HOWARD EPSTEIN: Parlous and Powerless – OBAMA’S LEGACY TO THE USA
As my American readers will know, the foreign policy of the USA in modern times was established at the start of the previous century by (soon-to-be president) Theodore Roosevelt: “Speak softly and carry a big 
stick….” The US may from time to time have been guilty of some infractions of the “speak softly” part, as when the CIA engineered the fall of Allende in 1973 Chile (and régime-changes wrought elsewhere, most notably in Iran), or when the same subordinate body nearly got the newly-formed administration of JFK into a shooting war over Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1961, or when Ronald Regan, with questionable bravery, had the US armed forces invade the island (and British colony) of Grenada in 1983; but, for over a century, if the US was blamed for anything it was for sending in the cavalry later rather than earlier, as in 1917 to polish off the Great War (WWI) in Europe and as in 1941, to join WWII only when catapulted into it by the Japanese treachery of Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, at all times in the twentieth century, which became known as “The American Century”, no-one doubted the size of the Yankee stick, and its deterrent effect was plain. Even the Japanese expected that in attacking a somnolent America they would more than likely seal their fate and that the Americans would go on to bring about the total defeat of the Axis of Germany and Japan. Their anticipation was not to be disappointed.
Accordingly, that walking quietly, big stick in hand – as a deterrent – was the pose and policy of the USA from Teddy Roosevelt’s statement in January 1900 until the accession to power in 2008 of Barak Obama. One may mark the latter event, driven by Obama’s openly-stated desire to make America likeable again, as the beginning of the end of Pax Americana, and the slow act of suicide of the World’s Policeman. We all know what happens when the cops abandon the streets: the bad guys take over; and that has just as surely come to pass in the world’s most dangerous regions: the Middle East and the Far East.
I used several lines of my past year’s blogs to poke fun at John Kerry, a man who appeared to spend more time projecting his tonsorial impressiveness rather than American power. Here was a man, I also complained, whose life of privilege must have deprived him of the full range of human emotions – and appropriate responses – in the face of human suffering very many notches beneath that of a golfer who, way ahead of the competition, on his final shot completely misses the fairway. (I know. It’s completely lost on me too.)
Yet, to be fair to Kerry, he was merely the monkey. The organ grinder had already cranked out the tune, and whilst Kerry was racking up the air miles and making the ineffectual speeches – and lecturing to the Israelis about why their suicide is everyone else’s preferred option – his presidential boss was working energetically back in the good ole US of A practising his golf swings. Rather than rewriting the Three Monkeys’ stance that he had already established to justify the receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize For Having Achieved Absolutely Nothing, Obama, much to the doubtless mirth of Putin, Xi Ping, Kim Jong Un and the Ayatollahs, who could not believe their luck, continued to sound the retreat. (Kim Jong Un’s boat had come in many years before when “negotiator” Wendy Sherman had handed his father a route to atomic power on a plate, as she was to do later – under Obama – for the Iranians.) Nobel Laureate Obama has throughout his tenure as the most powerful man in the world fixed on his course to prove in the starkest terms King Lear’s dictum in Shakespeare’s eponymous play: “Nothing shall come of nothing”.
Well, not quite true, for it seems even nothing can come to something: it can come to a pass, and in Obama’s case it has come to not so much a pretty pass as an extremely ugly one. When such obamapologists as the New York Times and the Washington Post, usually to be found in the vanguard of his promoters, come out with as damning criticisms of him as can be found anywhere in the world’s press you know the scales have finally been lifted from left-skewed eyes.
Only the illiterate could have failed to see the volte face performed by Richard Cohen of the great news organ of DC, writing under the headline: Obama’s hallucinatory excuses on Syria on October 3:-
the United States has …. a president who is cautious to the point of timidity and prudent to the point of appearing heartless.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-hallucinatory-excuses-on-syria/2016/10/03/59c83f58-898e-11e6-b24f-a7f89eb68887_story.html?utm_term=.bf939314f68f
Just to draw together the new journalistic realism about their erstwhile poster-boy, Cohen opened by quoting the New York Times’ David Sanger, who had observed that:-
Russia … is a “declining economy with the gross domestic product of Italy.” So how come it manages to push around the United States, which has the world’s biggest economy and, as President Obama put it just last week, “by a mile, the greatest military on earth”?
Describing Russia’s offensives in Aleppo, Syria, to support and ultimately secure the incumbent Assad (whom Obama has wanted gone for the five years of the Syrian civil war), Stephen O’Brien, the United Nations’ undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, called the:-
“indiscriminate bombing and shelling . . . a level of savagery that no human should have to endure.”
and others have, more directly called war crimes (though just try getting Putin tried in the ICC).
Cohen continued:-
The United States retaliated against this hideous outrage by protesting and, on Monday, suspending talks with Moscow [which two days later they unsuspended!].
This is a level of impotence that the Americans have not manifested since before they threw a tea party for the British in Boston in 1773.
Now, therefore, the projection of US power amounts to no more than: talk quietly and – well, just talk quietly. There is no stick.
As for Kerry, he turns out to be no better at ensuring oral discretion than several other politicians who thought they were either off-air or unlikely to be quoted for, according to Cohen, Kerry:-
… confessed his frustration to some fellow diplomats and his words were promptly leaked. Kerry now stands, as has been suspected for some time, in opposition to his president’s policy.
Cohen then goes for the jugular of the great verbal juggler in the Oval office:-
But what it has done to Kerry is minor compared to what it has done to Obama himself. It has led him into hallucinatory explanations of his decisions. He mangles the facts, jumbles chronology and, in effect, holds himself guiltless for Syria’s approximately 500,000 deaths, 8 million internally displaced persons and a tidal wave of immigrants that has destabilized Europe.
……..
Back when the Syrian civil war started in 2011, Obama could have done something and, in fact, implied he would do something. “The time has come for President [Bashar] Assad to step aside,” Obama declared. Not only did Assad fail to step aside, but his forces later smeared Obama’s famous “red line” all over history by using poison gas on civilian centers. By then, 2013, Assad, Putin and other assorted bad guys had taken the measure of Obama: weak.
So, there we have it: some of Obama’s formerly greatest supporters, not to say his own Secretary of State, have stamped their verdict on Obama’s policy in the Middle East:
FAILED
We shall pass this week on the previously-mentioned inability (in some of my past pieces) of the USA to prevent Putin, should he feel the urge, from walking into the three Baltic states (a distinct possibility, given that the traditionally-neutral Swedes are building up their garrisons on their island in the Baltic Sea, Gotland, and introducing national service, in fear of an attack by Russia), more of the Ukraine and whatever parts of eastern Europe appear attractive to him.
There just is not the space here to catalog all the Obama failures. We should, however, ask: “How’s the Pivot to Asia going?”
You doubtless remember the Pivot to Asia? Catchilly-named (by Obama) but completely inscrutable (like the man himself), this heralded the oh-so-clever “rebalancing” of US foreign policy toward the Asia-Pacific region, expressly provided as the justification for the abandonment of the Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states (and the Europeans), whose interests had been the cornerstone of US foreign policy for three generations.
How well do you think the Pivot is going, Mr President? After all, its stated intention was to deter Chinese expansionism in the Pacific and to protect Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines – in other words, US interests in the Pacific? Well? How is the pivot going? Don’t ask!
As surely as the Chinese have built what were no more than rocky outcrops in the South China Sea into fully-fledged islands to form air and naval bases, so too, just as reliably, has American protest looked increasingly futile. We Israelis are famous for creating facts on the ground; but what the Chinese have done is to create facts on the high seas, and place themselves in an unassailable position to dictate to would-be traffic – naval and merchant-navy traffic – in the sea lanes east of the somewhat extensive Chinese coastline, around 9,000 miles or 14,500 kilometers. (The Pacific coastline to the north is Russia’s – all the way to the Arctic.)
Short of a nuclear exchange (a phrase I might usefully have used above, when considering the last-remaining US options in the West against Russia – but see the Coda) there is little that the Americans can now do to deter the Chinese, whose global reach proceeds apace. Turning the world’s merchant vessels into vassals of the Chinese is not even the first act of a new Chinese opera in which they get the best arias – it is merely the musical overture.
Still, there is always the Philippines, you say, firmly within the American sphere of influence since 1898. Their sprawling mass of 7,000 islands facing China represents a formidable bastion against advancing Chinese hegemony, does it not? Wrong again. Only last week, the maverick Manila-ensconced president Duterte, who had somewhat indecorously called Obama the “son of a whore”, went the whole hog and showed that two can not only tango but also pivot. He has declared Filipino fealty for Beijing. (The thinking of the Manila Madman may well have been that the Chinese leadership might be less judgmental of him in his ambition to destroy drug-dealing in the Philippines, even if it means shooting every man, woman and child in what are now those benighted islands.) whatever the reasoning, a significant geo-political ally in the Far East, to whom Obama had pivoted, is now to be counted in US military planning not as an asset but as an enemy entity.
As a record for eight years as President of the USA, it is not bad. It is disastrous.
The Breibart website may be somewhat to the right of your comfort zone, but, frankly, even if their allegations, that Obama is a real live Manchurian Candidate (an enemy insertion, programed to destroy American power from within) are farfetched, it is plain that, whatever his true intentions, whether for the destruction or the betterment of America and her influence, it is that which he has emasculated, as compared with the power and sway of both Russia and China. He could hardly have wreaked more havoc than that for which the fictional character of Richard Condon’s political thriller had been programmed – and failed. Not so Obama. When it comes to the reversal of American dominion in the West, and equally the East, the verdict must be:-
SUCCESS
In case all that was not enough, Obama trumpeted his deal with Iran (the JCPOA) as part of his all-important (to him) legacy. One can simply sum up the JCPOA thus: the USA released billions of previously-sanctioned dollars to the Ayatollahs to keep their international terrorist funding program at full pelt, and in return received not so much as reduced demonization for the Great Satan that America is in Iranian eyes. Iranian nuclear weapons development has proceeded apace, and the JCPOA – that the Iranians have never signed – is honored by them more in the breach than the observance, something that has escaped no-one’s attention save that of the Obama administration – lest they have to do something about it.
Why non-one is talking openly about a new anti-western axis of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran as a threat to the life to the Western way of life – or life itself – is unclear. Perhaps it is only a matter of time. Watch what happens to the markets then!
And so, as always in the end, I refocus on Israel. Despite my urgings that our prime minister (hanging on for a Ben Gurion record-busting number of years in power) should go home, I want to be honest and say 
that of the two world leaders (Obama and Putin) with whom I should have preferred Bibi to clash, he made the right choice. That one, Obama, is about to go off in a hissy fit, having achieved nothing (rather, worse than nothing) for his country (and given us Israelis a hard time, to boot) in his eight years in power, whilst the other, Putin, is here to stay. With both the Russians and the Chinese, Israel under Netanyahu has cultivated good relations. Long may they be developed.
Coda: Last week, a nuclear war drill was held in Russia involving 40 million people. Putin openly boasts that Russia has built sufficient nuclear fall-out shelters to protect the whole of Moscow’s people if the Russian capital were to suffer a nuclear strike, and that it has over a thousand more nuclear missiles that America. Putin has developed and is about to deploy new nuclear war-heads, each single, solitary one capable of destroying states such as the UK, France, Germany, New Jersey, Ohio and New York. (I think you get it by now). He calls the shots in every potential theatre of war between Europe and America. In the meantime, Obama is perhaps limbering up to stick it – ah, the stick has magically reappeared – to Israel in the UN Security Council before he exits stage (very definitely) left. Parlous and powerless as against Putin, Xi Ping, Kim and the ayatollahs, Obama’s legacy, sight trained on Israel, may yet distil down to one word:
BULLY
© Howard Epstein – 2016 October
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As usual, I have borrowed from my recently-published book for the allusions to America and its disappointing political leaders.
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