The world and South side of Chicago: Two different places Wednesday, June 17, 2009
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Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.
Among the many mysteries of the workings of the Obama Administration — most will have to be sorted out long after by the historians — is what can only be called its tin ear in foreign affairs.
For a political machine which has the reputation for being slick, which defeated no less a political mafia than the Clinton apparatus, which herded the mass media into its camp, and which, in power, has been able to manipulate its program to cover an tacit acceptance of many of the policies it campaigned against, President Barack Hussein Obama shows an unexplained obtuseness to nuance in international relations.
In a search to explain this basic phenomenon, distinguished observers have often resorted to rather arcane and studied explanations: for example, the repeated petty insults to America’s traditional cultural twin as well as political and military ally, the U.K, it has been said, traces back to Obama’s African inheritance. His grandfather, a cook for British World War II forces, and his father, a spearcarrier in the fight against British colonialism in Kenya, have willed him their anti-British prejudices, it has been said.
But that hardly explains why the Obama team, seeking to delink the opposition of the country to bringing Guantanomo “graduates” to the U.S., or indeed, to Obama’s campaign and promise repeated in office to liquidate the facility, would shove them off to a famous resort island. The Administration has delivered what Defense Dept. documents still claim as four Al Qaida-trained Uighurs, the Turkic rebels against Chinese Communist rule in Singkiang province, to apparently unregulated freedom. Still these former “battlefield combatans” are not likely to disappear in the Bermuda Triangle. Washington defied not only Westminster by not informing London, which still has formal control of self-governing Bermuda’s security and defense issues, but skirted the Bermuda government by making a behind the curtain deal with the Bermuda Prime Minister. That cannot but build new problems down the line and certainly will not reassure opponents of Obama’s attempt to close down Guantanomo and limit other anti-terrorist activities carried over from 9/11. Perhaps most of all, it came at the very moment Obama was again reasserting that the U.S. would not say something publicly it was working to contradict in private conversations with foreign governments.
This little imbroglio was added to the Walmart Gift Episode when an exchange of inferior state presents on the American side during embattled Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Washington visit, the snub of the Queen for the Normandy Landing anniversary event, and several other little indiscretions during the London G8 visit. These are alkl minor footnotes to history but the kind of gestures which lend “atmosphere” to a larger negotiating environment.
In fact, however, Obama has been rather even-handed in rattling the protocol tenets with other European members of NATO. He went sightseeing in Paris rather than closeting for extensive policy discussions with that other wildcard, President Nikolas Sarkozy — desspite of the fact that Sarkozy more than any other EU leader has been strong on blocking the Iranian mullahs’ efforts to build nuclear weapons. In Germany, he refused a Berlin visit for a lengthy one-on-one with Chancellor Angela Merkel in order to adhere to his own agenda, which included a visit to a former death camp to commemorate his uncle’s participation in its liberation [something, incidentally, his uncle says they never discussed]. [His earlier campaign Berlin visit, held its mass meeting in front of a monument to Prussian militarism that destroyed European piece for several generations.] These were all efforts at public relations for his American audience, of course, little mindful of the more important aspects they lent U.S.-European and world strategic concerns.
The Europeans, bless them!, have lived with American presidential idiosyncrasies for the 75 years Washington has been the superpower. And, certainly, far too often, the U.S. public has had to put up with a Europe inappreciative of the blood and sacrifice the New World has made to solve the problems of the Old. A Europe in its greatest economic crisis in the postwar period will probably surmount this period of miscommunication.
But it is the major crises of Asia to which Obama a priori must now turn where this lack of understanding or attention to the current reality becomes an issue of statecraft and dictates the very survival of the civilized world. Their importance becomes clear when it is shown to rest on a possible vast expansion of nuclear armaments among powers with even less stability and ability to control them than was true during the tense years of bipolar confrontation of The Cold War.
In this situation, faced with the threat of a nuclear arms race in the Mideast and in Northeast Asia, Obama’s tin ear simply ignores the nuances if not the substance of reality in favor of some short term political slogans and a backward look at a skewed version of history exemplified in his Cairo speech.
Nowhere is that more in evidence than in Washington’s view of current events in Iran. With his penchant for finding the mote in the American eye and issuing an apology rather than dealing with the iniquity at hand, Obama has failed to seize the opportunity the present revolutionary situation in Tehran presents. With the Iranian majority of young people on the streets protesting — and apparently dying — in their effort to bring about the end of one of the most ruthless and benighted dictatorships in recent history, Obama’s first statements chose to endorse the effort of its theocratic despot to explain away a failed propaganda election slight of hand. Reminding a generation of Persians who have known no other repression but this sixth century theocratic monster, his statements revived the supposed U.S. transgressions of the past. It boggles the mind!
At a time when a few but important voices are calling, again, for progress toward modernity and justice in the Arab/Muslim world, he insists on a litany of false claims for a failed society in a muddled appeal to cultural equivalency. He [literally] bows to the leader of a regime — however much the U.S. may have to make common cause for the moment — represents everything American democracy abhors. In more practical terms, he puts demands against Israel in the endless bazaar bargaining of the Arabs ahead of the obvious fact that there is no Palestinian entity with which to negotiate. That at a time when the Palestinian negotiator America has chosen, Mahmoud Abbas, has said openly in a media interview that he will not negotiate but wait for Washington pressure on Israel for concessions. He ignores the fact that a significant half of the Palestinians are in the hands of a jihadist regime in Gaza, even offering financing for its attempts at growing military strength. And Obama negates the one breakthrough which might unlock the longstanding conundrum of Israeli-Arab accommodation, a clearcut and definitive statement of the acceptance of a Jewish state by the overwhelmingly surrounding Moslem regimes. Obama has put these poor prospects for any Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough as his immediate goal ahead of the effort to halt a nuclear Iran which is the paramount preoccupation of even Israel’s traditional opponents and neighbors.
In increasingly explosive northeast Asia, Obama refuses to acknowledge — in his endless continuing campaign against the Bush Administration — that the only effective weapon for the moment against North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction proliferation is Bush’s Proliferation Security Initiative. This was a quiet initiative outside the UN Washington had arranged with 18 nations to halt Pyongyang’s trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. That it has now been, in effect, incorporated into the latest UN resolution may or may not make it more effective. But by shifting the onus to the UN, Obama [and his laptop carrier, Sec. of State Hillary Clinton] are reducing the possibility of its effectiveness. Ironically, that comes, at a moment, when for the first time in a decade Washington has a strong and determined government in Seoul which had quietly signed on that agenda. It remained for President Lee Myung-Bak to note in the press conference following their meeting that it was the strength of the U.S.-South Korea military alliance which made much of the propaganda coming out of Pyongyang ineffectual bombast.
At a time when North Korea and Iran are both testing new missiles, the Obama Administration has put on hold the agreements made by the Bush Administration — after extended and difficult domestic political maneuvering for those governments — with Poland and the Czech Republic. This deployment was seen as a further insurance that American anti-missile defenses, still under construction and with some skepticism at home and abroad, Washington could meet any future military challenge of the Tehran and Pyongyang regimes. Obama’s retreat from this Bush initiative was seen as a gesture in order “to reset”, as Vice President Joe Biden has said, relations with the increasingly authoritarian regime of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Almost unnoticed by the Obama-infatuation media is the most recent Putin refusal to even consider bringing Russia into the radar network for an anti-missile defense for which those Central European deployments would have been the first step. It, of course, negates the Russian complaint — which Obama apparently hoped to defuse — that the deployments were anything but defensive provisions for a failure of the Americans and the Europeans [with little or not help from Moscow] to prohibit the development of aggressive weapons by Tehran threatening both Europe and America. It is another refusal by the tin ear in Washington understand what the real nature of the threat to peace and stability in Central and Eastern Europe actually is — a revanchist Moscow regime seeking to recreate the Soviet empire in the “Near Abroad” even when it threatens peace as last summer’s war in Georgia.
These are the movements and policy feints of a President and an Administration which simply has a tin ear for the nuances of international politics. Granted that its efforts are primarily focused on a domestic economic crisis. But the dangerous inability to distinguish what is happening in the real world on the international stage threatens America’s historic role during the past several decades as the final resource for international peace and stability.