7/8/14, "Is Obama’s Foreign Policy Too European?" NY Times op-ed, Clemens Wergen, Berlin. "Clemens Wergin is the foreign editor of the newspaper group Die Welt and the author of the blog Flatworld."
"I have long been a critic of the German foreign policy debate — of
its freeloading on the American security umbrella, coupled with moral
grandstanding whenever the Americans did things their way; of too much
analysis of past events and not enough thinking about how to get things
right in the future; of its tendency to take words as a substitute for
deeds. That’s why I have usually given the Americans the benefit of the
doubt: At least they took on problems nobody else was willing to tackle.
But then, at the height of the Syria conflict and just after yet another of Barack Obama’s
speeches, I suddenly understood the problem with this American
president and his foreign policy. He sounded just like a German
politician: all moral outrage, but little else to help end one of the
most devastating civil wars of our age. President Obama, I thought with a
sigh, has become European.
Indeed,
the less this president wants to get involved in something abroad, the
more he dials up his rhetoric. That the American president finds things
“unacceptable,” one of his administration’s favorite words, doesn’t
carry any real meaning anymore; it certainly doesn’t mean that America
will try to change what it deems “unacceptable.”
One
school of thought holds that President Obama is only executing the will
of the people by staying out of conflicts around the globe. After two
wars Americans are tired, so the reasoning goes, and need a respite from
the world. And after the country recovers economically and mentally, it
will return to be its true global self.
Or maybe not. Maybe, as Peter Beinart argued
earlier this year in National Journal, Americans are becoming more
European in many respects, from attitudes on social welfare — like their
grudging but growing acceptance of Obamacare — to religion and foreign
policy.
Polls
suggest that Americans are not happy with the results of Mr. Obama’s
foreign policy, though they still shy away from the costs that more
engagement around the globe would entail. Welcome to my world. It sounds
awfully European to want to have one’s cake and eat it at the same
time.
There
is a certain irony in the fact that President Obama’s foreign policy
finds its Waterloo in the same country that shipwrecked the Bush
doctrine: Iraq. It is true that the Bush administration seriously
mishandled the war in Iraq. But it is also true that after the surge,
George W. Bush handed Mr. Obama an Iraq that was in much better shape
than it is today.
By
rushing to the exit and teaming up with the Iranians to reinstall Prime
Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki after he lost the elections in 2010 — and
by not confronting him forcefully on his anti-Sunni policies — the
Obama administration undermined the progress American troops had paid
for very dearly.
Then
came another deed of omission in Syria. For years Middle East experts
had warned that the civil war in Syria would not be confined to that
country, but would spill over into neighboring countries. But Mr. Obama
stood back, using rhetoric and admonitions while ignoring the experts.
Yet they were right: The crisis in Iraq is a direct result of Mr.
Obama’s nonconfrontational strategy in Syria.
.
.
When
he was first elected in 2008, Barack Obama was hailed on the old
Continent as a president with almost European sensitivities and
worldviews. But the compliment was unintentionally double-edged. For
more than two decades now, Europeans have assumed that the world would
remain comparatively stable and wouldn’t need much hard power to be
maintained (at least European hard power, that is). So too, it seems,
does Mr. Obama.
.
.
While
Mr. Obama’s new style of diplomacy — soft power and nonintervention —
was at first seen as a welcome break with the Bush years, five years
later a dismal realization has set in. It turns out that soft power
cannot replace hard power. On the contrary, soft power is merely a
complementary foreign policy tool that can yield results only when it is
backed up by real might and the political will to employ it if
necessary.
Ultimately,
the measuring stick for a successful foreign policy is not how many
nice and convincing speeches a leader makes, but whether he succeeds in
getting things to go his way. And in this respect Mr. Obama’s low-impact
foreign policy was simply not enough. Because if America stays out of
the fray, there are many others who will fill the void: Bashar al-Assad,
Hezbollah, Iran, Russia; the list of actors and countries that are
actively pushing against European and American interests, and getting
away with it, grows ever longer.
Barack
Obama wanted America to learn from Europe’s soft-power approach. But
while Europeans are loath to admit it, they know that European soft
power often doesn’t work either — and that it is a luxury that they
could afford only because America’s hard power always loomed in the
background. And when they dropped the ball, America would pick it up.
And
therein lies the lesson to our American friends who seemingly want to
become less involved and more European: There is no second America to
back you up when you drop the ball."
"Clemens Wergin is the foreign editor of the newspaper group Die Welt and the author of the blog Flatworld." published in July 9 editions.
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Comment: I posted this for future reference on the topics of media, Europe, EU, the UN, and "global agreements" which seem to be around every corner. As to the lame duck US president, he's only interested in destroying the US and Israel.
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