The American Interest
Friday, January 1, 2010

A friend as troubled as I am at President Obama’s mounting misadventures in foreign and security policy said, “I hope he knows what he’s doing.” I hope he doesn’t.

I hope he doesn’t because I prefer the alternative explanation: that he has spent nearly a year getting it wrong out of inexperience, naiveté, the distraction of an aggressive domestic agenda and an inflated sense that he can charm our adversaries into submission. If this is how we are to understand the President’s Plan A–ill-conceived approaches toward the Middle East, the Americas, our European allies, nuclear proliferation and strategy, Iran, Russia and human rights–there is some hope that eventually reality will intrude and he will move to a very different Plan B.

After all, even Jimmy Carter, whom Barack Obama increasingly resembles, discovered after three years as President that he had failed to grasp the reality of the dictators in Moscow and Tehran. And while Carter’s loss of innocence came too late for the Afghan victims of Soviet aggression or our embassy staff in Tehran, he did, in his last year, careen toward a Plan B that included an armed rescue attempt and at least arrested a sharp decline in defense spending.

Unlike the hapless Carter, Obama after only a year in office has enough runway in front of him to take off in a new direction. He would have help. Hillary Clinton is much tougher than Cyrus Vance, whose abhorrence of force, and faith in diplomacy, led him to resign over the plan to rescue American hostages. James L. Jones could manage a turnaround far better than Zbigniew Brzezinski, who surely knew better but, having little in common with his President, was largely ineffective. Robert Gates would not lament a burst of realism in defense affairs, and I suspect Richard Holbrooke would be thrilled.

Obama would certainly enjoy public support for more robust policies. Opinion surveys show that the American people are uncomfortable with his dithering and his incessant apologizing, and growing weary of the high ratio of talk to action. The Nobel Peace Prize highlighted the paucity of results from Obama’s first year, causing many to reflect on what he has actually accomplished. And while the left wing of the Democratic Party would likely resent any shift toward a policy that mainstream America would welcome, Obama’s sharply declining approval among moderates and independents will sober all but the Party’s lunatic fringe.

But what if Plan A is not the product of inexperience and naiveté (with a dash of incompetence)? What if we are witnessing the deliberate, measured implementation of a deeply entrenched ideology reflecting such influences as the scarcely acknowledged Bill Ayers and the once inconveniently visible Reverend Jeremiah Wright? What if they shaped Obama’s worldview in the years when they were ministering to and counseling a young, charismatic politician? Americans have never been tempted to elect a “blame America first” President, and they did not think they were doing so last November. Indeed, 17 percent of Obama voters said they considered him a “conservative.” Now they are not so sure.

The key elements of Obama’s foreign and defense policy are the belief that we must “engage” our adversaries and cultivate our allies (after a cathartic admission of what he sees as America’s shortcomings and misdeeds). Now, there is nothing unusual about the idea of engaging adversaries. Every American President has done so. The most fruitful and effective engagements have been those in which diplomacy was conducted from a position of strength and clear purpose: Think of Ronald Reagan and the four Soviet leaders he dealt with. Nor is it unusual to cultivate allies; indeed, it would be unusual not to.

But Obama’s approach to engaging adversaries has none of the signs of operating from strength. On the contrary, he appears as an anxious supplicant. Consider his “engagement” with Iran and Russia. In the case of Iran, the Administration has been practically begging the Iranians to talk while appeasing them with near indifference to the theft of an election, brutality against the regime’s opponents and continuing support for terrorism. In the case of Russia, the absurd “reset” button hoopla must have astonished the Kremlin leaders–but not nearly so much as the abrupt decision to scrap missile defense deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic, alarming both governments with an unmistakable message: Moscow once again has a say in the policies of two sovereign states, both allies of the United States and members of NATO.

Obama’s approach to Moscow smacks of appeasement, an eagerness to accommodate unreasonable Russian positions made worse by an exaggerated focus on refurbishing the antique arms control arrangements of the Cold War while embracing a utopian vision of a world without nuclear weapons. The predictable results are already emerging: Moscow gleefully accepted the abandonment of the Polish missile defense deployment and shortly thereafter conducted an in-your-face military exercise in which Russia “invaded” Poland. The exercise included the use of nuclear-capable aircraft.

Obama’s Russian agenda is, but should not be, the mirror image of Putin’s American agenda. That is why it is missing any hint of a strategy to oppose Russian intimidation of its former but now independent republics or its erstwhile “allies.” While we are busy engaging Moscow in arms control negotiations, Georgia, Ukraine, the Baltic States and others are increasingly apprehensive that an American President is oblivious to the danger a resurgent Russia poses to their freedom and independence.

As for working with allies, Obama seems to think that his popularity with Europeans is not just the beginning, but the end of the story. He has managed in his first year to humiliate Gordon Brown, annoy Nicolas Sarkozy, offend Silvio Berlusconi, and leave Angela Merkel lukewarm, at best. He seems not to grasp that popularity does not count for much when working on hard issues like getting help from our allies in Afghanistan or closing Guantánamo. Obama’s idea, trumpeted during the campaign, that he would abandon his predecessor’s “unilateralism”, retrieve America’s standing, and go on to elicit the allied cooperation that eluded George W. Bush, was naive. Moreover, it wrongly assumed that Bush actually preferred unilateral action. In fact, Bush acted without the support of allies only when allied policies left him no choice. As Obama is in the process of discovering, allied support sometimes requires either abandoning or diluting American security interests. There will be times when the price of that support is prohibitive.

The President’s conceit–that he can charm adversaries and mobilize allies–has so far proven empty. His belief that an open hand will be seen as an expression of good will to be reciprocated is simply wrong. Unless it is part of a larger strategy, an outstretched hand runs the risk of conveying weakness. Take Venezuela as a case in point. Obama was all smiles with Hugo Chávez, even as Chávez presented him with–and Obama accepted with thanks–the “gift” of an anti-American diatribe. This was followed by a number of taunting moves from Chávez–from Castro, Putin and Ahmadinejad, too–all of which demonstrated that the outstretched hand had earned not good will, but contempt.

If, as I hope, Obama simply did not understand how to use American power to achieve American objectives, there is hope that his dismal first year will see the scrapping of Plan A and the adoption of a better Plan B. But if he believes against all evidence in Plan A and sticks with it, we–and many who depend on us–will almost certainly come to regret it.

http://www.aei.org/article/101469

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 29, 2009; A08

While most of the federal government was shut down by a snowstorm last week, there was one person in particular whom Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called in through the cold: Japanese Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki.

Once he arrived, Clinton told him in blunt, if diplomatic, terms that the United States remains adamant about moving a Marine base from one part of Okinawa to another. That she felt compelled to call the unusual meeting highlights what some U.S. and Asian officials say is an alarming turn in relations with Japan since Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama led an opposition party to victory in August elections, ending an almost uninterrupted five decades of rule by the Liberal Democratic Party.

Since the election, a series of canceled dinners, diplomatic demarches, and publicly and privately broken promises from the new government has vexed senior White House officials, causing new concern about the U.S. friendship with its closest Asian ally. The worry extends beyond U.S. officials to other leaders in Southeast Asia, who are nervous about anything that lessens the U.S. security role in the region.

A pledge of assertiveness

At the center of concern are Hatoyama and his Democratic Party of Japan. Hatoyama had campaigned on promises he would be more assertive than previous Japanese leaders in dealings with the United States. He and his coalition partners opposed parts of a $26 billion agreement between the two nations to move the Marine base to a less-populated part of Okinawa and to transfer 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam.

The United States has seen the moves as central to a new Asian security policy to assure Japan’s defense and to counter the rise of China. But Hatoyama and his allies saw the agreement as the United States dictating terms, and wanted the base removed.

Increasingly, U.S. officials view Hatoyama as a mercurial leader. In interviews, the officials said he has twice urged President Obama to trust him on the base issue and promised to resolve it before year’s end — once during a meeting between the two in Tokyo last month and another in a letter he wrote Obama after the White House had privately expressed concerns about the Japanese leader’s intentions.

On Dec. 17, Hatoyama officially informed the Obama administration that he would not make a decision about the air base by the end of the year. He told Clinton the news in conversation at a dinner in Copenhagen at the conclusion of the United Nations climate-change summit.

After the dinner, Hatoyama told Japanese reporters that he had obtained Clinton’s “full understanding” about Tokyo’s need to delay. But that apparently was not the case. To make sure Japan understood that the U.S. position has not changed, Clinton called in the Japanese ambassador during last week’s storm, apparently having some impact.

“This is a thing that rarely occurs, and I think we should take this [Clinton's action] into account,” the ambassador told reporters as he left the State Department.

Hatoyama’s moves have befuddled analysts in Washington. So far, most still think he and his party remain committed to the security relationship with the United States.

They explain his behavior as that of a politician who is not accustomed to power, who needs to pay attention to his coalition partners — one of which, the Social Democratic Party of Japan, is against any U.S. military presence in the country. They note that Hatoyama has put money aside for the base-relocation plan in Japan’s budget and that other senior members of his party have told their U.S. counterparts they will honor the deal.

Shifting policy?

But some U.S. and Asian officials increasingly worry that Hatoyama and others in his party may be considering a significant policy shift — away from the United States and toward a more independent foreign policy.

They point to recent events as a possible warnings: Hatoyama’s call for an East Asian Community with China and South Korea, excluding the United States; the unusually warm welcome given to Xi Junping, China’s vice president, on his trip to Japan this month, which included an audience with the emperor; and the friendly reception given to Saeed Jalili, the Iranian national security council secretary, during his visit to Japan last week.

Michael Green, senior director for Asia at the National Security Council during the Bush administration, said the concern is that senior officials in Hatoyama’s party with great influence, such as Ichiro Ozawa, want to push Japan toward closer ties with China and less reliance on the United States. That would complicate the U.S. position not just in Japan but in South Korea and elsewhere.

“I think there are questions about what kind of role Ozawa is playing,” Green said, adding that Ozawa has not been to the United States in a decade, has yet to meet the U.S. ambassador to Japan, John Roos, and only grudgingly met Clinton during an earlier trip to Japan.

“The prevailing view is that this is basically a populist, inexperienced government sorting out its foreign policy,” he said, “but now there is a 10 to 20 percent chance that this is something more problematic.”

U.S. allies in Singapore, Australia, South Korea and the Philippines — and Vietnamese officials as well — have all viewed the tussle between Washington and Tokyo with alarm, according to several senior Asian diplomats.

The reason, one diplomat said, is that the U.S.-Japan relationship is not simply an alliance that obligates the United States to defend Japan, but the foundation of a broader U.S. security commitment to all of Asia. As China rises, none of the countries in Asia wants the U.S. position weakened by problems with Japan.

Another senior Asian diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid, noted that recent public opinion polls show Hatoyama’s approval rating slipping below 50 percent, while Obama remains popular.

“Let’s hope Hatoyama gets the message that this is not the way to handle the United States,” he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/28/AR2009122802271.html?hpid=topnews

TSA All the Way

Naturally, between his swimming, biking, gift-opening, long walks on the beach, contemplative time for photo ops on the shore at sunset, eating, reading the comics, playing with the kids, playing with Bo, reading me, naps, and shopping, Big Guy is focused like a laser on national security right now.

His main concern is this story we’ve been hearing about out here in Hawaii about this fellow from a foreign land who tried to blow up a plane. Big Guy was on the phone with Bruno, his head of Homeland Security, and she/he said that everything was under control and that everything had worked according to plan.

And by plan, he/she meant fooling this African fellow – who by the way has no ties to our Administration whatsoever, just in case anyone cares to read the authoritative background check we did on him before we took a deep sigh of relief – into believing he’d successfully gotten passed our security net to bring highly explosive underwear on board an international flight, and then put our super-secret civilian patrol on duty to take him out mid-flight. Big Guy said that didn’t sound like much of a plan, but as Bruno said, it worked just fine. And she was right.

Big Guy said it was amazing what Americans could do when government got out of the way and let them protect their lives and future on their own terms. He said he wished they’d do more of that every day here at home.

Unfortunately, something tells me that’s exactly what they’re going to do, oh, in about 11 months.

I believe in reality they are much lower. It’s the Holidays and people are all over the place, New years around the corner. People are really too stressed out right now to think about another bumming thing.

The only reason the Dow has been going up is that the Gov is intentionally forcing people to gamble with their money by keeping rates done. Cash is losing much to inflation. This game can not go on much longer.