is like a large erection. George W. Bush’s foreign policy was like a large erection. Ally and adversary alike were cowed and impressed by these large erections. Obama is taking the blood out of our impressive foreign policy and system of deterrence. When it comes time to criticize a Democratic president’s foreign policy, the first thing is to accuse him of having a limp dick.
But that only gets you so far. You next have to do a bit of explanation. Why does the president have a limp dick? And this is where you compare him to the Europeans, who seem to have become so demilitarized that they’ve forgotten to reproduce. It all comes down to a simple trade-off. You can have health care or you can be exceptional in the imperialistic sense, but you can’t do both.
In the Obama narrative, America has been a reckless source of trouble for the world because of its arrogant interventionism. Obama’s solution, in the words of Charles Hill, a professor at Yale, is the following: “Close out the wars, disengage, and distance ourselves in order to carry out the real objective: the achievement of a European-style welfare state. Just as Reagan downsized government by starving it through budget cuts, Obama will downsize the military-industrial complex by directing so much money into health care, environ-o-care, etc., that we, like the Europeans, will have no funds available to maintain world power.
I was a bit surprised when, in the late stages of the health care debate, I first saw the right making this formulaic argument that health-care-for-all could only come at the expense of our unique role of global cop. But the argument has gone viral in the last month. As an argument on the fringes, it may be helpful to the Republicans, but I’d be interested in what would happen if you put the question to the American people. Not that I really accept the premise, but what would the American people choose if offered a European-style safety net at the cost of a significant roll-back of U.S. military spending (with a concomitant reduction in U.S. influence in global affairs)?
Of course, no right-wing critique of a Democratic president’s foreign policy would be complete without some strikingly unfair and hypocritical attacks. So, first we must be critical of Obama’s decision to put democracy over friendship in Honduras (a decision shared with the Organization of American States (OAS)).
(Of course, it is OK to be unilateralist in the formal renunciation of strategic options, as happens with any nuclear self-denial; otherwise, multinational solidarity is always to be preferred, even when it leads to the backing of anti-American forces, as has happened in Honduras.)
And then we must criticize Obama for not putting lofty ideals (like the democratization of the Middle East) over any pragmatic concerns.
Obama’s foreign policy has two pillars: conciliation as a tool for peace (defined as lending a close ear to every recalcitrant nation, while abjuring any American right to be censorious); and an avowed preference for pragmatism over any values-based evangelism (in effect, the elevation of pragmatism to the status of directive principle).
You’d think that advocating democracy for Honduras would get you credit for having a “values-based evangelism” in foreign policy, but this is a right-wing essay.
There is also an unseemly side to the pragmatism that is Obama’s international leitmotif. Paradoxically for a man who incarnates the progress of civil liberties in his own country, the president has literally banished human rights (that quintessentially liberal and Democratic concern) from U.S. foreign policy—just because Bush took up the cause. Of rights in China, Egypt, and elsewhere, the Obama administration has spoken only with an excessive, and dispiriting, circumspection.
As much as I admire President Obama, he has hardly incarnated progress on civil liberties. That comment is an obvious nod to the president’s race and the right of black people not only to vote but to run for public office. There are other civil liberties, like the right to hold the government accountable for lawbreaking and the right not to be assassinated by your government without any due process. But we must maintain the limp-dick narrative here, so we’re moving on…
So one wonders—as Putin embraces Chavez and Karzai plays host to Ahmadinejad; as Russia asserts the right to repudiate any nuclear-arms reduction treaty and China gives us the bird on the yuan; as the alliance with India languishes and the one with Britain experiences unprecedented atrophy; as Israel expresses acrid disagreement with us and Japan seeks to rip pages out of its postwar rulebook—what all the pragmatism has really, truly accomplished…
…other than give our delighted adversaries a free pass and our friends a very rude wakeup call.
An interesting set of beefs. On the front-page of the New York Times right now: U.S. and Russia Sign Nuclear Arms Pact. On the Reuters newswire: China Hints At Readiness to Let Yuan Rise. At the Washington Post: China to join talks on Iran sanctions at U.N.. As for the others, I see no problem in having some acrid disagreement with Israel over their settlement policy and I doubt Guam will tip-over after we reposition some of our Japanese-based forces there. Our relationships with India and Britain are just fine. And I think it’s taking the Monroe Doctrine a little far to worry about low level Russia-Venezuela arms deals. The only area where I share any concern is Afghanistan, where I presume my solution is not shared by this right-wing columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the Hoover Institution.
Teddy Roosevelt said we should talk quietly and carry a big stick. The right has tweaked this to be: expose your huge erection and scream at anybody passing by who hasn’t noticed it.
